A critical review of four recent works that reflect current conflicts and tensions among feminists regarding new reproductive technologies: In Search of Parenthood by Judith Lasker and Susan Borg; Ethics and Human Reproduction by Christine Overall; Made to Order, Patricia Spallone and Deborah Steinberg, eds. and Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and Medicine, Michelle Stanworth, ed. Their positions are evaluated against the background of growing feminist dialogue about the future of reproduction and the bearing of reproductive innovations on such related issues (...) as racism, sexuality, motherhood and abortion. (shrink)

Nowhere is current controversy over biological explanations for human behaviour more striking than in debates over violence. New theories are being formulated, and biological markers are being identified in new ways. The terms of discourse and debate are being changed. Violence may be represented as a pathological biological syndrome, or as natural, especially for men. Why the growing interest now in biological explanations of violence? Is the biology of violence suggestive of a new brand of biological determinism? This latter, broader (...) question poses a challenge to the argument that current biological theories of behaviour are different and better than faulty, often racist and eugenicist, theories which have gone before. New theories do not reduce to linear cause-and-effect explanations, and there are no `genes for crime'. Nevertheless, there is a question of geneticism, `the doctrine of the primacy of the genetic make-up in determining every aspect of the human mind, constitution and social behaviour...' (Medawar, 1984: 255). (shrink)