Cases like this http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050211/D886HU480.html cause me to wonder if it wouldn’t be better if people could buy and sell babies. No, I am not advocating a non regulated free for all situation where criminals could purchase infants for nefarious reasons. No, people would still have to pass a back-ground check and interview process to prove that they didn’t have a serious criminal record. However, if the person in the story above could have “sold” her infant for $30,000 through the proper channels I think it would be less likely that she would have resorted to making up stories. Those of you who hate abortion should like this plan because some women would probably opt for this over abortion. Those of you who favor choice should like this plan because it would provide one more option for women.
There would of course be downsides. For example some women might have kids for no other reason than to make money. However, I think that is a relatively small price to pay for the benefits. In addition, since it is fundamentally a market based system if too many women did this the price, and thus the incentive would decrease. Also this would be in addition rather than in place of the current system so that people who couldn’t afford to “buy” their child could still adopt. Furthermore, the fact that wealthier people might go through the “pay” system might actually free up kids in the traditional adoption system for those of moderate means (although admittedly this might be offset by more women placing their kids up for adoption via the approach which gets them paid).
I think part of the problem would be that some people would just have kids so they could sell them. And most likely, they would be the people that would have kids no one would want to adopt. Crackheads, dimwits, trailertrash, etc, etc.
A college graduate isn’t going to waste time getting pregnant just to sell the kid.
The system would get flooded with children that no one, even their parents, wants.
It would be a nightmare, at least for the poor kid who nobody wants.
You are not going to get slammed by me. There are plenty of people that would do this in a second and I know some of them personally (some are in my extended family). Drug addicts would be extremely likely to do this to fund their habit as well the poor and trashy who want an extra 30G a year (“I tell you Earl, if we can cut the turnaround time down to 10 months on the next few, that’ll give us a big raise”). I also firmly believe that some of the undesirable traits of the biological parents are going to stay with the child even if he/she is sold. Predisposition to addiction and the genetic component of intelligence are two of those. We certainly don’t want to encourage baby mills to pump out this type of problem for spending money.
I think that War of Northern Aggression sort of put the kybosh on the idea of selling people.
But barring that, lets look at it a bit more.
I would assume that the price you can get for a baby would depend on the condition of that baby, and supply and demand. If this was legal, I would expect the supply to shoot up, while demand to remain somewhat constant. Lower quality babies, lets say USDA grade B and C babies would start falling in value compared to the USDA Grade A babies. So it wouldn’t really pay for a crack addicted woman to have and sell her baby, as it wouldn’t fetch a price that would outweigh her costs. Also she would have to front the up front costs of pregnancy and wait for the payback later, not something someone trying to scrape by to get her next hit will do.
Perhaps there will be a baby futures market however where someone will pre-buy the baby with the intent of selling it when it arrives.
That is a brilliant idea. However, the futures market that you imagine needs to be more local than you imagine. There shouldn’t be anything fancy that would intimidate the seller. We already have a great model in place in poor areas all over the country. That is the pawn shop. What we need to do is modify the pawnshop business model to fit here.
Here it goes:
You have a small little storefront with an awning manned by one guy behind a counter.
The pregnant woman walks in and presents her showing belly and the guy gives her a marked pregancy test and tells her to take it in the little bathroom off to the side. This is to ensure she isn’t just fat and trying to switch to a fake test to get money.
The woman presents the test as positive.
The owner mutters: “Cingridletion. Sign Here” and hands her a stack of papers to sign.
The woman signs away the rights of the baby when born. This baby has an estimated final market value of $20,000 so the owner gives the woman 20% or $4000 now with a guarantee of another $4,000 when the baby is born. The owner as assumes the risk that the woman might miscarry but also has the rights to multiple babies if they are suprise twins or above.
The owner signs the woman’s belly with a special, long-term skin marker that shoes that the baby has been sold and she cannot sell it to anyone else.
The woman carries the baby to term to get the remaining $4000 and the owner sells his rights to the baby to a matching service for $20,000 for a $12,000 profit.
As you see, I have a huge jump on mapping out this business model. When selling babies becomes legal, I plan to have over 100 branches of my new franchise rolled out within two years.
Sounds nice, but I think this will only apply to the USDA grade C or lower babies. The Grade A’s and B’s I would expect to be sold on the commodities exchange, when the woman goes to the Dr for the pregnancy test and it comes back positive, she can then request that the baby be placed on the market, where she is tested for drug use and the commody is graded. She can see real time what babies of similar grade are trading for and if she decides she can put hers up too.
I really don’t see much market in grade C or lower babies, so I think they will fall into your pawn shop model.
