NEW BOOK BY HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PROFESSOR EXAMINES
MULTIBILLION DOLLAR BABY BUSINESS
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| Professor Debora L. Spar Photo: Margaret Lampert |
BOSTON -- A generation ago, infertile couples desperate for children had few choices beyond adoption. Today, advances in science and technology have made it possible to order babies from a menu of convenient options including donated eggs, rented wombs, and gene selection. In The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception, Harvard Business School Professor Debora Spar argues that it is time to acknowledge the commercial truth about reproduction and begin thinking about ways of governing it. Indeed, in the United States alone, human reproduction has become a thriving $3 billion industry; yet the product in this market is one that most would argue should never be sold: a child.
Just published by the Harvard Business School Press, The Baby Business is a behind-the-scenes account that combines pioneering research and interviews with the industry’s top reproductive scientists and trailblazers to provide a first glimpse at how the industry works. Throughout the book, Spar illustrates the inner workings of controversial market segments such as stem cell research, surrogacy, egg swapping, “designer babies,” cross-border adoption, and human cloning.
Focusing on the financial promise and ethical perils facing this new industry, The Baby Business explores:
- who the baby makers are and how they structure their trade,
- who is making money and how prices are set,
- how legal inconsistencies and continent-spanning loopholes affect the market,
- what role government can and should play in regulating the industry, and
- how industry participants can address the complex moral and legal challenges they will face as this industry evolves.
Hampered only by the limits of science, the dilemma of unmet demand, and an uncertain political system, the fertility trade will inevitably continue to grow. As it does, The Baby Business challenges readers to examine how science, law, and commerce can be balanced in the quest to satisfy one of humanity’s most basic desires.
The Baby Business is available for purchase online.
About the author
Debora Spar is the Spangler Family Professor at Harvard Business School, where she works on issues of business-government relations and the political environment of international commerce. In addition, she is Senior Associate Dean, Director of Research and teaches courses on the politics of international business, comparative capitalism, and economic development. She is also chair of Making Markets Work, an Executive Education program devoted to public- and private-sector leaders in Africa, and teaches and consults for a number of multinational corporations, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations. Professor Spar is the author of Ruling the Waves: Cycles of Discovery, Chaos, and Wealth from the Compass to the Internet and The Cooperative Edge: The Internal Politics of International Cartels, and coauthor with Raymond Vernon of Beyond Globalism: Remaking American Foreign Economic Policy. She has also written numerous publications in academic and public policy journals.
About Harvard Business School
Founded in 1908 as part of Harvard University, Harvard Business School (www.hbs.edu) is located on a 40-acre campus in Boston. Its faculty of more than 200 offers full-time programs leading to the MBA and doctoral degrees, as well as more than 40 Executive Education programs. For almost a century, HBS faculty have drawn on their research, their experience in working with organizations worldwide, and their passion for teaching to educate leaders who have shaped the practice of business around the globe.