Friday,. October 29, 1993
OP-ED
Harvard Law RECORD
9
Is Embryo Cloning Part of Reproductive Freedom?
What follows is an excerpt from Prof.
Bartholet’s new book, Family Bonds:
Adoption & the Politics of Parenting, in
which she addresses in detail the issues
noted above. The excerpt is taken from
chapter 10, "Modern Child Production:
The Marketing ofGenes, Wombs, Embryos,
and Babies."
DOPTION regu]ation rests on
the premise that biologic par-
enting
relationships
are
sacrosanct. These relation-
ships are to be disrupted only
as a last resort, and the regulation is
designed to ensure that they are not
unnecessarily disrupted. The universal
rules against baby-buying reflect and affirm the value
we will discover in anom-
placed on these relationships, for if birth parents could be
paid for agreeing to give up their children, it would both
encourage such action and risk devaluing such relation-
ships more generally.
Although this premise continues to govern the tradi-
tional adoption world, technology has ushered in a new
world of adoptive arrangements where entirely different
rules apply. Technology facilitates the separation of bio-
logic from social parenting. It means that a child can have
as many as five parents: an egg mother, a sperm father, a
gestational mother, a social mother, and a social father.
Technology is increasingly being used to produce children
for the specific purpose of separating them from their
genetic and birth parents. While in the traditional adop-
tion world parenting rights and babies are not supposed to
be for sale, in this new technological adoption world every-
thing is for sale. The raw materials for producing babies
are being marketed with increasing aggression and sophis-
tication
A rapidly expanding industry is engaged in producing
children for these new forms of adoption. Thousands of
"donor insemination children have been born every year for
decades, and thousands ofsurrogacy babies have been born
and delivered to the intended rearing couples in the past
fifteen years. We stand on