Monstrous mothers: media representations of post-menopausal pregnancy.

In recent coverage of post-menopausal women whose bodies have gestated a fetus to term, the media has played an important role in determining how we come to understand something as seemingly "natural" for women as pregnancy when it occurs in the "unnatural" bodies of post-menopausal women. Given that scientific discourse relies heavily on universal terms like "nature," these news stories query the meaning of scientifically defined concepts. In turn, the premises upon which these scientific concepts are based themselves challenge static terms like "nature" and the "natural," revealing them as cultural constructs that serve a particular purpose in establishing and maintaining a specific cultural relationship to what is in fact a medically mediated biological process.(1)

In these cases of assisted reproduction in postmenopausal women, however, the "naturalness" of the biological process is under question. Media coverage of this form of assisted reproduction is highly illustrative of this, simultaneously reminding us of what is "natural" (the visual strangeness of a post-menopausal pregnant body reminds us of what a "real" pregnant body should look like), while reflecting the constructedness of the "natural" (menopause marks the natural end of the reproductive life cycle of the female body, yet if postmenopausal pregnancy is not natural how is a postmenopausal body able to gestate a fetus to term?). Thus, when a woman of 63 years gives birth, most initial media responses seem to privilege voices that cry out against the "unnaturalness" of assisted reproduction, while simultaneously fixating upon perverse cultural expectations about the aging body.

Media accounts of these "perverse pregnancies" have inevitably turned to the experts of medical science for clarification. However, as the subsequent stories reveal, these experts are unable to offer reassuring words to allay the fear of post-menopausal pregnancies. Instead, medical authority is portrayed as existing in a state of debate. For many doctors, cases of in vitro fertilization in postmenopausal women are another example of medical science "going too far"; interfering in the biological aging process of the body, they "border on the Frankenstein syndrome." Other doctors, however, believe that in vitro fertilization enables medical science to align the biological function of the body with the changing needs of postmenopausal women.

Is this a monster story, then, or a medical marvel? In that this story shows us the medical establishment divided among itself, we are also treated to a story about the confusion of medical certainty; by falling back on established structures of support that are no longer viable, media coverage of assisted reproduction inevitably contributes to the breakdown of scientific authority. Given that this issue is so contentious, we should consider this as a moment of mediated confusion wherein the diverse needs of women are at odds with a system of social, medical, and cultural - not to mention natural - practices.

But amid this confusion, we need to read these moments for the ways they make available different options for women. For example, some women, particularly poor women of color, have often been positioned as post-menopausal mothers: first to the children of affluent white women, and more recently to their grandchildren in the current "epidemic" of teen pregnancies. As a result, assessments of the dangers of assisted reproduction as well as celebrations of its liberatory potential need to be closely scrutinized in terms of not only who has access to such technologies, but to the extent to which such technology simply reproduces traditional positions for women of differing ages and ethnic backgrounds.

The various cultural configurations of assisted reproduction and the aging body require an assessment of how the technology used to enable pregnancy in postmenopausal women was first represented. This inevitably involves looking at the mainstream media stories that initially represented these cases. As mentioned earlier, such stories are rife with popular anxieties about the possibility of a new generation of "senior-citizen" mothers. Along with these anxieties emerge ethical conflicts regarding the well-being of children born to aging women and questions concerning the regulation of and access to these technologies. A snapshot example from mainstream popular culture of dominant cultural sensibilities about aging and pregnancy is captured in the 1995 comedy Father of the Bride-Part II. This film, like many other characterizations of "granny-moms," depicts sensibilities directly connected to shifts in the boundaries of what counts as "natural."

