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Buying Babies — by Rachel Lu
I’m writing a paper about “third party reproduction.” If you’re not familiar, this is what they call it when a person or couple decide to make a baby but involve a third party in the process, either as a source of genetic material or as a host for purposes of gestation. Surrogacy and artificial insemination are two of the primary examples.
Third-party reproduction is going to become a big bioethical debate over the next few years. It’s not a new thing, but the pressures to make it easier and cheaper are intensifying rapidly. The reason is obvious. Same-sex couples are creating a market for children. The fertility industry is looking to meet that demand.
I’ve been working on an analogy and I’m curious how it strikes people. I’d be grateful if people would tell me what intuitions they have about it.
Suppose we have an educated gentleman living in the antebellum South. He and his wife are unable to have children. This is a source of terrible grief to her. The gentleman isn’t racist, but he also isn’t a committed abolitionist; as a copious reader of history he sees slavery together with war, poverty, prostitution, political corruption, and a million other evils, as a part of the human story. It isn’t beautiful, but it’s a thing people do and he doesn’t feel personally called to interfere.
Since his wife so desperately wants a child, however, he sees an obvious solution. He goes to the local slave market and buys her a baby. He tells his wife if she loves him like her own she’ll find that this child can satisfy her maternal longings. She believes him, and they raise the baby as their son. When he reaches adulthood, they draw up the paperwork and formally emancipate him. They help him to find a job in the north where he can live and work as a free man.
How does this scenario strike people? Is it morally defective to acquire a child through a slave market, given the intention to love and nurture him? If so, can we find a morally significant difference between the couple that buys their baby from a slave market and the couple that buys their baby through a commercial surrogacy arrangement?
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Tom, we’re presumably not going to see completely eye to eye on the natural law bits, but can I at least persuade you that third-party reproduction opens doors to degrading practices in way that should concern us (just as artificial contraceptives did)? If so, can we agree that we should set serious limits to try to prevent that from happening and not just let the market run amok?
I think commercial surrogacy contracts should be illegal. If people want to volunteer to be surrogates for loved ones they can. If people want to show their support for same-sex couples by being volunteer surrogates, I guess they can. (I’ve heard of such cases in fact.) But you shouldn’t be able to contract to hand over the baby you’re carrying. A woman who gives birth to a baby should have rights to that baby unless she is demonstrably unfit to care for him. And mothers should not be paid for terminating parental rights.
Thanks, Howellis!
Oddly enough, allowing an open market for adoption would likely decrease infertile couples’ demand for ART (mentioned in “Price and Pretense in the Baby Market”).
Without a market, birth mothers have little incentive to seek out adoptive parents or clearinghouse services that will make it easy for prospective adoptive parents to find unwanted children while the children are still in infancy.
When you prohibit a market in something, you are also prohibiting the efficient flow of information regarding that thing. This may not be your intention, but it is the inevitable result. And you are responsible for it, no matter how much you virtuously protest.
By all means, continue to prohibit a market in adoption! Then sit back and watch as children who could have otherwise been adopted in infancy get aborted, abused, or end up in foster care as “damaged goods”, with the likelihood of anyone adopting them so late in life practically nil. Sit back and watch as infertile couples despair of the infeasibility of adoption and turn to ART instead!
To prohibit a market in adoptions is to incentivize ART, abortions, and the evils of foster care. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is.
Here’s the overarching question:
Should our society disregard biology as the primary principle for determining parenthood and family?
It seems that the libertarians are saying yes, and the social conservatives are saying no.
I mean, I’m apt to agree, but it’s clearly the logic of the whole liberal approach to “family planning”. And plenty of people clearly do share that attitude, which is often why they support legalized abortion.
Err… so Midge…. a woman gets pregnant, has the baby, and mistreats it or abandons it. And I’m responsible because I wouldn’t sanction her selling it on the open market? That’s ridiculous. There are always negative indirect consequences to every law or social decision, but saying we’re “responsible” for them is highly misleading.
No, we can’t. Partly for philosophical reasons and partly because of the very practical reasons Midge outlines in #73, I don’t favor banning things unless they’re proven to be harmful (and even then, I’m a tough customer).
I’d say that it’s the default principle, but that’s subtly different than saying it’s the primary principle. So, maybe.
Should human life be subject to the market? I thought our country answered this question in 1865.
Exactly. If you class this together with other restrictions on commerce, you’ve totally missed the point.
No. Please reread what I wrote. I wrote that people opposed to a market in adoptions are responsible for the inefficient flow of information – nothing more and nothing less:
Inefficient flow of information exacerbates the evils you describe. It does not cause them – obviously.
Agreed, but that’s because Leftism is premised on entitlement, so they — unsurprisingly — see contraception in that context. This is reason #5422 I’m not a Leftist.
I’m not surprised they’ve been successful, since the only organized opposition to their worldview it is premised on the idea that contraception is inherently wicked. Reason #5423 I’m not a SoCon.
Default was my second choice of words! Perhaps I should have gone with it. I’ll do so now:
Should our society disregard biology as the default principle for determining parenthood and family?
While I would be the first to concede that the Supreme Court has done many foolish things, I doubt you were thinking of SCOTUS when you made this comment.
In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, SCOTUS explicitly argued that people have come to rely on abortion to ensure baby free sex.
“The Roe rule’s limitation on state power could not be repudiated without serious inequity to people who, for two decades of economic and social developments, have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.”
