Baby Markets
Money and the New Politics of Creating Families

Michele Goodwin and a group of contributing experts examine the ways in which Westerners create families through private, market processes.

Michele Bratcher Goodwin (Edited by)

9780521513739, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 February 2010

338 pages, 10 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.64 kg

'In Baby Markets, Professor Goodwin and her colleagues provide an unflinching account of the largely unregulated world of reproduction and adoption. They begin by exposing the vast extent of world markets for these services, expertly assessing their troubling racial and national implications. More surprisingly, several chapters suggest the possibilities these same markets hold for poverty-relief, equality, and justice. This varied collection is for anyone interested in the complicated and controversial world of [twenty-first-century] family creation.' Jill R. Horwitz, Louis and Myrtle Moskowitz Research Professor of Business and Law, University of Michigan Law School

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.

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 US 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.

Subject Areas: Medical ethics & professional conduct [MBDC], Medical & healthcare law [LNTM], Law & society [LAQ]