Father of the Bride-Part II offers a highly traditional position on the issue of reproduction for older women, and presents it in a way that neatly circumvents many of the contentions that make the emergence of assisted technology for post-menopausal women so challenging to medical constructions of the natural biological body. In short, established cultural conventions enable the film to mediate questions of aging, motherhood, pregnancy and what is natural in ways that remain normative. Diane Keaton plays Nina Banks, the menopausal mother of two who discovers she is about to become a grandmother. The news prompts a small mid-life crisis for her husband, George, played by Steve Martin. He insists they are not old enough to become grandparents and turns to his body for verification - he dyes his hair, changes his look and makes love with his wife spontaneously on the kitchen floor. The film assumes we all know that grandfathers don't look or act like this. George's youthfulness is verified when Nina's emotional symptoms of fatigue are diagnosed not as menopause, but as pregnancy. He responds to the news by crying out "people our age don't have kids." "The National Inquirer will have a field day," he shrieks, "with headlines such as 'Grandmother Has Baby.'" He reminds Nina with increasing alarm that they'll be close to 70 when the child graduates from college. In this way the film raises many of the anxieties and concerns frequently associated with pregnancies in older women, anxieties and concerns grounded in the unnaturalness of such pregnancies.

Ultimately, however, their age is translated into experience and, coupled with their financial security, makes them ideal parents. In short, the prospect of parenthood rejuvenates the couple, especially George: Father of the Bride-Part II offers an undisguised male point of view. Most of the film's action is accompanied by George's voice-over. Thus the film quite literally sets about restoring George's ego, which has been threatened by cultural horror-stories about aging. His return to youth is facilitated via his kids, his virility and Nina's reproductive body. Yet the restoration of his ego comes at a cost. Nina is captured in one of the final frames outside her house. Having waved good-bye to her eldest daughter, Nina walks up the front path, arm around her adolescent son, smiling over her shoulder directly at the camera and George. She is framed as the perfect mother - at least this is how George sees her and this is how the audience is encouraged to view her. Pregnancy for older women who are still capable of becoming pregnant via "natural" methods is viable, especially when the pregnancy quite literally rejuvenates the husband.

By the end of the film, George Bank's problems with aging are thwarted and his mid-life crisis is over. Thus, while the film might confirm an older woman's decision to have a child and positively reflect on that decision, it does so within predetermined and traditionally defined parameters. Nina's desires are never directly addressed. Despite the use of her body as a vehicle for restoring her husband's declining self-image and sense of self-importance, her thoughts are always filtered through the film's central authorizing figure, her husband. The film briefly and comically touches upon the "unconventionality" of grandparents as parents, but the financial stability and the "natural" way in which Nina becomes pregnant seems to head off any real concerns about her age.

While cultural responses to the impact of assisted reproduction reveal anxieties about the unnaturalness of the aging pregnant body - anxieties that remain despite the authorizing presence of medical science - visual representations focus on the taken-for-granted cultural absurdity, the comedy or unnaturalness, of "grannies" as mothers. This preoccupation with reaffirming the cultural borders that constitute the acceptable necessarily hints at the constructedness of concepts such as nature and suggest that discussions of assisted reproduction in the media over the past five years, and their focus on whether or not this is a natural practice, are an effort to make sense of a crisis of legitimation. This is a crisis of legitimation that is occurring, both culturally and scientifically, as medical institutions face an emergent technology directly at odds with what counts in western culture as "natural." Complications in the representation and definition of what constitutes a "normal" and "natural" pregnancy or family structure are emerging in media stories about cases of non-fertility, where technology is brought in to give nature a "helping hand."

With increased accessibility to assisted reproduction, for example, the possibility that heterosexual intercourse will no longer be the "natural" or "normal" means of impregnation poses a significant threat to established value systems. Consequently, the reasoning that supports heterosexuality as the "natural" sexual practice for human beings, based on its necessity for human procreation, will no longer be valid. As such, media coverage of medical developments in assisted reproductive technology are themselves important sites for the reproduction of particular value systems. In other words, this is a "reproductive" moment on many different levels and what is at stake here is not simply the reproduction of children but the simultaneous reproduction of social and moral values. The moment is rife with possibilities, yet as closer examination reveals, it is unclear which possibilities are available and which possibilities will be foreclosed. In June 1994, the French government approved legislation limiting the age at which women could attempt artificial insemination as well as restricting assisted reproduction to heterosexual and infertile couples. The Italian parliament called for a ban on artificial insemination for post-menopausal women and demanded guidelines similar to those established in France after artificial insemination enabled a lesbian couple to give birth. In Germany, in vitro fertilization with donated eggs is prohibited without exception. No such legislation currently exists in the United States.

