Thanks for writing in. With regard to these technologies, some people say that the genie is out of the bottle. In some senses I agree. Conception using these technologies has been occurring for quite some time, and in the case of sperm donation for at least a century on record. It can seem both draconian and fruitless to talk about a ban or making them illegal.
At the same time, I find it clarifying to remove some of the technological garb from this discussion and think about what we’re really doing. These practices facilitate men and women giving away or selling their children to be raised by someone else. If a woman is not infertile, getting pregnant using donated sperm is not high tech, and can even be done in the home. As others have noted, farmers have used these practices to breed animals as long as animal husbandry has been practiced.
Donated eggs is another story. It’s quite high tech and, notably, quite physically risky for the one donating the eggs, as well as potentially raising health risks for the woman who conceives with those eggs (studies seem to be suggesting that pre-eclampsia and other complications are higher) and with potential health and psychological effects for the offspring
which we cannot yet know.
But old-fashioned surrogacy, using the surrogate’s own egg, is nothing new at all. It is in the Bible, for one thing. It’s just that older laws on what we now call surrogacy called it instead prostitution or baby selling.
I say it’s clarifying to remove the language of “technology” and try to see this for what is really is – buying and selling or giving away children – because then we can ask ourselves whether our laws and norms should support it. At present, in all of the US sperm and egg donation and procurement is legal. Surrogacy is legal in at least some states. The question perhaps is not whether is should be made illegal but rather less legal, in other words more regulated.
But I’m just as interested in the question of norms as much as laws. Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to do it. It is legal to get a divorce, but I don’t think that means it’s a good idea to get one the first time you have an argument with your husband. Instead we have norms about why marriage matters that encourage us to stick it out a little longer than that. Similarly, I would hope that our norms about what children can and should expect from their mothers and fathers will help to confront the current practices of child abandonment that are dressed up in the technological garb of sperm and egg donation and surrogacy.
Finally, to me, the most powerful thing one might be able to do to slow down this exchange in the parts to make children is to highlight the uncertainty of it all. When you are buying sperm or buying eggs, you are purchasing a microscopic product that you cannot see and inspect for yourself. The product is sold to you through websites and catalogs like a sofa or a new car, but you can’t run your hands over the upholstery or kick the tires. You’re going on faith that the intermediaries – your doctor’s office, the sperm or egg bank, and the sperm or egg donor him or herself – are all telling you the truth and are all following correct practices. When it comes to something as consequential as childbearing, do you really want to take that risk?
Categories: General
But isn’t that substantially true of even reproduction via two married heterosexuals having intercourse?
You don’t get to kick the tires of your husband’s sperm, or even ever see the sperm that joins the egg — and the same is true in reverse. There’s little quality control, and no guarantees; there are all sorts of genetic flaws or even diseases which can be carried in either the egg or the sperm.
Even if we assume that our spouse has been absolutely honest with us about their own medical and genetic history — and that assumption has often proven wrong — the spouse might have a history she or he doesn’t even know about.
In reproduction, uncertainty is unavoidable.
But you get to have a look-see at the one producing the goods. And, you can pretty much confirm where the goods came from.
Elizabeth, I agree with what you say about surrogacy, but I think you can even go further. Those who express indignation at the law interfering in these arrangements are somewhat misrepresenting the situation. The fact is, surrogacy needs positive laws to support it – i.e., it needs the state to step in to enforce a contract about ownership of a human being, over and against biological kinship, in any case where the egg donor or surrogate wishes to dispute custody. In a legal vacuum, surrogacy couldn’t exist, since the contracting “parents” couldn’t count on getting a baby for their money and trouble. So advocates of this form of reproduction are not just asking the law to leave them alone; they’re asking our legal system to allow and uphold contracts about the buying and selling of human beings, something that since the end of slavery at least, our legal system has not considered acceptable.
All the payments and legal wrangling involved in surrogacy are creepy, but what upsets me far more are the couples who pay a lot of money for a custom laboratory-made baby (often genetically theirs) who break up and then tell the pregnant surrogate they’ve change their minds and don’t want the baby. As though they were cancelling an order on Zappos.com! However I have heard of adoptive parents returning their children to social services when they divorce so this should not surprise me.
One more thing re the slavery question: throughout world history it has been common for parents to sell their children into slavery if they couldn’t feed them, had a debt they couldn’t repay or were pacifying some conflict by “giving” a daughter as a child bride to some conquering foe. In parts of Roman history it was apparently common for a man to sell his wife’s child if he questioned it’s paternity. Like so many forms of moral degeneracy we are simply repackaging age-old barbarities in hip clothes and shiny new gadgets. The idea of the equal worth and dignity of all human souls is being coded and tweeted away. A new Dark Age indeed.
Hello
that is some interesting stuff you wrote I had not thought of