CYKIAE Season 009 Part 1. Babies for Sale – Biological Parents

It seems like only yesterday that it was illegal to buy babies – but then we have science to thank for new developments that have made that possible. Also society has made major changes to what is acceptable creating the demand for babies for people who couldn’t get babies the usual way themselves, same sex couples.

In this programme I’m going to start by looking at the old-fashioned way people got babies and the in-built mechansims that came into play from pregnancy to birth, then I’ll be looking at children born in answer to the demand of adults where the egg or the sperm, or both, are obtained from a third party which third party usually will never have any further connection with the child produced from their egg or sperm. Sometimes one of the people involved in getting the baby will contribute their egg or sperm, but the other side of the equation will be obtained from a donor – usually an unknown stranger.

Sometimes all of that applies, and sometimes it may be that the egg and the sperm both, are provided by the future parents but a woman, who is most likely unrelated to the couple, will be the surrogate mother – she’ll carry the fertilised egg through to birth and then, usually, immediately relinquish the child to her paying customers without having anything at all to do with the baby that she just gave birth to.

There’s always been the long debate with science on the issue of whether we should do something for the simple reason that we can. Then there are the arguments that that is no reason to do something that perhaps we shouldn’t be doing. This seems, to me, to be one of those areas.

We’ve been doing this sort of thing with sperm and egg donors and surrogate mothers for long enough now for there to be children who, today, are old enough to let us know how this sort of situation is working out for them. They are clearly entitled to a voice that must be heard and weighed on the scales to decide if we should continue to do this or ban it.

The result of all these new techniques is that babies are being born that could never be born otherwise. People are buying babies to demand. Being able to buy another human being seems like a horrible thing for our society to allow.

So me tell you what happens when a baby is conceived in the old fashioned way by a man and a woman who are living together and intend to bring up the child as their own. It would be far far better if they were married, to give the child the chance of having those biological parents while the child is growing into an independent human being, but that’s another issue.

Tag words: Louann Brizendine MD; The Female Brain; The Male Brain; mommy brain; progesterone; cortisol; fetus; placenta; pregnancy; ultrasound; Dads; testosterone; prolactin; pheromones; Couvade syndrome; baby; mother; father;