The early 1990s have seen a media fascination with stories about assisted reproduction for older women. Although the first child born to a post-menopausal parent was in South Africa in 1987 - a grandmother was implanted with the fertilized egg of her infertile daughter - one of the most popular stories of postmenopausal assisted reproduction occurred in 1993. The New York Times, along with a number of other newspapers, covered the story of a 59-year-old British woman who had recently given birth to twins after being artificially impregnated with eggs donated by a younger woman and fertilized by the older woman's husband. The British woman remains unnamed but the story reveals she is a "well-to-do business executive married to a 45 year old economist." Underlying this narrative is the story of new reproductive possibilities that are made available to a particular class, one of affluent, educated women with financial access to expensive technologies. However, like other papers covering this story the New York Times focuses on the ethics of such medical practices. The headline reads, "Tough Choices in Medical Ethics: Women Over 50 Bearing Children," and the subsequent article offers a variety of medical responses to the pregnancy, most of which are negative.(2) Dr. John Marks, the former chair of the British Medical Association Council, voices concern about the ability of a 69-year-old woman to cope with 10-year-old twins. The article also includes a second, similar story, clearly offered to provide a comparison, concerning a 53-year-old American woman who acted as surrogate for her infertile daughter, giving birth to her own grandchild. Ethical issues, according to the story, were "muted by [the grandmother's] altruism."

These two cases are written in ways that lend themselves to two very distinct ways of looking at the specific practice of assisted reproduction. Post-menopausal women, in the first case, who want to defy nature to become pregnant in order to satisfy their own desire for a child are monsters. Alternatively, the second case suggests, a mother who becomes pregnant so that her infertile daughter may experience motherhood is exempt from direct ethical judgment. The first case elicits a response implying an ethical stance, while the uncertainty surrounding the second hints at a confusion that lies at the heart of this issue. In both cases the condition of motherhood is being perversely extended while the alternative methods by which these women become pregnant de-naturalize how we might understand motherhood, as exemplified in the case of the American mother who carried her daughter's child.

On the contrary, the decision of the 59-year-old Brit to give birth to a child not only challenges the medical and biological construction of her body, but also presents an older woman who has defied the culturally sanctioned and clearly marked roles outlined for women of her age. She is a successful executive, has a younger husband, and after having given the most productive years of her life to building a career, she now wants a child. The American mother-grandmother, alternately, conforms to the traditional roles assigned to the maternal and grand-maternal positions. She is the ultimate maternal figure: a mother to her daughter as well as to her grandchildren. She quite literally embodies the maternal - her body is the "natural" choice for her daughter's surrogate pregnancy. However, in both cases, the body violates well-established cultural sensibilities about aging and the female body. The case of the British woman, though, is more clearly testimonial to the notion that women are not dependent on "the biological clock" should they wish to combine children and a successful career. In this way, current technology enables the emergence of an un-natural mother figure who threatens to challenge particular myths about motherhood: a medical marvel or a monster story?

Historically, monsters are linked to the female body in scientific discourse via the process of biological reproduction. Such discourses explore a deep-seated curiosity about the origins of the deformed or anomalous body. According to Rosi Braidotti, the question typically asked about monsters was: "How could such a thing happen? Who has done this?"(3) In terms of reproductive technologies, the how and who aspects of these questions offer interesting insights into the current construction of science, medicine, technology, culture and nature: monsters evolve out of anomalous situations, and as such they represent no absolute genealogy. They are not entirely of human born, and if human equals natural in this equation then neither are monsters entirely natural. As practices of assisted reproduction eclipse nature's control over the body, as the body is seen less as a natural object and more as a human-technological hybrid, and as popular discourses about new reproductive technologies struggle to describe the anomalous "nature" of the female body, the generation of medical and media monsters seems fitting and timely. What emerges out of a cursory glance at the media's discursive construction of assisted reproduction and the aging body is a confused, tangled knot of issues made up of cultural anxieties, ethical conflicts and the challenges posed by new medical technologies to established ways of understanding the body and its relationship to nature, culture, science and medicine.

