Author Pinki Virani, who exposed paedophilia, crusaded for euthanasia and reached nurse Aruna Shanbaug’s story to every household, has never shied away from calling a spade a shovel. In Politics of the Womb: The perils of IVF Surrogacy and Modified Babies, she returns with her customary forcefulness to tackle the business of assisted reproduction.
Readers who never had a close brush with artificial reproduction will nevertheless have noticed dubious posters promising cherubic infants to desperate-to-be parents. Virani blows the lid off the IVF practice that may have started as a personalised ethical treatment but has reached a racket of industry proportions.
A foreword by the author explains the legal ramifications of the procedure. If that is not scary enough, Virani launches into the health, moral, social, psychological and ethical perils of assisted reproduction.
A clinical description of the female and male reproductive systems and the entire process of reproduction is explained in detail and what could have been a dreary text-book section is enlivened by hilarious comments from the author. The book discusses the tertiary aspects of the IVF procedure and these include the practice of putting multiple embryos, editing human genes, surrogacy, ova or oocyte trafficking, third party reproduction, uterine transplant, freezing of ova and the procurement of eggs and uteri, among others.
Patients are rarely informed about the merits involved in the procedures—all of them costing big bucks—and Virani proposes a list of government policies that could safeguard the interests of the would-be parents. The author outlines the rapid commercialisation of an unethical industry preying on the emotions of people craving to be parents, disregarding the health hazards. She dwells on the phenomena, in which young men and women casually sell their sperms and eggs for quick money. An entire manual of instructions intended for people desirous of getting into the IVF cycle lists the pros and cons, while tilting heavily towards the cons.
The dark cloud of medical insensitivity is not without its silver lining and Virani cites cases of altruistic donors and wombs, human milk banks where an intricate system makes excess mother’s milk available to other babies needing it. Using catchy phrases (‘fertility junkies’, ‘amphitheatre of womb wars’, ‘reproductive slavery’) that aptly capture the essence of the problem, Virani puts forth some personal theories, some of which read pretty solid and some a tad outlandish. The book is backed by a wealth of research and a generous sprinkling of examples. A tighter job of editing could have given a crisper feel to the book. There is no effort to pretty the prose, the words tumble out raw and frenetic, with chopped sentences, incomprehensive use of capitals and blatant flouting of grammar. But this very rejection of literary finesse gives the book its urgency and gets across the author’s desperation in sounding the alarm bell.
Even as one wonders which way mankind is headed with the amount of genetic tinkering going on, news comes in about the world’s first baby from three parents; Virani’s book could not have been more appropriately timed. Turning the spotlight on a trend that has been growing so insidiously that it has failed to register on the public consciousness, the book is almost an encyclopaedia on artificial reproduction.
With birth defects like autism and cerebral palsy frequently tied to fertility techniques and with people going in for gender selection, gender balanced twins and other kinds of tampering, the subject is no longer mere fodder for sci-fi novels, and the author is apprehensive about future generations of genetically modified humans having serious evolutionary repercussions. Politics of the Womb shocks, disturbs, informs, enlightens, forces the reader to take a stance and lends itself to spirited debate. And that’s saying a lot for any one book.