Do Assisted Reproductive Technologies Promote Well-Being?

Infertility and involuntary childlessness are often accompanied by psychological distress. Such distress exhibits gendered patterns: women typically experience greater infertility-related suffering, including while they undergo procedures like IVF, and when such procedures fail. Early feminist critics of reproductive technologies sought to locate and address this suffering in the totality of women’s experience under patriarchy. Contemporarily, a liberal approach to this issue emphasizes the importance of an individual’s reproductive autonomy to engage in infertility procedures as they see fit. In this paper, I suggest that a hidden assumption within this liberal argument, serving as an operant justification for the development and provision of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), is that ARTs promote welfare, or well-being, through the alleviation of infertility-related distress. I explore whether ARTs do appropriately attend to welfare and so meet this justificatory aim. I suggest that IVF, where it is not successful, that is, in the vast majority of cases, does not serve to promote well-being. A comprehensive picture of welfare requires examining the social context in which infertility-related distress operates and in which well-being is thus compromised. Such considerations are essential to forming a holistic picture of well-being and in assessing whether ARTs can meet their welfarist aims.