Baby Markets Is Here!

Baby
Markets: Money and the New Politics of Creating Families, edited by Michele
Bratcher Goodwin (University of Minnesota), is available from Cambridge University Press.  Contributors include: Michele
Goodwin, Martha Ertman, Kimberly Krawiec, Mary Anne Case, Sara Dorow, Ruth
Arlene-Howe, Elizabeth Bartholet, Jose Gabilondo, Mary Eschelbach Hansen,
Daniel Pollack, Naomi Cahn, Maggie Gallagher, Debora Spar, John Robertson, June
Carbone, Nanette Elster, Lisa Ikemota, Michelle Oberman, Viviana Zelizer, Sonia
Suter

And my chapter, Price
And Pretense In The Baby Market, is available on
SSRN.  Abstract:     

Throughout the world, baby selling is formally prohibited.
And throughout the world babies are bought and sold each day. As demonstrated
in this Essay, the legal baby trade is a global market in which prospective
parents pay, scores of intermediaries profit, and the demand for children is
clearly differentiated by age, race, special needs, and other consumer
preferences, with prices ranging from zero to over one hundred thousand
dollars. Yet legal regimes and policymakers around the world pretend that the
baby market does not exist, most notably through prohibitions against baby
selling – typically defined as a prohibition against the relinquishment of
parental rights in exchange for compensation.

This Essay explores the costs of societal pretense that legal
baby markets do not exist. Those costs include scarcity, foregone opportunities
to address market failures, an inability to develop regulations designed to
further particular public policies unlikely to be advanced solely through the
goal of profit-maximization, and the promotion of rent-seeking. This Essay
focuses specifically on the rent-seeking problem, arguing that, although
frequently defended by those who contend that commercial markets in parental
rights commodify human beings, compromise individual dignity, or jeopardize
fundamental values, bans against baby selling (at least as currently written
and enforced) serve little purpose other than enabling anti-competitive
behavior by the most economically and politically powerful baby market
participants.