The Baby Business: How Markets are Changing the Future of Birth

It is difficult to conceive of the child as commerce. For even at the start of the 21st century, we like to believe that some things remain beyond both markets and science; that there are some things that money can't buy. In economic terms, these things are defined as being inalienable; the people who own the assets have no ability to profit from them. In moral terms, they are things that we as a society have chosen not to sell;assets or attributes that are somehow more valuable than any price they might fetch. This prohibition is particularly strong for children. For who, after all, could put a price on a child? Yet every day, around the world, babies and children are indeed being sold. South American toddlers are advertised to their prospective parents by reference to their physical characteristics. Eggs are priced according to their 'donor's' intelligence. Embryos are being created and manipulated to produce particular genetic trains. Such transactions may appear to be above or beyond the market. But they are not. When parents buy eggs or sperm; when they contract with surrogate mothers; when they choose a child to adopt or an embryo to implant, they are doing business. This research project examines the commercial and political aspects of the baby trade. Rather than focusing on either the science or the personal implications of reproductive medicine, it looks instead at the commerce that has evolved along with the science; at the business that is actually shaping what science can and cannot do.