[The desire for a child and the wish to become a mother]

The author presents excerpts from individual and group interviews with infertile women offered participation in an in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) programme. The analysis of these interviews allows a distinction between the explicit desire for a child and a multiplicity of unconscious wishes underlying that desire. It also makes manifest the fantasies attached to these new forms of reproductive engineering, not only on the part of the women involved but also on the part of the physicians wielding these new technologies. Tubert shows the effects IVF programmes actually have: the female body is radically naturalized and the symbolic--which according to Lacan establishes the social position of the subject--is ousted by the biological, degrading the female body to the status of a pure object for modern science to manipulate at will.