A Marketplace Called Desire

January 9, 2007

In an ABC News Now video on January 8, 2007 (transcript), Jennalee Ryan describes her work at the Abraham Center of Life as “ethical” and “very moral.” The Abraham Center of Life is an embryo bank, where prospective parents, for a fee, can choose an embryo according to genetic parental qualities of height, race, education (egg donors have some college, typically, and sperm donors all have advanced degrees), eye color, and other genetic traits. The Abraham Center of Life is a business concern; whether it is ethical or moral depends on more than an assertion.

Debora L. Spar, Harvard professor of business administration, writes in The Baby Business, her book on assisted reproductive technologies as well as adoption, that, “We are making babies now, for better or worse, in a very high-tech way.” Her conclusion? “We can moralize about these developments if we desire . . . We can decry the fate of our manipulated offspring . . . Or we can plunge into the market that desire has created, imagining how we can shape our children and secure our children without destroying ourselves” (p. 233).

It would appear that some are indeed plunging into this market of embryos-by-design. The results are unclear at present, but some questions are certainly in order. What if the child produced through the Abraham Center of Life is not precisely the child desired? Elsewhere, (The Tennessean January 6, 2007, “Off-the-shelf embryos prompt ethicists’ scorn”), Ryan is quoted as saying, “If I do discriminate, it’s that I only want healthy, intelligent people.” Presumably that is also at least one of the aims of the would-be parents of the children produced through the Abraham Center of Life. But what if the child’s IQ doesn’t square with the genes of the gamete donors? Can the child be returned because the product was unacceptable? Could either the donors or the center be sued for wrongful birth, or at least, emotional distress of the parents? Whether or not the parents get what they want, in terms of a child that is acceptable to them, or compensation in the event something goes awry, what about the child?

It is remarkable that the only time the child is mentioned here, it is as the fulfillment of adults’ desires. Granted, it is not unusual to speak of children born of the desire of adults, either as a product of desire of two adults for one another, or of two adults for the child. Yet when a child is not only the product of desire, but also the culmination of a financial arrangement, where deliberate choices have entered into the equation, who speaks for the child? How will the child feel, when he or she is told of the origins of his or her birth? If one child cost more to produce than another, is that a statement of relative worth — within a family, or within a society? What happens when the child made-to-order displays traits, physically or in terms of character, that the “social” parents do not like? Will every challenge bring to the fore the nature-versus-nurture debate? Are the children informed of their genetic family histories — those disorders/diseases that appear after the sperm and egg have been “donated”? Will they be able to meet their genetic parents if they wish? Will they need DNA analyses of others whom they may wish to date?

Desire has indeed created a market for babies, but this is not the first or only market that desire has ever created. Children are a heritage, gifts; not commodities to be traded. Our nation does not have a stellar history of being either ethical or moral in its treatment of all humans as equal. The Thirteenth Amendment to our Constitution is a testimony to our difficulty in understanding the equality of persons. Now a business has been formed to traffic in embryos that are more equal than others, by desire and design. This is Eugenics, not Everest: we dare not enter simply because it is there.