Bioética, infertilidad y técnicas de reproducción humana asistida

De la medicina clínica a la medicina social

Abstract

It is estimated that 80 million couples trough the world have some kind of problem to gave birth, and most of them are found in developing countries. This is because the consequences of sexually transmitted infections (STI), tuberculosis, infections associated with unsafe abortions, puerperal sepsis, and so on, with a lack or limited access to opportune and / or suitable diagnosis and treatment; moreover, there are other factors, including the role of men as transmitters of STI. In addition, psychosocial stress is higher in infertile couples in developing countries. The article mentions that infertility treatment by using assisted reproduction techniques (ART) is very expensive and therefore difficult to provide in public health care. From a sociological point of view it could be partially explained the presence of ART in developing countries, either through a perpetuation of the upper and dominant class by using this technology (those ones who can pay for them) facing a lower and dominated class on which it does not matter if they have children or not because all of them are just interchangeable workforce; or it could be explained by adaptations that occur in processes of “glocalization”, where the globalization processes takes different forms in different local contexts. Finally a critique is done to the center of all the problems that ultimately are ethical: considering infertility as a disease, medicine continues colonizing areas which are not in their ground (such as reproduction), not only in the clinical set but at the moralizing one, as the definition of infertility assumes a married couple practicing heterosexual intercourse penis-vagina: this would be the model proposed as “natural” by reproductive medicine.