What to Expect in ’08: The Business of Baby-Making

What next for the notoriously under-regulated and highly lucrative assisted reproduction industry? Some developments to look for:

• Sex selection. U.S. fertility clinics will step up their promotion of pre-pregnancy sex selection, and the Genetics & IVF Institute will request and receive FDA pre-market approval for the sperm-sorting method known as MicroSort. In India, civil society efforts to get enforcement of laws against sex selection will start to make headway, but skewed sex ratios in some regions there - and in a number of other Asian countries - will get even worse.

• Surrogacy. Look for more coverage of the growing rent-a-womb business, in venues from women's lifestyle magazines to business journals to anti-globalization websites. "Medical tourism" companies will cash in on the attention, arranging growing numbers of outsourced pregnancies that offer affluent couples cut-rate surrogacy arrangements with a next-to-zero chance that the woman from a rural village who carries and births "their" baby will change her mind about handing it over. In the U.S., heart-breaking dramas will continue to surface as wildly inconsistent state surrogacy laws foster "regulation shopping" by brokers.

• Egg freezing. Dozens more fertility clinics will launch online advertising about "exciting new developments" in egg freezing techniques. But they will downplay the risks of egg extraction, the problems of egg thawing (the American Society for Reproductive Medicine estimates a 2-4% chance of a live birth for every thawed egg), safety concerns about any children eventually born, and the appalling lack of data about all of these. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/86414.php

Looking for hopeful signs? Check out these three recent and upcoming sources of careful thinking about assisted reproduction:

• Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Overview and Perspective Using a Reproductive Justice Framework by CGS's Emily Galpern [PDF]

• Future Choices: Assisted Reproductive Technologies and the Law by Jessica Arons of the Center for American Progress

• Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy and Birth, coming in March

Previously on Biopolitical Times:

• Don't count your eggs
• Bad news on sex selection in new UN studies
• Oprah on Renting Wombs in India: “It’s beautiful”
• Women’s Mags Do Surrogacy