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THE COMMODIFICATION OF CHILDREN
THE MODERN WORLD IS FULL of things to buy. Go into any airport and you can find piles of T-shirts, packets of snacks and glittery souvenirs produced oceans away from the places they depict. You can purchase imported French cheese at most Vermont country stores and African bangles in the streets of Paris. You can buy music online, along with financial reports and assessments of your family doctor. Lots of things that used to be free-like television, radio and after-school sports-are now for sale. Things that were once considered luxuries-like pedicures or housemaids-have become the stuff of everyday commerce. We buy so many things, in fact, that we've even spawned cottage industries that, for a fee, can advise us on how to stop spending.
Yet even in this age of consumer frenzy, there are some things that we don't want to buy. We donate kidneys and livers for transplant rather than selling them. We fall in love with our spouses (presumably) rather than acquiring them through contract, and we don't allow sex (except in the state of Nevada) to be exchanged for money. We also expressly prohibit the purchase or sale of any human being. Across the world, slavery is condemned as a fundamental crime, a sin against both nature and law.
Specific prohibitions exist against the sale of children, arguably the most vulnerable citizens of the global community. We cannot sell our children as sources of labor and we cannot buy them as objects of value. We define children, in economic terms, as being distinctly inalienable: Those who "own" children have no ability to profit from them. Because who, after all, could put a price on a child? Who could imagine selling one?
And yet every day, around the world, children are being acquired through distinctly commercial channels. Want a better baby? You can buy one-from a fertility clinic that will choose the healthiest embryos, or a service that enables you to select your child's gender, or a highly specialized surgeon who can correct certain physical defects while the baby is still in the womb. Can't conceive the old-fashioned way? Well, the market can fix that too. For a fee, you can select sperm from one source, eggs...