Putting Together a "World Baby"

Tamara Audi and Arlene Chang of the Wall Street Journal dissect the global baby industry, which is growing thanks to increasingly restrictive international adoption laws. “Prospective parents put off by the rigor of traditional adoptions are bypassing that system by producing babies of their own-often using an egg donor from one country, a sperm donor from another, and a surrogate who will deliver in a third country to make what some industry participants call ‘a world baby,'” they write. The process is controversial, not to mention legally complicated: “The potential for abuse on many levels is big,” says Arthur Caplan of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “You’re straddling all these [international] boundaries to buy the ingredients and the equipment.” [%comments]