In many states you can pay the birth mother “reasonable living expenses” or some such while she carries your child. As Abbie indicated, this is often very like “selling a child.” Some get rent for nine months, plenty of money for food a clothes and occationally a car is purchased that they will keep after the pregnancy. It isn’t uncommon for these expenses to be $20,000 over the few months they are required.
Most states don’t allow this, for fears of baby selling.
I actually do think we should compensate birth mothers. Perhaps not outright with cash paid by adoptive parents, but if we want them to “choose life” and make the sacrafices involved with pregnancy and giving up a child, giving them scholarships to state schools (including trade schools and universities) may be a good incentive. Yep, there would be women who make the choice to get pregnant for the scholarship - I could live with that.
The grading system would be done right along with the Dr’s visit. The mother would be checked for drug use, maybe have a credit report run, and possible an ultrasound. The results would be fed into a computer and the baby would get a grade. It won’t always be 100%, but as long as it is consistent enough the market will assume the risk.
The easy answer is that the market would assume the risk, but remember people are not buying the baby to have a baby, they are buying on the hope they can re-sell that baby later at a profit.
Some of the consideration a baby futures market trader might be:
Selling price today of Grade B Baby = $20,000
Expected price (speculation) 7 months from now = $30,000
Chance this mother has of delivering Grade B Baby = 75%***
Asking price for Grade B Baby = $15,000.
*** the percentage is based on the chance she might harm the baby, sell it elsewhere, degrade the baby, skip town.
Also additional laws should be passes to make it a crime to harm ‘your’ baby once it’s sold.
Bases on these 2 the woman should get the money up front, when the sale is made. She might receive a premium if she is willing to ensure the grade, perhaps she would get $18,000 on delivery of a class b or better, but then she is assuming the risk.
Instead of the indelible ink, I was thinking of a baby marker that can be inserted directly into the baby which can be seen on ultrasound, so ownership can be identified.
Just another example of the rich getting richer on the backs of the poor (literally)
I live in New Jersey and followed the “Baby M” trials closely. Basically, the mother Mary Beth Whitehead signed a surrogacy agreement to have William Stern’s child and turn it over the him. After the girl was born, she reneged.
Anti-surrogacy people call it “baby selling,” even though the child is the genetic offspring of the man “buying” it. Pro-surrogacy people say a man cannot “buy” his own child, he is merely paying the “surrogate” for her services.
Like the abortion issue, it’s one of those huge debates that will never have a definitive answer.
I personally don’t think selling children should be legal, but I agree that a genetic father cannot buy his own child.
Babies aren’t consumables in the sense that say calves are. Nobody needs a regular supply of babies (unless we take this swiftian hypothetical to it’s finish) so what will happen is that there will be a brief flurry of trading to alleviate the short term demand and then demand will fall almost to 0. It would be impractical to make a living off it unless you had a superb pedigree that was guarenteed to be in demand.
Why not just extend the sperm bank model further and have an “egg bank” and a “surrogate bank”. Punters could tailor make thier perfect baby.
I don’t agree with this. I figure that being able to buy a baby would encourage people who don’t want to go through the states anal exam to sign up. This I suspect could easially double the demand, actually I expect more.
Also you have to figure people wanting babies maybe have a 10 year time frame to make the purchace. Some relationships don’t last, sometimes the woman gets pregnant after a few years of trying, eventually the couple (should) realize they are too old to raise a child. So every year there are people entering the market, jsut at the rate of about 1/10th of what is it today. Add to this the increase expected due to getting the state adoption process out of the way, and now we’re talking 1/5 to 1/3 the current demand.
Now we consider non-standard families, such as gays, who might be discouraged to go to the state, because even if they are suppose to be looked on the same as a hetero fam. it reality they are not and most likely be denied. so demand gets bumped up a bit more. Thinking about this it may be homophobic not to allow babyselling.
On the supply side, the baby sellers will most likely be poorer mothers lookign to make a buck and teens with a sense of morality who don’t want to kill the baby through abortion, and or make a buck. As demand falls from current levels to the smaller but still stable levels, the grade of the baby will be of great importaints of fetching the highest dollar.
I see additional grades comming out, such as USDA Grade AA, and AAA babies. This will actually help the mother out, as she tries to make the grade, she will stay away from substances (cigarettes, drinks, drugs) and eat a healthy diet to get the best possiable grade, and her health will benefit as well. I would assume higher then A grade babies will need ongoing tests to qualify however.
Don’t they already do that in other parts of the world that was a big problem with foreign adoptions - not in China because of the girl surplus, but other places? I’m not sure where I get this impression, probably from some Dateline or other. (I think of Gypsy women, for some reason.) Can anybody confirm or deny?
