Harvard professor Debora Spar discussed Monday what she considers the emerging technology market of our time: the baby-making business. In a lecture in the Haldeman Center sponsored by the Ethics Institute, Spar hit upon many key points that might once have seemed more at home in a science fiction novel but are quickly becoming real issues facing society.
Now that over one million children worldwide have been born through in-vitro fertilization, the ethical questions regarding the regulation of this emerging technology have become real and imminent, she said. These questions include: Should the government ban cloning to replace parents' deceased children? Should rich people be the only ones able to afford to overcome infertility? Should states cover artificial conception by declaring infertility a medical condition, eliminating same-sex parents and older women as potential candidates?
In the lecture, Spar gave an overview of her book, "The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Shape the Commerce of Conception." She acknowledged that starting a family is a highly personal matter, but argued that the business of artificial conception must be brought into the open as the economic market it is. Spar said that the time has come to discard the emotional, often tragic, personal aspects of what constitutes the demand for baby-making technology and focus instead on the market aspects of supply and demand.
"The goal of my book is to bring the issues of artificial conception into the public realm," she said. "I want to encourage debate."
Spar likened "the baby business" -- as she has nicknamed it -- to past emergent technologies such as the telegraph and the radio. The American government, which lags behind many European governments, must learn to regulate this biotechnology market as it learned to regulate the telegraph and radio markets, she said.
Spar approached her argument by arguing that the baby business is in fact an economic market.
"This is the first business I've ever encountered that did not identify itself as such," Spar said. "It's emotionally and politically laden, so we don't want to talk about it. Would-be parents don't want to think of themselves as consumers, and most providers don't identify themselves as businesses."
Demand for artificial conception comes from a large number of groups within the American population, Spar explained. Not only are 15 percent of women and 10 to 15 percent of men infertile, but many demographics are either incapable of having children or of having healthy children, such as same-sex couples, single parents, and couples who carry genetic diseases.
It is this last category that Spar believes constitutes the largest need for regulating the growing baby business.
The various methods of supplying the demand for children include artificial insemination, in-vitro fertilization and surrogate mothering. Along with in-vitro fertilization, which consists of implanting fertilized eggs into a uterus, doctors can perform a test called pre-implantation genetic development. This process enables the consumer to choose to implant the embryo with the most favorable genetic makeup. Parents can choose not to implant an embryo with cystic fibrosis just as easily as they can choose to implant a boy, rather than a girl.
The implications that arise from this potential choice -- which grows with each new characteristic doctors learn to test for -- are staggering, Spar said. What will the effects be, she asked, in countries like China and India, which already use cruder methods to noticeably shift gender demographics toward a higher population of males?
Aine Donovan, executive director of the Ethics Institute, said Spar's speech would prove pertinent to students.
"Students might not be aware of why this is such an important issue, but most will start to have families in eight to 10 years, and suddenly all of this information and debate will be incredibly relevant to their lives," she said.
