Abstract
The Stealthy Revival of Eugenics The Baby Business: How Money, Science and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception Deborah L. Spar Harvard Business School Press, 2006 The Baby Business: Haw Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception is exceptional in its neutral position on modern eugenics and its commercialization. It is rare to find a well-written and well-researched book that tackles a politically sensitive issue without bringing the author's bias into the discussion. Deborqh Spar, unlike others, uses the term eugenics openly and explains the history of why it had to go underground for so many years - after the National Socialist Germany lost the war. She opens, "These children of the future are already among us. In 2001, nearly 41,000 children in the United States were born via in vitro fertilization (IVF) - 'test tube babies' in the older vernacular. Roughly 6,000 sprang from donated eggs; almost 600 were carried in surrogate, or borrowed, wombs. In 2003, Americans adopted 21,616 children from abroad and produced a handful of homegrown, biologically unrelated twins." There are so few authors that will bring you the data without then telling the world what is wrong and how to correct it. Not Spar, she is too rational. She states, "Usually, this is the point in any provocative book where the author lays out a road map for reform. Having led readers through hundreds of pages of description and analysis; having criticized others' theories and bemoaned the current state of affairs, the author concludes with a plan, an argument about precisely what should be done to fix the problem at hand. But this author is not going to do that. Why? Partly, it's because offering a plan at this point would be unreasonable: the baby business is running so quickly and expanding so radically that time is likely to render any detail moot." Later on I will get into the behavioral ethicists bemoaning of the immorality of these new genetic technologies, but they have already lost the battle to stop this technology. People want it, it is difficult to uncover if it had to hide, the rich will go to other countries to get the eugenic results they desire, and in the end it will be as normal as birth control - which was also seen as a moral outrage when it was first made readily available. Today, many women tend to work first and get married and have children later, but fertility drops off rapidly with age. When they finally have the opportunity and the desire to have children, they are often unable to do so - they lack sufficient eggs. "An average twenty-eight-year-old woman, for example, has a 72 percent chance of conceiving after a year of effort. An average thirty-eight-year-old, by contrast, has only a 24 percent chance. Put differently, female fertility drops 20 percent after the age of thirty, 50 percent after thirty-five, and 95 percent after age forty." Hormone therapy now makes harvesting ripe eggs possible. Savvy young women who have the forethought to do so, can have there eggs harvested and frozen for use later on in life when they are ready to have children. If they never have children nothing is lost. But when they do, the eggs will be available no matter how old they are - even if they have to use a surrogate womb and a donor's sperm. Sperm banks and the more recent egg banks, keep eggs and sperm frozen until needed. Spar explains that these commercial enterprises are growing in size and only the largest will remain in business. She explains, "Much of this revenue goes to covering the banks' fixed costs: donor screening, specimen storage, and the paperwork involved in tracking large numbers of anonymous, identical-looking 'products.'" Donor screening of course is the eugenics involved in supplying sperm and eggs to those who want them. The public generally denies that genes make the person, but a tremendous amount of effort is put into detailing every aspect of the donor's eggs or sperm. …
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