For sale: Bodies, parts, eggs, genes, stem cells
By Donna Dickenson | 2008-8-4
IN the 1960s, feminists coined the slogan, "Our bodies, our selves."
But that liberating sentiment has recently undergone an ironic twist.
As an anonymous American woman, justifying her decision to undergo
cosmetic surgery, put it, "All we have in life is ourselves, and what
we can put out there every day for the world to see ... Me is all I
got."
The French commentator Herve Juvin extolled this new attitude towards
the body in his 2005 surprise bestseller, "Lavenement du Corps" ("The
Coming of the Body").
Plastic surgery, the implantation of biochips, piercings - all
emblazon the belief that our bodies are our unique property. At the
same time, Juvin asserts, because everyone has a body, property has
suddenly become democratized.
We appear to live in a time that has witnessed the absolute failure
of the grand Enlightenment dreams of linear progress, universal
peace, and equality between rich and poor.
Together with widespread hostility to organized religion, manifested
in such hugely popular books as Richard Dawkins's "The God Delusion,"
disappointment with social ideals means that we turn inward.
In the absence of a belief in eternal life, everything becomes
invested in this life, this body.
Long life is our desire, eternal youth our supposed right, and the
myth of the body without origin or limits our new religion.
That might be why governments are so widely seen to have a positive
duty to promote stem cell research and other forms of medical
progress.
Biotechnology industries flourish, with state sanction and support,
because they add extra value to the body, the object of supreme worth
to us.
Indeed, the infinite renewal of the body isn't confined to
superficial repairs through cosmetic surgery.
External substitutes for organic structures can be surgically
implanted, breaking down the barrier between the body and the outside
world.
At the same time, tissue removed from the body enters into commerce
and trade as a commodity like any other, in the form of stem cell
lines, human eggs, and other "products."
The American law professor James Boyle believes that we can grasp the
way in which the body has become an object of trade by likening it to
the historical process of enclosure.
In 18th-century Britain, land, which was previously a public
resource, was "enclosed" by private owners.
Freed of feudal-style legal restrictions on transfer of ownership and
of traditional rights held by commoners who used communal land to
pasture their animals, landholdings could now be sold to raise
capital, which helped to finance the industrial revolution.
In modern biotechnology, Boyle thinks, things previously outside the
market - once thought to be impossible to commodify - are becoming
routinely privatized.
One in five human genes is now patented, even though the human genome
might be thought to be our common heritage.
And although Boyle doesn't mention this latest development, umbilical
cord blood, taken in the final stage of labor, is now banked by
profit-making firms as a potential - though unlikely - source of stem
cells for the baby.
In biomedicine, a series of legal cases have generated powerful
momentum toward the transfer of rights over the body and its
component parts from the individual "owner" to corporations and
research institutions.
So the body has entered the market, becoming capital, just as land
did, though not everyone benefits, any more than the dispossessed
commoners grew wealthy during the agricultural enclosures.
Most people are shocked when they learn that one-fifth of the human
genome has been patented, mostly by private firms.
But why be so surprised? After all, female bodies have been subject
to various forms of property-holding over many centuries and in many
societies.
Women's bodies are used to sell everything from cars to pop music, of
course. But female tissue has been objectified and commodified in
much more profound ways, in legal systems from Athens onwards.
While men were also made into objects of ownership and trade, as
slaves, in general women were much more likely to be treated as
commodities in non-slave-owning systems.
Once a woman had given her initial consent to the
marriage "contract," she had no right to retract her consent to
sexual relations - ever.
There are clear parallels between that situation and the way in which
the common law has offered little redress to patients who have tried
to claim property rights in tissue taken from them.
(The author, Emeritus professor of Medical Ethics and Humanities at
the University of London, was the 2006 winner of the International
Spinoza Lens Award for contribution to public debate on ethics.
Copyright: Project Syndicate/Institute for Human Sciences, 2008.
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StemCells subscribers may also be interested in these sites:
Children's Neurobiological Solutions
http://www.CNSfoundation.org/
Cord Blood Registry
http://www.CordBlood.com/at.cgi?a=150123
The CNS Healing Group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CNS_Healing
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