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My adoptive parents essentially bought me from a South Korean Orphanage. I can’t see any way in which anybody was harmed. No South Korean family was going to adopt a North Korean refugee. The orphanage got money to help support the other children and find them homes, my parents got me, and I got to grow up in the United States with loving, supportive parents.
Free-market baby selling would be horrible, but I can see how a highly regulated system in which birth parents and adoptive families are both highly screened could in theory work.
The potential for abuse, however, would make it very difficult to do in an equitable manner.
In short, I can see how it migh work in thoery, but like many thoeries, it likely would break down at the practical level.
This is a little off topic but some women have mentioned selling their eggs here. How did you get into that situation? Are there egg-scouts wandering the college campuses out there for fertile looking women to approach? Or did you contact an agency of some sort to offer your eggs for money? Selling some eggs of my own have crossed my mind a few times but all the sitcoms and teen movies out there only show men going to sperm banks for a quick buck and not women so I have no idea how the whole thing works.
Okay… nothing to add except to say that every time I glance at the OP title my brain reads “Bodies” instead of “Babies”. It’s annoying and it seems that I’m ment to respond to this post in some fashion so that I can get past this mental glitch and move on with my life.
As for women selling their bodies… why not indeed!
Not quite. We paid a South Korean orphanage for our son. But what we paid for was not our son, but for the services required to get our son to us. His birth mother received no cash - though she may have received services (medical, educational, job placement). We paid Eastern Social Welfare about $5,000 seven years ago. That included plane tickets for our son, six months worth of foster care, all the paperwork and social workers time involved, medical care for him including hospitalization. There is little graft and little room for profit in the Korean system.
The difference between paying for a child and paying for services to receive achild may be subtle, but its important. Its the distiction that allows “living expenses” to be paid to birthmothers.
What gets my goat about international adoptions is the ones where graft is rampant, but the birthmother isn’t seeing a cent of the money being made placing children – that’s being made by social workers and judges and taxi drivers. Graft directed at birthmothers gets condemned quickly by our State Department (which shuts down international adoptions quickly when there are suspicions of baby selling) and the U.N. Graft directed at government officials, while that’s the way the system works…
I personally know someone who started a “non profit” International adoption agency that specializes in former Eastern Block/Russian adoptions. They charge between 30 and 45K per child. In addition, the owners pay themselves a salary of about 250K per year. I just think its a shame that everyone can make a fortune except for the mothers who must go on living in extreme poverty (in most cases).
If someone is rich and adopting a baby, SHOULD they be allowed to give the birthmother some money that goes above “living expenses?”
I don’t see why not. Let’s say the girl is about to go to medical school and gets into trouble. Would there be any harm if, after everything is signed, the new parents saw to it that her schooling was paid for? As long as that detail was never mentioned until AFTER the adoption was set, I don’t see why this would be a bad thing.
I didn’t mean to imply anything about how anybody acquired their adoptive child, and I apologize if it seems I was implying that people who adopt Koreans are buying babies. I would never tell anyone they bought their child or dream of telling an adoptive child they were bought.
When I describe my situation, I’m talking solely about my situation and how I feel about it. I don’t have a problem with saying my adoptive parents bought me; they gave the adoption service money in exchange for recieving a healthy child, and things weren’t as tightly regulated in the 1970’s.
In “Honk if you Love Buddha”, Renee Tajima-Pe tells her story of returning to Korea to find that her mother was pressured to allow her to be adopted when another girl whose info and picture had been sent to her parents was adopted by a different couple. The adoption agency simply found another healthy girl the same age from a large, poor, family paid her birth mother for her, and sent her instead, she was about 3, and they had to train her to respond to her “new” name before she was sent to the United States.
I don’t know how common this was, and I certainly hope it was rare, and further, based on what you’ve posted here, I’ll assume that it’s nearly unheard of now. But it did happen at times in the past.
This is why I’m careful to talk only about my own situation, which is very atypical. I was a North Korean refugee. I often jokingly refer to making a daring escape from North Korea at the age of 18 months, but the truth is probably that my birth parents paid someone a lot of money to get me out and into the South.
I suppose it’s possible the story the orphanage and adoption agency told my parents wasn’t true, but I can see no motive for trying to pass me off as North Korean if I were simply an unwanted South Korean.
I’m not going to withdraw my statement about my being bought; thats the word I feel best describes how I came to the United States. I likewise would never insist to anyone else that they were bought or had bought a baby. I know how loaded that word can be for some people.
Regardless of whether you want to say they “paid expenses related to adoption” or bought me, regardless of how they got me, my parents are my parents because of the love and support and joy and tears we shared as a family. What happened to get me here doesn’t change any of that.
Or situations in which babies are kidnapped from their mothers to provide children for internatiional adoption. This was rampant in Guatemala a few years ago.
