What to Expect in ’08: The Business of Baby-Making

Biopolitical Times

What next for the notoriously under-regulated and highly lucrative assisted reproduction industry? Some developments to look for:

  • Sex selection. U.S. fertility clinics will step up their promotion of pre-pregnancy sex selection, and the Genetics & IVF Institute will request and receive FDA pre-market approval for the sperm-sorting method known as MicroSort. In India, civil society efforts to get enforcement of laws against sex selection will start to make headway, but skewed sex ratios in some regions there - and in a number of other Asian countries - will get even worse.
  • Surrogacy. Look for more coverage of the growing rent-a-womb business, in venues from women's lifestyle magazines to business journals to anti-globalization websites. "Medical tourism" companies will cash in on the attention, arranging growing numbers of outsourced pregnancies that offer affluent couples cut-rate surrogacy arrangements with a next-to-zero chance that the woman from a rural village who carries and births "their" baby will change her mind about handing it over. In the U.S., heart-breaking dramas will continue to surface as wildly inconsistent state surrogacy laws foster "regulation shopping" by brokers.
  • Egg freezing. Dozens more fertility clinics will launch online advertising about "exciting new developments" in egg freezing techniques. But they will downplay the risks of egg extraction, the problems of egg thawing (the American Society for Reproductive Medicine estimates a 2-4% chance of a live birth for every thawed egg), safety concerns about any children eventually born, and the appalling lack of data about all of these. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/86414.php

Looking for hopeful signs? Check out these three recent and upcoming sources of careful thinking about assisted reproduction:

  • Future Choices: Assisted Reproductive Technologies and the Law by Jessica Arons of the Center for American Progress

Previously on Biopolitical Times: