The Baby Business

A dark side to the love of babies

by ALICIA PRIEST

Ah babies, don’t you love ‘em? With their moist-smelling heads, big button eyes and kiss-me tummies, they’re designed to turn the coldest soul into a babbling fool.

It’s a brilliant survival strategy that works on almost everyone. But our love of babies is getting mighty strange these days, and depending how you look at it, that could be a bad thing.

Recently, 62-year-old Patti Farrant, also known as Patricia Rashbrook, became Britain’s oldest mom after undergoing five courses of fertility treatments and spending more than $20,000 to give birth to someone else’s biological child. Before you decide where you stand on the “aging mother” issue, consider a few scientific and economic facts about how older women get pregnant and give birth in the first place. Although Farrant’s age may be shocking to some—she’ll be 67 when her son starts kindergarten and 80 when he finishes high school—she is actually four years younger than the world’s oldest birth mother. Last year Romanian Adriana Iliescu gave birth to a baby girl at the age of 66.

Not long ago these deliveries would have been impossible—as women age their eggs age too and by the time menopause hits at about age 50, those eggs are fried, so to speak. In fact, after menopause women simply don’t have enough of the right hormones necessary to conceive and sustain a full-term pregnancy. But in a reproductive trick that could be lifted right off the pages of Margaret Atwood’s 1986 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, in which most women are infertile after repeated exposure to chemicals, and the few remaining fertile women are taken to camps and bred, their babies taken away and given to the wealthy, upper-class women—fertility doctors gave Farrant exactly what she’d paid for.

People have been buying babies of various ages for a long time—the fee is often disguised as a ‘donation’ to the orphanage. But recently, the market has expanded to include human embryos. How tragic that in a seriously overpopulated world where millions of babies are neglected and unwanted, certain baby building parts are seen as top commodities—to be bought and sold like cars or coffee beans.

As with most trade agreements there are winners and losers in the human egg trade. A recent headline by the BBC declared that ‘fertility tourism’ could be the next big European travel boom. Fertility tourists are wealthy women, mostly from the U. K., who travel to Eastern European countries, such as Russia, Ukraine, Slovenia, and Hungary, in order to become pregnant at a fertility clinic.

No clinic in Britain will accept a would-be mom over the age of 55. In Farrant’s case, she was a wealthy, menopausal woman who traveled to an undisclosed location where she was connected with eggs taken from a pool of young, impoverished, and vulnerable women. These women legally sell their eggs for around $350 a treatment. (So far, women in Britain and Canada cannot legally sell their eggs.) Once harvested, the eggs are fertilized in a laboratory with a selected father’s sperm and then placed in the wanna-be mother’s uterus. This is called in-vitro fertilization or IVF and has become a fairly common, if expensive, procedure in the developed world.

But donating eggs is not as simple a matter as donating sperm. Egg donation can be a lengthy, painful, and potentially dangerous procedure involving the injection of a powerful drug known as follicle stimulating hormone, or FSH. This hormone is like steroids for ovaries. It forces them to produce far more eggs than normal, and the subsequent bumper crop comes at a price.

Egg donation causes side effects to one in five women, and one in 100 women puts her life and fertility in danger. Medical experts believe about one per cent of women suffer serious side-effects know as ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome (OHSS). Yet few women who go shopping for a child know or perhaps even care about the terrible risks imposed on egg donors. In many cases donors don’t know either.

Although mainstream media promote the belief that 60 is the new 50, I believe Farrant’s decision to embark on the 20-year task of parenting at her well-ripened age is deeply selfish. For one, she has three grown children and so has already experienced motherhood. Second, as laws now stand, her son has no right to know who his biological mother is, and likely will never know. And finally, her action supports an international egg donation trade that preys on the poor and the weak. Babies may be pretty—but the baby business isn’t.

Alicia Priest is a Victoria freelance writer who loves babies, had one and is looking forward to her 60s, the perfect age to be a grandmother.