Cash and Carry: Reproductive Tourism

Peoples' egocentricity, their investment in their personal aspirations can often take absurd turns. But then, it's human nature. It is human nature to long for what is not feasible. To dream of something unattainable. Its value lies predominantly in the fact that whatever it is that people happen to aspire to and which they cannot achieve, its value increases exponentially because it seems unattainable.

Something that is desired but not possible, assumes greater dimensions, and those who wish to obtain the desired object long for it beyond reason. While others, who have too much of a good thing, wish they could somehow rid themselves of it.

Too bad that people who conceive easily cannot share some of their good fortune with those whose ability to conceive has been physically impaired by some medical condition beyond their control. Even beyond the capacity of modern medical practise to ameliorate. As opposed to those who have children and find it difficult to make economic ends meet, who find their love and affection cannot be stretched any further to incorporate yet another unfortunate pregnancy, despair.

For a time there was something called surrogate motherhood, then the practise was deemed illegal in Canada. But not elsewhere in the world. People from wealthy countries with money to spare have indulged for some time in health tourism, finding it suits them to travel to countries in Europe and to Asia for medical procedures (at a reasonable cost) not available in Canada. And now there's reproductive tourism, where perplexed and determined couples who can afford the freight, pay for an impoverished woman to carry a baby to term for them.

Infertile couples from Canada, no longer enthralled with the now-passe and complex adoption of Chinese girl babies, now seek to fulfill their dreams of a baby of their own by travelling to India to make arrangements for the services of young Indian women living in poverty and unable to reject an offer to make more money they had ever dreamed of. To enable them to send their children to school, or to buy a home for themselves. Nine months of indentured motherhood, then release and payment.

The protocol also includes travelling to Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Romania or the Czech Republic for in vitro fertilization with the help of paid-for donor eggs. This is being termed by some who see the practise as the commercialization of reproduction - as exploitative, as immoral and unethical. Manipulating the dire needs of women living in poverty, to attain their own entitled ends.

In a sense, there's little difference between this extension of the cheap labour markets in the third world producing cheap goods for the bountiful retail markets in wealthy countries of the world, and the rationalization that at least indigent people are finding employment without which they would have nothing at all, and at the same time benefiting the grasping selfishness of the wealthy.

Except, of course, for that niggling, nagging reality that this is human life that is being traded - cash and carry.