I guess I just don’t understand your argument then.
When a young person tells his parents, “I want to support myself! I’m gonna apply to 50 jobs!” there’s no certainty that a job will result – especially in this economy. He is creating conditions that could enable it to happen, but it certainly might not, for any number of reasons.
Obviously this must be because “commercial transactions [such as job-hunting] are the way we impose our will on the world”.
No, there’s never an element of fortune or sheer gift in finding a job. Midge did not get down on her knees and thank God when she was able to find a job that kept her from medical bankruptcy during illness. Why would she? She was, by your reasoning, “master (mistress?) of the universe”, able to bend everything in life to her will through the sheer powers of commerce!
So our real problem is a dearth of people out there telling young couples to “use contraceptives responsibly”? Please.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I am pretty sure that children who are adopted into stable two parent families do much better, on average, than children who are raised by their biological single mothers, without a father present. There are always exceptions: I know single mothers who did a great job, and two parent families who made a hash of it, but in general, children are better off with a mother and a father who are married to each other, regardless of whether they are the biological parents or not.
Rachel, I think Tom’s argument is that the only counter to the leftist proposition that contraception is for baby free sex from SoCons is that contraception is evil and abstinence is the only solution. I believe Tom is arguing for a middle road.
*Edit* The new comment quoting system sucks. Can someone PM me and explain how to do it properly?
I think your error is taking everything to its most extreme consequence. Isn’t it possible to agree that biology is a good default principle for determining parenthood and family while also agreeing that it is not the only way to form good stable families? Or that not all biologically related families are paragons of moral and civic virtue?
I’d say we’ve a general dearth of people telling young folks to make responsible decisions in general, and too many trying to conflate specific technologies and behaviors with irresponsibility.
The idea that biology is the most important aspect of family is the reason why many feel that aborting an unborn child is kinder than giving him up for adoption. It is the reason why women in abortion clinics scoff at the idea of giving their child to someone else: they say that they could never do something so cold, and they really believe what they are saying.
It seems as if two related but separate issues are being conflated: baby selling and baby making. I can think of plenty of reasons why baby selling is a horrible idea, but it isn’t the same thing as creating embryos in a lab. With things like IVF, we are creating and destroying human life at will. That should at least make us uncomfortable, regardless of how we feel about selling a baby who was made the old fashioned way.
Yet another of the many, many reasons Roe should be overturned.
In that decision, Scotus also said: “In some critical respects abortion is of the same character as the decision to use contraception…”
Here’s a great 5 min. clip from Janet Smith where she discusses Planned Parenthood v. Casey:
Rachel, you should be aware that the scholars advocating for opening the adoption market do agree there should be serious limits, such as restricting open-market adoptions to very young infants. If I recall correctly, of the pro-adoption-market papers of which I’m aware (and which you should read as research while writing your own paper), all acknowledge there are good reasons to prohibit at-will adoptions for older children. Oddly enough, the people writing these papers aren’t monsters :-)
See: Landes and Posner, “The Economics of the Baby Shortage” ; Kimberly Krawiec, “Price and Pretense in the Baby Market”; Donald Boudreaux, “A Modest Proposal”; Alexander and O’Driscoll, “Stork Markets”.
And I’m saying, Jaime, that this “middle road” is hardly novel; it’s had armies of advocates from the very beginning. It was the Catholics who were typically presented as the crazy ones for straight-out opposing contraceptives; “use responsibly” was the more mainstream position for decades. Among liberals and conservatives. I remember getting the “use responsibly” talk in 7th grade from my public school teacher. Most churches adopted similar positions.
It’s only very recently that some other churches and conservatives have started to acknowledge that maybe the Catholics were right to suggest that the very availability of contraceptives changed our whole orientation towards sex and relationships in a problematic way.
Tom is still free to pitch his tent on the “use responsibly” ground, but don’t try to pretend that that position has been neglected.
Why would someone buy an older child when they can’t even be given away now? The supply demand curve would at first blush seem to indicate a payment in the same direction as the child.
Midge, people don’t have to be monsters to endorse positions that have monstrous results. Sometimes you really do need to pay attention to the underlying logic of giving social sanction to particular practices.
Past bad decisions have given rise to the general expectation that people should be able to have sex without being liable for the enormous responsibility of parenthood. That’s had enormously bad effects on our society. Here again, I see a shift in our paradigm or comportment that puts us on an evil path. If we let people buy babies out of sympathy for their desire to raise them, we may soon find ourselves facing a whole new slate of arguments.
Is it fair that the poor-but-infertile/sterile should never get to experience parenthood? Why should this couple get eight kids and that one zero just because the former was young, heterosexual and open to life? Is it the gay man’s fault that he loves someone who can’t reproduce with him? Shouldn’t we do something to remedy that natural injustice?
Disregarding natural ties as trivial (“family transcends biology, accept that or not”) sets a very dangerous precedent.
Does the availability of firearms change our whole orientation towards violence and murder?
True, you don’t. At multiple levels, perhaps.
To me, everything about life is gift. Including commerce and the fruits of commerce.
To many SoCons (including, as far as I can tell, you), everything about life is gift except commerce and the fruits of commerce – which, because they’re excluded from the category “gift”, are innately corrupt and corrupting.
This is perhaps our most basic failure of mutual understanding.
Economic opportunities are themselves gifts, and should be treated as such.
I think the people writing the papers know this, and regard official restrictions in line with natural demand as not very harmful.