Baby Markets

Creating families can no longer be described by heterosexual reproduction in the intimacy of a couple's home and the privacy of their bedroom. To the contrary, babies can be brought into families through complex matrixes involving lawyers, coordinators, surrogates, 'brokers', donors, sellers, endocrinologists, and without any traditional forms of intimacy. In direct response to the need and desire to parent, men, women, and couples – gay and straight – have turned to viable, alternative means: baby markets. This book examines the ways in which Westerners create families through private, market processes. From homosexual couples skirting Mother Nature by going to the assisted reproductive realm and buying the sperm or ova that will complete the reproductive process, to Americans travelling abroad to acquire children in China, Korea, or Ethiopia, market dynamics influence how babies and toddlers come into Western families. Michele Goodwin and a group of contributing experts explore how financial interests, aesthetic preferences, pop culture, children's needs, race, class, sex, religion, and social customs influences the law and economics of baby markets. Features • Offers daring analysis of contemporary reproduction • Supplies an honest analysis of the challenges in creating families through adoption and assisted reproduction • Unpacks the thorny issues of race, class, and sexuality in the neopolitics of procreation Table of Contents Part I. What Makes a Market?: Efficiency, Accountability, and Reliability in Getting the Babies We Want: 1. Baby markets Michele Goodwin 2. The upside of baby markets Martha Ertman 3. Price and pretense in the baby market Kimberly Krawiec 4. Bringing feminist fundamentalism to the U.S. baby markets Mary Anne Case 5. Producing kinship through the marketplaces of transnational adoption Sara Dorow Part II. Space and Place: Reproducing and Reframing Social Norms of Race, Class, Gender and Otherness: 6. Adoption laws and practices: serving whose interests? Ruth Arlene-Howe 7. International adoption: the human rights issues Elizabeth Bartholet 8. Heterosexuality as a prenatal social problem: why parents and courts have a taste for heterosexuality Jose Gabilondo 9. Transracial adoption of black children: an economic analysis Mary Eschelbach Hansen and Daniel Pollack Part III. Spectrums and Discourses: Rights, Regulations, and Choice: 10. Reproducing dreams Naomi Cahn 11. Why do parents have rights? The problem of kinship in liberal thought Maggie Gallagher 12. Free markets, free choice? A market approach to reproductive rights Debora Spar 13. Commerce and regulation in the assisted reproduction industry John Robertson 14. Ethics within markets or a market for ethics: can disclosure of sperm donor identity be effectively mandated? June Carbone Part IV. The Ethics of Baby and Embryo Markets: 15. Egg donation for research and reproduction: the compensation conundrum Nanette Elster 16. Eggs, nests, and stem cells Lisa Ikemota 17. Where stem cell research meets abortion politics: limits on buying and selling human oocytes Michelle Oberman Part V. Tenuous Grounds and Baby Taboos: 18. Risky exchanges Viviana Zelizer 19. Giving in to baby markets Sonia Suter.