Today's news about a prominent reproductive medicine attorney's fall from grace is booming through the grapevine. Theresa Erickson, long and widely known as fearless and vocal in her "family formation law" practice, has admitted to committing acts that are generally felt to be heinous. Folks are calling it a "baby-selling ring" -- you can read about it all over the Internet, including here at Courthouse News Service and make your judgement about how to spin what she and a few co-conspirators have done.
On a related note, I stumbled across a video today from a recent appearance on NBC Today of the Ayala sisters.
How is this case, in which parents of Anissa purposefully conceived a baby (Marissa) who could be a bone marrow donor for her sister, related to the "baby-selling ring"?
Well, it's a loose connection, I'll give you that. But it's also an example of how society and technology interact, inevitably bending morals and ethics. The Ayala's were despised by some when they made a baby 20 years ago to save their older daughter's life. I imagine there are still plenty of folks who find their choice just plain wrong from several angles. But for many of us nowadays, it's merely an interesting and poignant twist in family-making.
Might there be a time eventually when we slip further along the continuum away from the past-perceived horrors of contraception and IVF and surrogacy? Debora Spar, author of The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception, wrote how "Part of the impetus for [the resurrection of surrogacy] came from technology; part from commercial enterprise; and part from shifting moral norms." Spar describes how Noel Keane, the originator of the attorney-broker concept, launched the surrogacy market in the 1970's at the request of distressed, infertile clients who'd heard about artificial insemination. Keane was immediately dismissed as a baby-trading charlatan. Still, a handful of brokers followed him into the murky field.
Once IVF and donor egg technology made gestational surrogacy do-able, the hubbub about women carrying babies for other people quieted a little, or as Spar -- currently President of Barnard College -- puts it, "gestational surrogacy was a godsend" in commercial terms. She predicted in 2006 :
Over the next few decades, a wider trade in wombs is almost certain to emerge. If there is demand in one part of the world (and there is) and lower-priced supply in another (and there is), then the record of both trade in general and reproduction in particular suggests that commerce will proceed. The question is what role governments will play in the regulation of this trade, and how they will approach the potential for exploitation that clearly lurks in surrogacy.
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