In the case of assisted reproduction in postmenopausal women, technological intervention has pointed out the artificiality of the body's naturalized post-menopausal state; according to the established frame of reference (medical science), older women shouldn't be able to have children, but new technology (brought to us by medical science) can now make their bodies capable of pregnancy. Rather than validating cultural beliefs about the natural characteristics of the aging biological body - expectations that are primarily drawn from the realms of medical science itself - medical science is instead calling into question the very concepts that have helped to formulate cultural categories such as age, gender, menopause and post-menopause. As a result, these women's bodies cannot be understood simply in terms of "natural biological" function, age and gender. Un-natural possibilities that destabilize conventionally sanctioned "natural" practices are now made possible.(4)

The confused and often contradictory analysis in other media stories about assisted reproduction in postmenopausal women reveals a techno-cultural relationship between the body and scientific practices and pronouncements. This relationship points to the constructedness of what constitutes the "natural" and the inevitable hybrid state of the reproductive body. In her 1994 article in the Chicago Tribune entitled "Pregnancy Risks and Age," Susan Fitzgerald demonstrates the problems of trying to describe the female reproductive body as both a site of medical practice as well as a natural biological phenomena.(5) As a result, her article struggles to negotiate how to represent what constitutes "normal" or "natural" practices for the female reproductive body. The piece opens with a brief history of the dichotomous relationship between women's reproductive issues and medical science. As an example, Fitzgerald describes how "The Pill," when first introduced, helped to "give women the freedom to decide if and when they [want] to get pregnant" while now women are cautioned of the increased risk of breast cancer that can result from delaying childbirth into their thirties and forties.

Fitzgerald doesn't explicitly account for these mixed messages in terms of new medical or scientific discoveries about The Pill, but her example illustrates the contradictory signal women are given by medical science with regard to their choices about when and if to have children. Such mixed messages are heightened by the series of confusing statements about pregnancy and older women introduced in the comments of fertility doctor, Dr. Mark Sauer. Sauer's words only serve to reiterate the uncertainty of how to construct meaning at a time when medical and cultural categories are increasingly under threat. His statements are confusing precisely because the significance of the language he draws from is in the process of being culturally reconfigured by new reproductive practices and no longer substantiates the meaning he wants to convey.

This confusion is particularly apparent in a statement made by Sauer. With regard to assisted reproduction for older women, Sauer comments that, "Nature didn't assume we would evolve the way we did and have so many people in their 40s who want to have children . . . [F]rom a strictly reproductive point of view, you really should be trying to have your babies when you're younger. Unfortunately, as a society we have not accommodated women's biological needs."(6) If "nature" didn't assume we'd evolve to a state whereby so many people were having kids in their 40s, then presumably nature, like the "strictly reproductive point of view," believes that women should be having babies "when you're younger." In this case, medical expertise adds to the confusion and only serves to place at odds the concepts of nature, biology, women's reproductive needs and societies' accommodation of those needs.

Sauer attempts to distinguish between nature and culture, yet assisted reproduction necessarily involves culture's intervention into what was once perceived as a "natural" process. Nature is clearly constructed in a dual role here: Sauer tries to give nature a pre-existing condition - one in which presumably women's needs played no part - while simultaneously acknowledging the different position it occupies in relation to a medical-cultural-scientific locale. In the process, Sauer calls upon nature's assumptions to differentiate between what is perceived to be biologically suitable and what is culturally practiced. He states that "'nature' didn't assume we'd evolve to a state," etc. Consequently, nature is positioned in a role that implicitly involves agency. In his discursive construction of the role of nature in women's decisions to reproduce, Sauer emphasizes that nature - rather than science - has made assumptions about the female body. Under these circumstances, nature's agency and scientific agency are conflated and oscillate between the biological, the medical and the perceived needs of women.

