One of the tests of a liberal society is whether the state stays out of the bedroom—but more than 3M people alive now were not made in bedrooms. They came into being as a result of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) under the glare of laboratory lights, with the assistance of a team of doctors, nurses and technicians.
IVF was originally intended to allow heterosexual couples to bypass problems with fallopian tubes or sperm by introducing eggs and sperm to each other in a petri dish. But demand has mushroomed among those with other medical problems as well as the single and gay. They need people to supply them with sperm, eggs and sometimes wombs; and the services of clinics who put the lot together.
Since the manufacturing of anything which is regarded as God-given—or at least natural—touches a moral nerve, governments tend to want to regulate the business. And because attitudes to the family vary from country to country, regulations about baby-making do too. Discerning baby-shoppers therefore assemble inputs from around the world—sperm from Denmark, an egg from Russia, a surrogate mother from California—to ensure that biology, for them, need not mean destiny. Some even switch countries midway through treatment, starting in Britain, say, and travelling to Russia, Spain or America at a crucial stage in the proceedings.
Countries known to be permissive soon end up treating lots of foreign patients. Women from all over Europe travel to Denmark for donor insemination because it is well-regulated, quality-checked and guaranteed to be anonymous: more Swedish women conceive every year in Danish than in Swedish clinics. Women travel to Spain for egg donation, since Spanish women can be paid for their eggs. They travel to California from all over the world to sign surrogacy agreements, since there it is the commissioning, rather than the gestating, woman who is legally considered the “real” mother.
The turkey-baster was an icon of 1960s feminism. But do-it-yourself sperm donation has fallen out of favour in an era of AIDS and child-support payments. Nowadays those who need sperm get it frozen, so the donor can be tested six months later for HIV (the virus does not show up in tests until some time after it has been caught), and anonymous, so the donor can neither claim parental rights nor be burdened with parental responsibilities.
Cryos, a Danish sperm bank, is probably the world's largest supplier of sperm. It sells to clinics in nearly 50 countries, has more than 200 donors on its books at any one time and distributes more than 10,000 units of semen each year, resulting in about 1,000 pregnancies. It cannot export to countries where anonymous donation is illegal, including Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Britain, Switzerland and Australia, or to Italy, where it is illegal to use donor sperm. Some clinics in these countries now treat patients at home and fly them to Denmark for insemination. In 2001 the company opened an American offshoot, Scandinavian Cryobank (slogan: “Congratulations! It's a Viking”), which, like other American sperm banks, offers sperm direct to customers via an online catalogue. Its eye-catching offers include exclusive worldwide rights to a donor for $75,000.
A major competitor is California Cryobank. It pays donors $75 per specimen—with occasional gift vouchers and movie tickets thrown in. Customers pay $240-400 per specimen, depending on sperm count. Basic information about donors—height, weight, colouring, occupation—comes free, but further information must be paid for. A facial-features report, listing such attributes as “nostril flare” (narrow, average or large), costs $12; an audio interview is another $25. For $65 a customer can buy a package of baby photo, audio tape, full personal profile, psychological profile, essay, description of the clinic staff's impression of him and facial-features report. She can hire a consultant to help her choose a donor, at $80 for 30 minutes. At a cost of thousands, she can store vials from a donor in order to be able to have more children by him in the future. The clinic will buy back unwanted vials for half their original price.
Donating eggs is considerably more taxing than donating sperm, as it means taking super-ovulation drugs for a fortnight or so and then undergoing a minor operation to harvest the eggs. So where it is illegal to pay donors, eggs are scarce, and where it is legal, they are expensive.
In Britain egg donors can be paid only for travel expenses, so most donated eggs are from friends or family, or, until recently, other infertile women, who are permitted to barter half the eggs harvested during their own infertility treatment in return for a richer woman paying for treatment for both of them. This practice has now almost ceased—an unintended consequence of a legal change in May which gave children born of egg or sperm donation the right to be told the identity of the donor once they turned 18. Most potential egg-sharers have been deterred by the fear of remaining childless and later discovering that another woman has conceived a baby by an egg that was given away.
British women are instead looking abroad, to countries where egg donors can be paid. Many travel to Spain, where a sympathetic attitude to infertile women and a payment of £800 mean that donors are
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