Jennifer Denbow's "Reproductive Labor and Innovation"

Jennifer Denbow is Associate Professor of Political Science at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and the author of Governed through Choice: Autonomy, Technology, and the Politics of Reproduction.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Reproductive Labor and Innovation: Against the Tech Fix in an Era of Hype, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book is in a chapter dedicated to examining non-invasive prenatal tests (NIPT) as an example of the “tech fix” in the book’s title. On this page, I analyze how makers of these tests market them as a salve for reproductive anxiety that covers over the root of that anxiety. Here is a quote that encapsulates the page’s analysis:

As the producer of the MaterniT test warns, “anyone can have a pregnancy with a chromosomal abnormality—healthy women, mothers of all ages and all ethnicities can be at risk.” These [NIPT] companies stoke fears about “abnormal” fetal development, even in low-risk groups, and subsequently offer products to ease the very anxiety that they played a role in creating. Thus, while it is true that many people experience anxiety about conception and pregnancy, the idea that a prenatal test can fix this problem obfuscates the industry’s role in fomenting this anxiety. It also covers over the deeper structural issues—such as climate chaos, financial instability, and the crumbling of public infrastructure—that have contributed to an uptick in anxiety for parents and nonparents alike. This reproductive innovation, then, sustains the innovation/reproduction binary’s papering over of structural injustices in favor of “solutions” that bolster the wealth and influence of the biotechnology industry and venture capitalists.

This page does represent a key thesis of my book: that although the state, investors, and companies sell innovations as a cure-all for all sorts of personal and social problems, technoscientific innovations in fact tend to obscure the roots of those problems and often make them worse. This page captures how this works with regard to one technology aimed at reproduction, while other chapters look at other technologies such as digital care work platforms and emerging reproductive biotechnologies like making gametes from stem cells.

Page 99 also provides a good sense of my book in that it briefly explains the book’s main argument regarding the “innovation/reproduction binary.” The book is dedicated to understanding how the overvaluation of technological innovations in the United States has come at the expense of addressing structural problems and valuing reproductive labor: the feminized work of caring for each other and sustaining society. In the case of NIPT, instead of offering collective support for caring for children, including disabled children, we are offered a technology to try to control what our offspring will be like.

Learn more about Reproductive Labor and Innovation at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue