In a recent speech, feminist Germain Greer stridently attacked the IVF industry.

Feminist author Germain Greer has attacked the IVF industry, claiming that the highly commercialised treatment has ‘destroyed motherhood’.

“The concept of motherhood has been emptied out”, she said to a packed audience at the Hay Festival in Wales. “We now have a genetic mother who supplies eggs… did we sit down and talk about what eggs mean to women?”

Greer was referring to women being offered “cut-price IVF” in exchange for giving clinics their eggs for research and use. 

“In some cases you are told what has happened to them, and in other cases you are not”, she said.

Greer also said that the feminist push to legalise abortion in the 1960s had been overshadowed by ‘IVF barons’. She claimed that David Steele, the architect of the 1967 Abortion Act, acted out of political expediency, on account of pressure from influential IVF advocates.

“We got legalised abortion precisely because the fertility industry needed it… It certainly wasn’t us. We could have marched until our feet fell off and they wouldn’t have bothered to give us access to abortion. They were the ones who wanted to be able to terminate pregnancies at will. David Steel is a politician. He only made an act after the fertility barons told him what they needed.”

True to form, Greer pulled no punches. She even criticised gay IVF parents Elton John and David Fletcher:

“I’m a bit exercised to discover that Sir Elton John and his ‘wife’ David Furnish have entered on the birth certificates of their two sons David Furnish as the mother.” 

Germain Greer ruffles feathers over IVF and abortion
Xavier Symons
https://www.bioedge.org/images/2008images/TH_busines_of_IVF.jpg
Creative commons
abortion
commercialization
commodification of babies
Germain Greer
IVF

• Author
• Recent Posts

Xavier Symons

Xavier Symons is a bioethicist and scholar in residence at the Kennedy Institute for Ethics at Georgetown University.

Latest posts by Xavier Symons (see all)

• Can machines be moral? - March 7, 2021
• Can we synthesise Christianity moral theology with secular bioethics? - November 28, 2020
• Euthanasia polling data may fail to capture people’s considered views - August 15, 2020