Boy...Boy for Sale

You'd be singing the tune from Oliver with a different thought on your mind if you'd just read Cheryl Miller's review of Debora L. Spar's The Baby Businesss:

As disturbing as Spar finds these trends, she remains realistic and honest about the temptation to pick and choose the genetic make-up of our offspring. After all, who doesn’t want the best for their child? Who wouldn’t want to live in a society in which all children were healthy, in which everyone, as in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, is above average? Spar herself wrestled with these questions when she decided to adopt a daughter—an experience that inspired her to write The Baby Business. In a New York Times article, Spar recalls how she would browse through hundreds of pictures of potential adoptive children on the Internet—abandoned baby girls from China, toddlers with mental or physical disabilities from Russia, teens from the U.S. foster child system—many of whom had been waiting for years to find a home. The search was heart-wrenching, not least because she found herself—much to her dismay and surprise—unwittingly comparing and assessing the children as if they were goods for sale. “How do you pick a child who already exists? What do you choose?” she asks. “If there are pictures, you are inevitably choosing on looks: brunette versus blond, short versus tall. For girls this process seems particularly cruel: a beauty pageant that plucks one little creature from the orphanage and leaves the others behind.” Spar decided to allow the agency to choose a child for her, although she admits that she “half-dreaded” the moment when she’d first see the child it chose.

That just happened to be one of the sadder paragraphs from Miller's review, but the whole thing is worth a read, especially if you are anything like me and can't conceive of actually reading the book itself (because it sounds too troubling).

Ah, I do myself a disservice. The book sounds terribly fascinating, particularly as a swift kick in the pants for people like me who have been known to blithely advocate a "baby market" as a way to encourage women to give up their children for adoption instead of killing them (i.e. abortion). So, I guess I'll have to tackle this one head on after all.