Buy Buy Baby

This Washington Post article relates a new development in the baby business. Now prospective parents can order pre-made embryos after carefully reviewing the contracted egg and sperm donors. All egg donors must be in their twenties and have at least some college education. Sperm donors must have an advanced degree. Both are vetted for their medical histories, for example making sure there's no familial history of mental illness.

And it is so very, very scary.

Of course, this business is only marginally scarier than what has preceded it. In a modern world where socio-economic class is becoming continually more of an issue, paying for embryos is a bad idea.

Though I have never been in a situation where I wanted children and could not have them, and therefore cannot possibly understand and thereby reject the feelings and efforts of infertile couples seeking to have children, my first response to all of these infertility clinics is that they are churning out babies that the world doesn't need. As a firm believer that the world needs to achieve zero population growth, I cannot be fully comfortable with the amount of effort that goes into producing pregnancies. This is hardly going to be a popular stance. I don't even like it much myself. Except that here I am not talking about people who are trying very hard to have their own biological children. These people are already outsourcing, they're just choosing parents to create a designer baby, rather than adopt one of the desperate infants (or older foster children) populating the world.

Of course, these potential children are being chosen over existing children because with the embryos-r-us retailer, they can get a designer baby. With adopting a child from a third-world country, who can say what you're getting? You might have to love a child inspite of it being flawed. A fate to be avoided, most definitely.

Well, what's wrong with wanting to choose who parents your child? Isn't that what we're essentially doing when we have children the natural way? No, not really. When you choose a mate, you look for mutual attraction, shared values, a sense of security with each other. Generally speaking, we don't check their medical histories or go back through their family tree. We want to have children with our partners because we love them, not because we weighed and measured them and decided they scored high enough. And in our society, it is inconceivable that if we all chose exactly what we wanted in our children that we wouldn't vere towards the same sorts of traits: athletic, smart (probably of a scientific bent), attractive, with the standard rule of beauty at the moment being tall and thin.

And if everyone were like that, would that necessarily be terrible? Well, not everyone would be like that. You see, mail-order embryos are something that can only be afforded by the rich (or at least, relatively rich on the global scale). So the rich would have these children, carefully selected to have been born from healthy, attractive, well-educated (and therefore assumed to be intelligent) parents, and the poor would just have regular kids. And who is going to move up in the world? Joe Schmo, born of his parents love (or drunken one-night stand and broken condom) or Joseph Schmoington III, born of strangers carefully screened for genetic fitness? This is why it is eugenics. Because not only does this process entail cold-bloodedly deciding which genes are worthy and which are unworthy, but it also involves exclusion. And this is only with pre-screened parents. This particular issue of the Abraham Institute, or whatever it's being called, doesn't even touch on the fact that embryos are being screened for genetic fitness. I can understand why one wants to rule out some damaging and painful congenital disorders, but people can choose the sex of the baby, and it's not stopping there. I don't believe for a minute that it's stopping there.

I'm exhausted and terrified just thinking about the implications of where our society is taking reproduction. And that's without going into issues of the objectification of women and the consequences of sex determination in misogynistic cultures.