Education and the new technologies in reproduction.

Since 1978 technologies applied to human reproductive biology have resulted in totally new ways of making families. Traditionally education has presented science as a value-free body of absolute knowledge, neatly divided into discrete disciplines. This has resulted in a fragmented approach to the teaching of human reproduction. Many students are leaving school today confused and ignorant about contraception and their own fertility. How will education deal with new methods of controlling and promoting human fertility and family planning? Should the curriculum include: the scientific details of the technologies; the nature and known causes of infertility; the recent legislation designed to limit these technologies; the implications for the family as the fundamental social unit? If so, where in the curriculum, and taught by whom? This paper critically examines these possibilities with particular focus on the confused role of genetics in defining parents and families, both in the literature and in recent Victorian legislation designed to regulate new reproductive technologies. A more precise definition of the concept of 'mother' which acknowledges all three components, genetic, birth and social is suggested for inclusion in a broader curriculum about human reproduction, preferably within science education.