Women’s Rights in European Fertility Medicine Regulation

Abstract

For more than 20 years, Artificial Reproductive Technologies (ART) have focused the attention of gender studies. These studies try to evaluate the impact of Reproductive Medicine mainly on Western women. There is, nonetheless, a perspective that has not been sufficiently explored by the scientific literature on this issue, namely, the analysis of the legal policy models followed by European countries concerning women’s rights in the context of reprogenetics. European Fertility Medicine’s regulatory texts constitute a unique means to gain insight into the legal status of women’s reproductive rights. Therefore, the question that we would like to raise in this paper is this: What purposes do European ART regulations actually serve and what place do women’s reproductive rights have within them?