The Brave New World we now experience is filled with a myriad of moral dilemmas--and none demands more urgent attention than those related to human reproduction and the massive technological advances that are related to human fertility and babies.
In one sense, these moral dilemmas directly affect only a small percentage of the American population. The vast majority of babies born in the United States are conceived through natural means--completely without the assistance of reproductive technologies. Nevertheless, a growing number of American couples find themselves facing difficulty conceiving and bearing a child. Furthermore, homosexual couples--both male and female--increasingly demand a "right" to have children, and these are joined by some unmarried individuals who have similar access to these technologies.
In any event, the field of reproductive technologies now represents a fast-growing sector of the economy--and one that produces a significant profit. All this raises a crucial moral question: is an unregulated free market in reproductive technologies and materials such as human gametes destined to undermine human dignity and the sanctity of human life?
The emergence of a free market economy in donor organs, a market now spreading around the globe, should serve as a significant warning that reproductive technologies and gametes, along with other factors involved in human reproduction, represent a lucrative market that has already caught the attention and interest of many corporations, entrepreneurs, and individuals.
This market has now caught the attention of the Harvard Business Review [HBR]. In its February 2006 issue, HBR features a "big picture" article by Harvard business professor Deborah L. Spar. In "Where Babies Come From: Supply and Demand in an Infant Marketplace," Professor Spar acknowledges that many persons would find the very notion of a "market" in the arena of human reproduction to be distasteful or worse. "There are markets in real estate, markets in used cars, markets filled with farmers selling green beans and cheese," Spar observes. "But a market in human fertility--sperm, eggs, hormones, surrogate mothers, embryos? Babies, or the means to make them, aren't supposed to be sold. They aren't supposed to be bought. They aren't supposed to have prices fixed upon them."
Nevertheless, Spar acknowledges that "there is a market for babies, one that stretches across the globe and encompasses hundreds of thousands of people." This may not be a conventional market in the sense of farm commodities or mortgages, but this new market in human reproduction has been created by "a deep and persistent demand from people who have been denied the blessings of reproduction, along with a wide and steadily increasing supply of ways to produce babies when nature proves inadequate."
As Spar explains, this new market in human reproduction includes for-profit fertility clinics, drug companies, doctors, and medical firms that rake in huge profits in the baby-making business. In 2001, almost 41,000 children were born in the United States through in vitro fertilization technologies [IVF]." Beyond this, another six thousand were produced by donated eggs and approximately six hundred were carried to term by rented wombs--most often identified as surrogate mothers.
Professor Spar is no newcomer to these issues. She serves as Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and Harvard Business School Press has just released her new book, The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception. Professor Spar's concern is straightforwardly related to business and economics. She raises a host of moral issues, but her most pressing concern seems to be the lack of clear legal definitions protecting property rights for all involved. In her article, she looks at the business of making babies like any other business, and raises the issue of government regulation as a means of defining rights, lowering prices, and expanding access.
