Lastly, although pro-life advocates who subscribe to a blind faith in fetal rights have not criminalized abortion, they have made it difficult for women to find facilities and funding for the procedure. Thus, the types of reproductive technologies and their availability reflect our cultural views of the pregnant woman, the living fetus, and heroic doctors. An ecofeminist philosophy is also considers the amount of research being conducted by science because it also reveals cultural assumptions of the roles that males and females have in reproduction. The reproductive technologies which I am speaking about are those that affect a woman s ability to bear children, the actual means of conception, the medical care given during pregnancy, the termination of the pregnancy, and the delivery of the baby. They include but are not limited to contraceptives, abortion procedures, in vitro fertilization, amniocentesis, and devices that visualize and monitor the fetus.
Most research conducted on reproductive contraceptives is for women.
If it conducted on males, as seen with the recent interest in Viagra, it strictly aims to increase fertility. This research bias indirectly places more responsibility on women to control their fertility. In effect, the greater role placed upon women in reproduction can dangerously position the female as either being equivalent or closer to nature. Conceptualizing women as closer to nature is only possible when there is a distinction between nature and humans. The dichotomies are overlapping because what is defined as male is equivalent to culture, symbolized by the rational, and what is defined as female is analogous to nature, symbolized by the instinctual.