We can bring the question home to us personally or we can be moved by the loss of a sense of our personal power. When you talk of reproductive technology, most women think of the pill (or the IUD). We learned to regard the pill as giving us control over our reproductive lives. It gave us a medical solution to what was, in fact, a social problem, but one over which we felt we had little control. This included the subordinate position or reproduction relative to productive, paid work. It was also the specific definition of post-war emancipation or "free love" as a particular form of heterosexual activity with no apron strings attached.

The combined effect of delaying childbearing plus the medical "side-effects" of the pill and the IUD has been a rising rate of infertility. Today, in infertility clinics across the country, women are being offered a new lease on their reproductive lives in the form of hormone treatments, in-vitro fertilization and embryo transplants. This time, there is no illusion about the technology giving women more control; it's being offered as a medical solution to a medical problem. And the women on the receiving end are grateful!

It's easy to see how a type of schizophrenia sets in. Even as a number of feminists in the health-care field are raising an alarm about in-vitro fertilization and the related issue of doctors' control over our eggs, the conception of life and the initial as well as final stages of gestating and incubating that life (plus the lives of women contracted as surrogate mothers), vast numbers of women don't see it that way at all. They don't see how much they've lost control. Or, more to the point, they don't feel it.

Look at child birth. It was commonplace in our mothers' generation not only to nurse babies on a glass bottle but to give birth to them (that's us) under general anesthetic. (Did you know that the root of the word aesthetic is "without feeling"?) To be robbed of your aesthetic sense is to be robbed of your ability to know at the most fundamental level; it's the very essence of alienation. Today, there's almost a pitched battle between the rising rate of caesarian section delivery and women who insist on owning their own labour and feeling it, pain, discomfort and all. There at least, women are taking back their power of judgment and saying no to a "labour-saving" technology. Meanwhile, however, the women who can't conceive are slowly alienated from their own reproduction through the intrusion, first of a basal thermometer and chart, then fertility tests and hormone treatments.

By the time the doctor mentions in-vitro fertilization, few women will have retained much sense of their own definition of reproduction to feel through the situation and judge it for themselves. Alienated and effectively anaesthetized, they humbly submit to the doctor's redefinition of reproduction, increasingly with doctors and reproductive technology at the centre.

And in an obvious parallel to the work world, women are increasing their dosages of tranquilizers, cigarettes and alcohol as they adjust to working as fast-fingered extensions of information systems in banks, telephone companies, insurance companies and even fast-food restaurants and supermarkets. We might not know who's gaining power and control. But we know who's losing a sense of their power to do anything about it.

AISLA: Is the education system responsive to women's need to use technology? Is compulsory math and science education for young women a solution? Do we need more women scientists and technicians? Can education play a role in helping women come to terms with technology?

HEATHER: The education system, as a system, has always been the handmaid of the powers that be. Even Ontario's educational reformer, Eggerton Ryerson, wanted the educator to prepare young people for their appropriate "station" in life. Current attempts to harness education more closely to the cart driver of business and industry are merely differences in degree, not in kind. Therefore, in providing courses in word processing and computer programming, the education system is responding characteristically. It's responding to its definition of what women need to cope with technology. To the extent that women are asking not just for operational or machine skills but for knowledge of technology as system, as a certain model of industrial design which might be rejected in favour of what Elaine Bernard calls "user-driven design," the education system has remained sternly unresponsive. That's why it's important for groups like CCLOW and CAAE to pursue a learner-driven design for technology education, including computer literacy: what the technology's all about and how to operate it. But it would also talk about why high technology and not low. And it would talk about who: whose technology, whose benefits, whose risks, who's in control?