As Sauer tries to explain his response he ends up returning the female to her "natural" body and in the process discursively constructs a body that is increasingly hybridized: a body that in practice is comprehensible only via its relationships to science, medicine, nature, culture, economics and gender. In other words, evident in Sauer's effort to talk about this issue in a meaningful way are a set of discursive practices at odds with each other. Under such circumstances, "nature" evades universal usage while concurrently being called upon to legitimize itself as a universal system of understanding. Sauer returns to a particular definition of nature to account for the relationship between women and reproduction and in the process "nature's" currency as a universal marker is made increasingly unstable. If women can "choose" at what age - and if - to have children and if medical technology is able to accommodate the "choices" women make, then the biological needs of women rest in part with women's decision making and in part with their position vis-a-vis medical practices, legislation and employee benefits such as adequate healthcare and childcare. The concept of the "natural woman" emerges as a shifting figure whose identity is discursively unidentifiable - even monstrous.

When medical science and social needs permeate an understanding of how we evolve, nature's position in medical practice as the sole proprietor over the body is a fallible one. Yet, as Sauer moves between positions that acknowledge social and cultural influences, what he describes as "women's needs" and those assumed to lie outside of such influences, i.e. with nature, he has to qualify his frame of reference. At the end of his comment he is speaking from a "strictly reproductive point of view." In order to offer his opinion about assisted reproduction, he has to qualify biological reproduction with a referent "strictly" to indicate that the term "reproduction" has meaning beyond its "biological" reference. As a practice, then, Sauer acknowledges that reproduction cannot be confined to the boundaries that culture places around it. Yet, in speaking from a "strictly reproductive" point of view, Sauer is forced to momentarily detach his comments from a larger context, the social and cultural context in which medical practices operate, a context he later insists is implicit to the practice of medicine and the role of the medical practitioner.

Primarily at odds in many of these accounts are the flames of reference used to understand medical developments. Repeatedly, the term "natural" is called upon as a referent whose meaning constantly shifts in this semiotic system. What emerges from these accounts is an understanding of nature that is not always constant and can be reconfigured at culturally acceptable moments. Sheryl Stolberg, medical writer for the Los Angeles Times, tries to invoke nature as an unequivocal signifier when she asks, "Is it proper for doctors to defy nature by assisting postmenopausal women in giving birth knowing they will not be able to nurse their babies, may not have enough energy to raise them and may not even live long enough to see them graduate from high school?"(7) Nature is used by Stolberg as a stable signifier, one that involves implicit ethical stakes and one that skirts the issue of personal choice. The discussion of post-menopausal assisted reproduction by the World Medical Association in 1994 still drew on the term "natural" in its guideline proposals for doctors. The proposal states that doctors should not artificially assist women to get pregnant after "natural menopause."(8) In both of these examples the term "natural" is used to shore up a familiar given that conjures culturally recognizable definitions, definitions that, rhetorically at least, place control over the "natural" body firmly in the hands of medical practitioners. Yet in the context of assisted reproduction, the authority of the body is no longer a precondition for the natural.

The blurriness that now accompanies uses of the word "natural" is perhaps best illustrated in a recent New York Times front-page article. In an April 24, 1997 issue, the New York Times featured the story of yet another birth to a post-menopausal woman. In this case, the 63-year-old mother lied about her age, telling doctors that she was in fact only 55-years-old.(9) As the age limit continues to be extended, Sauer, referred to as "a pioneer in establishing pregnancies in older women," comments that "even with a limit of 55, women above that age tried to enter [his fertility] program and it was hard to spot them. Many had had plastic surgery." Commonly, he admits, a woman's "deception" is unmasked by a friend calling to inform the fertility center. The same issues are being rehearsed here, and as with the earlier stories the body is becoming an increasingly unreliable source of scientific confirmation. Nature is in the process of being reconditioned but the impact of its reconfiguration on constructions of scientific authority remains unclear.

Of increasing interest and importance, however, is the extent to which women's reproductive choices are shown not to follow biological or medical textbook protocols. Doctors from the U.S. and Europe are in disagreement over whether or not women over 50 should be impregnated. Dr. Arthur Wisot at the Center for Advanced Reproductive Care comments that "there are no hard and fast rules, there is no legislation" and as a result he sets his own age limit at 50 because he doesn't think it is "fair to the child" to have an old mother.(10) Yet, Dr. Mark Seigler, director of the Center for Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago, suggested in 1994 that "to say that simply because these women are post-menopausal and above the age of 50 they can't provide adequate child care to a baby is patently ridiculous."(11) Indeed, in many families the responsibility of childcare has long been and continues to remain with grandmothers.

