Reproductive technology has come a long way in the last twenty years and continues to make expansive advances. The question “where do babies come from” is becoming harder and harder to answer. The response used to sound something like “when a man and a woman love each other very much…” now with in vitro fertilization, fertility drugs, and sperm/egg donors as well as future advances the answer will take on a new twist “…they go to see a doctor and look through a catalog to pick what kind of baby they want.”That is already true to some degree today. If a man or a woman is infertile they can look for sperm or egg donors, try fertility drugs or use in vitro fertilization to bring together their own genetic material in a petri dish. In the case of donors, potential parents are poring over the donor’s medical history, physical description, and social standing in order to find a worthy candidate to supply the genetic material of their offspring. This process has several moral implications. “Superior” donors, educated people, models, and other genetically “elite” are costing more on the genetic market. This practice is turning human beings into a commodity. Is it morally sound to be able put a price on a person? Will the new genetically “superior” offspring have more worth in context to the rest of society? One can answer these questions with the observation that even in society today some people are consider higher than others. We live in a class system, therefore there would be no real deviation should genetically “superior” be considered the top of the social pyramid. It would only be changing who is at the top, and how the pinnacle is measured, not the actual system. Another scenario is that reproductive technology procedures as it stands today are expensive and not covered by health insurance companies and HMOs. New technolo...
