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THERE is no better time than the commercial orgy that is Valentine's Day to consider the baby business. So with impeccable timing, Debora Spar, a Harvard Business School professor, has just published a fascinating book exploring how "money, science and politics drive the commerce of conception".
Happily, this is not an attempt by the management profession to reduce baby-making to strategic alliances and stretch values. But in "The Baby Business" (Harvard Business School Press) Ms Spar does take seriously the idea that there is enormous demand for better ways of creating children coming from those who find that the old-fashioned way does not work-or gives them too little control over the screaming end-product. This demand is creating a spectacular increase in supply of techniques, technologies and businesses that span everything from the egg to the mother.
Fertility treatment is a business with more than 1m customers and revenues of $3 billion a year in America alone. Top-quality eggs-from a female student, say-cost about $50,000. A surrogate mother costs about $59,000. Guatemala generates around $50m a year by exporting babies at...