Yet the ethical concerns arising in responses to postmenopausal women as mothers are unequivocal for some. They argue from a position that demands consideration of the child's welfare and their concerns run something like this: what about the lifestyle available to children of mothers who are in their 60s? Is it fair to these kids that their parents won't be able to perform traditional child-rearing practices? Can a parent with arthritic knees get down on all fours and play with their child? Won't such kids really experience a different childhood as the kids of pensioners rather than children of middle-aged parents? But different from what? Cultural communities where older maternal figures are responsible for the caretaking of three generations of offspring are not unusual. Some women, for whom deferred motherhood is a direct response to economic circumstances, are forced to consider pregnancy at a later stage in their lives. In single family units where mothers work long hours, the familiarity of an older, stable maternal figure raising children is deemed preferable to the anonymity of daycare. Is it then plausible to assert that youth in and of itself is a prerequisite for good parenting skills? Practices of assisted reproduction can no longer be simplified into polemical moral differences. The different positions currently made available in media accounts illustrate that terms such as pregnancy, motherhood and reproduction are simultaneously bound up in cultural constructions of what counts as "natural" ways to practice motherhood and "natural" processes of reproduction. More and more, cases of assisted reproduction bear out the permeability of such categories and reveal them as the gatekeepers of a particular type of morality and "family values" that are inevitably bound to the race, sexuality and financial class of the mother. In saying this, in no way do I want to deny the importance of raising "ethical questions" concerning the well-being of the children of post-menopausal mothers; however, what I do want to emphasize is the extent to which such concerns, Dike others cited in this debate, relate to a constellation of positions that are themselves grounded in their own equally permeable set of cultural values.

In an effort to think through this complexity, Thomas Murray examines the limitations of simplifying ethical issues by describing our varying moral positions as "a world marked by a multiplicity of interests and duties."(12) We are, he suggests, "certainly entitled to give good moral weight to our own interests." In the case of a pregnant woman who must decide whether or not to work in a potentially toxic environment, however, he insists that the ethical dimensions of her dilemma be portrayed not simply as beginning and ending with the well-being of the fetus. For in doing so, he argues, we "rip a complex decision out of its moral, as well as its social and political, context." Yet, he suggests, this is commonly practiced when a woman's desires or rights are counterposed to the fetus' "right" to protection from harm.(13) Murray's framework is useful in thinking through the ethical issues that inevitably arise in cases of assisted reproduction. We need to examine more closely terms like "ethical issues" in order to avoid the simplicity of an either/or paradigm: you're either for the mother or against her; for the well-being of the child or against it. Such paradigms ignore broader issues such as the access of individual women to such reproductive technologies, their access to the social structures that enable them to comfortably mother at an older age as well as conditions of health that exist among older women, conditions that are contingent upon any number of wider social, medical and cultural factors.

Many current social conventions or practices of childcare and child-rearing would be broken down if assisted reproduction were made readily available to older women. However, the control that assisted reproduction places in the hands of doctors and legislators is clearly a concern for many feminists who view the increased medicalization of the female body as limiting to women's reproductive freedom. These concerns continue to inform feminist debates about new reproductive technologies and to hound attempts at strategizing a feminist response to the plethora of choices that reproductive technology has made available. As many of the media accounts demonstrate, the anxiety currently surrounding assisted reproduction demonstrates the way in which accepted and dominant ways of thinking recuperate a universalist "nature," while the practices of new technologies implicitly question such a move. This realization has a profound impact on the foundations of scientific authority as well as illustrating the needs of women in terms that are complex and multifaceted. As such, what "women want" cannot be easily agreed upon by medical practitioners, legislators or women's advocacy groups.

