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Along with thousands of babies, one of the undoubted benefits of assisted reproductive technology, or ART, has been the acknowledgement of procreative rights, along with their long overdue extension to families not conforming to the standard Ladybird-book model. While this is progress for, say, single women, and gay couples needing surrogates – both of whom would once have been denied parenthood via IVF treatment, it also, obviously, represents overwhelming baby joy for the global ART industry.
What one country, or clinic, will not provide – donor eggs for a broody sixtysomething mother of grown-up children, say, or a paid (practically nothing) bunk in a surrogate – someone, somewhere, is happy to sell. For once, big business finds itself on the same side as high-minded scholarship, in fact working with it, and with would-be parents invariably described as “desperate”, to defy religious moralists and to mute secular anxieties about the rights or wellbeing of the resulting children.
For how can the nonentity that is an unborn child have rights? And once the babies arrive, to the loving –...