I agree that you have a pretty good handle on this at the higher levels and quality of babies. However, I see two problems:
How are you going to grade the babies effectively before they are born? I agree that it is unlikely for a crack whore to break Grade C most of the time but even prize breeding stock can produce less than Grade A offspring sometimes. You could wait to price them until after they are born but that kills the idea of the Babies Futures Market.
When is the carrier going to get paid for the baby? If you pay it all upfront, then there is no real reason for the carrier to take the baby to term or, in less extreme circumstances, just plain not take care of herself. Hitting the bars with a carton of cigarettes can seem like a lot of fun when you just got a big check in your hand.
The only way around this that I can see is to pay everyone a portion of the “Grade C” money upfront and then paying out the rest, including a large bonus for producing a baby at Grades B or A after delivery.
I’d be pretty sorely tempted to have a kid for the money. I’m not to excited about raising kids of my own, but if they were going to go to a family that loved them a lot and it would help my financial situation (no, not drug abuse…I could start a business, or start saving for retirement, certainly fund a move to a more profitable city) I’d have a hard time turning it down.
Women already sell their eggs. They go for about $10,000 a pop. The drawback is they pump you up with a lot of drugs and it is a long really unpleasent ordeal. Selling babies really isn’t all that different. I’m sure the same high standards would go for babies as eggs (the questionairs for eggs are very very long and intense).
That said, this is asking for problems when less-than-perfect kids are born that nobody then wants. That alone makes this a bad idea.
Because children are not commodities. It would cheapen the value that should be placed on human life, which is priceless.
There’s a reason many birth mothers change their minds about putting their baby up for adoption after it’s born. Carrying another human being around inside you for nine months creates a bond that is very difficult to break, and I applaud all women who give up their children for adoption. Doing it for Fun and Profit is disgusting.
The woman in the story didn’t want anyone to know she was pregnant. Being able to “sell” her baby wouldn’t have changed anything.
How is this different from (paid) surrogate mothers, OR women who sell their eggs?
And really, when we get down to it, isn’t private adoption basically buying a baby? If you don’t have a ton of up-front money, no orivate agency is going to talk to you. And if you go through an attorney, you’ve gotta pay them and there are rumors that a little extra cash is sometimes thrown in the birth mother’s direction (to help her finish school or whatnot).
On paper it sounds reasonable but it’d turn into a nightmare, as only a bad person would sell her baby. The good ones (the ones who are capable of realizing the gravity of the situation, recognize the baby’s value as a human being, etc.) will continue to go the adoption route.
The only result will be a lot of babies “for sale” that nobody wants to buy, because people generally want healthy babies that come from healthy genetic stock. Most people aren’t going to shell out tens of thousands for a newborn that was born addicted to crack.
I’m all for seeing unwanted babies spared from abortion and put into loving homes, but this approach could only lead to disaster.
The process of selling eggs is not that big a deal. Normal young healthy females can do it without much problem. I was screened and approved for the process quite quickly, (although I never went through with it due to timing issues) but a close friend of mine did it without much trouble at all. And she only got paid a few thousand dollars for the whole ‘batch’ of eggs. (That is, all that one cycle would provide).
Having now gone through a pregnancy I could not do it for money to sell a baby to random strangers on the open market, although I could see (maybe) being a surrogate or something for a couple I knew who would be good parents. I guess that’s not that far off, after all surrogates are usually paid for their troubles (at least their medical expenses are covered, anyway.)
I think the process of selling babies could have a devastating effect on property values. Think about it, many posters above have already demonstrated that a lot of babies won’t be suitable for prime retail outlets, so what do you suppose the mothers will do with these unwanted infants? My guess is that they’ll put them up on blocks in their front yards with a dirty "For Sale’ sign propped under their noses, and really, who wants to live next door to that?
Perhaps some kind of mild limits to “selling” children could be put in place to help prevent abuse of the system…say, you can only sell the rights to a child once every five or ten years?
But…does anyone better versed in economics know how similar setups in other countries would effect (or derail) this scheme? Would there, say, have to be tariffs to keep cut-rate Chinese infants from flooding the market, or something?
The big difference between this proposal and the current surrogate mother system is that most of the money would not go to the middle man. The same is true with private adoption agencies. A prospective parent might pay a fee in the range of thirty to fifty thousand dollars under the current system with most of that money going to the agency or the attorney. However, this approach would pay only small fee to the agency (which would have to licensed) with most of that going to pay for the background check and interview. My plan puts less money in the hands of fat cats and more in the pockets of women. Note, I think the five year limit would be an excellent idea.
Also, I have a hard time understanding the logic that says that a woman can terminate her pregnancy or give the kid up for adoption, but cannot be paid to give the child to a good home.