Yet the promise of something new mixed with the threat of everything staying the same continues to loom large in the possibilities of assisted reproduction. For post-menopausal women, assisted reproduction consistently addresses the needs and conditions of wealthy white heterosexual women, and rarely addresses the health risks that affect women of different classes and races that ultimately will determine which older women will be able to participate in programs for postmenopausal pregnancy and thus gain access to the "benefits" of an extended career and delayed childbearing. As pointed out earlier, many older women of color, older women of lesser economic means and older women of other nationalities have long acted as "mothers" well after menopause. Embracing as liberatory a technology that serves to reinscribe affluent white heterosexual women into a role in which many women have only ever figured is hardly cause for celebration. Any consideration of the potential of new assisted means of reproduction must take this into account. However, assuming that the reproductive needs of one woman are good for all women equally recuperates women into a system of legislative and linguistic conventions that reinforces the status of the reproductive body as biologically or "naturally" determined rather than culturally constructed. The liberatory issues that emerge out of the possibilities offered by these new technologies are as confused and muddy as the language that science relies upon to explain the relationship of medical practice to the process of reproduction. In a crisis of legitimation it is not clear where the liberatory possibilities are; as they exist for some women but not for others, it makes the appeal to any authority to legitimize these practices extremely difficult. As the conditions that define what counts as natural become increasingly less stable, perhaps our hopes for a future of alternatively reproduced possibilities lie in the generation of monsters.

NOTES

1. Nelly Oudshoorn, "A Natural Order of Things? Reproductive Sciences and the Politics of Othering," in FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture, George Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tucker, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis and Tim Putman, eds., (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 122-32. Oudshoorn writes, "the very act of classifying phenomena as natural is not without consequences. Natural phenomena are accorded the ambivalent status of objects of scientific inquiry: only those phenomena identified as natural will be included in the research agenda of natural scientists." Oudshoorn, p. 123.

2. William E. Schmidt, "Birth to 59-Year-Old Briton Raises Ethical Storm," New York Times. December 29, 1993, p. A6. See also William Tuohy, "Medical, Ethical Flap Erupts over Birth to Briton, 59," Los Angeles Times (December 28, 1993), p. A4.

3. Rosi Braidotti, "Signs of Wonder and Traces of Doubt: On Teratology and Embodied Differences," in Nina Lykke and Rosi Braidotti, eds. Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace, (London: Zed Books, 1996), p. 139.

4. Frequent accounts identify the age of the mother as a "problem" in relation to the child, focusing particular attention on the ability of a mother in her 70s to cope with the needs of a teenager. Of course, this ignores the prospect that as women choose to parent at older ages, childcare will have to become the responsibility of someone other than the mother herself. Parenting thus becomes a set of responsibilities that are shared with someone other than the mother as primary caretaker. This is a double-edged sword, as better childcare facilities for all mothers are a much needed commodity, yet an argument for such support for older women would suggest that many women over 50 are unable to satisfactorily take care of young children. Conversely, the issue doesn't arise for affluent families who have always been able to take advantage of daycare or home help.

5. Susan Fitzgerald, "Pregnancy risks and age," Chicago Tribune. (October 4, 1994) sec: Evening, p. 7.

6. Ibid.

7. Sheryl Stolberg, "Science Helps Italian Woman give Birth at 62," Los Angeles Times (July 19, 1994), p. A1.

8. Marilyn Gardner, "'Retirement Pregnancies:' Are Limits Needed?" Christian Science Monitor (July 14, 1994), p. 15.

9. Gina Kolata, "A Record and Big Questions As Woman Gives Birth at 63." New York Times (April 24, 1997), p. A12.

10. Ibid.

11. Susan Chira, "Of a Certain Age, and in the Family Way," New York Times (January 2, 1994), p. 1

12. Thomas Murray, "Moral Obligations to the Not-Yet Born," Ethical Issues in New Reproductive Technologies, Richard T. Gull, ed., (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 1990), pp. 210-23.

13. Ibid., p. 215.

ANGELA WALL is currently a Brittain Fellow in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at The Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. She is currently completing a dissertation titled Reading the Reproductive Body in Contemporary Culture in the Modern Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.