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Finally, like the Repository for Germinal Choice, the turn-of-the-century egg market also boasted an elite tier: boutique dealers in the highest-end eggs. In 1999, for example, a small ad posted in Ivy League campus newspapers raised eyebrows with its explicit offer of $50,000 for a very specific kind of egg: the donor had to be at least 5'10", with an SAT score of 1,400 and no family medical problems. The ad was placed by Thomas and Darlene Pinkerton, a California couple who left the real estate business to launch a high-end egg service called A Perfect Match. More recently, another Pinkerton ad promised $100,000 to a Caucasian woman “with proven college level athletic ability” willing to “give the gift of life and love.” [36] Some larger agencies, such as the Boston-based Tiny Treasures, hover somewhere between the Pinkertons and the rest, specializing in Ivy League donors with SAT scores higher than 1,250. [37]
Clearly, such services cater to buyers’ desire to choose—down to musical preferences—the kind of genetic bundle they are purchasing. Some also cater to particular kinds of buyers—Asian couples, for example, or homosexuals. Meanwhile, because commercial donation remains illegal in most other industrialized countries, U.S. firms have risen easily to the top of the global egg trade. At the Center for Egg Donation, 30 percent of business in 2003 came from abroad, and the number was steadily rising.
Dr. Merle Berger is unabashed about his job. The founder of Boston IVF, the largest fertility center in the United States, Berger is a pioneer in reproductive medicine. In more than thirty years of practice, the doctor has helped thousands of people create the children they desperately want. He is a professor at Harvard Medical School and the author of more than fifty scientific articles. Yet Berger describes his profession in a distinctly nonmedical way. “I manufacture embryos,” he announces. [38]
Today, Berger and his colleagues sit at the heart of the global fertility business. Doctors by training, they run the largest and most visible sector of the baby trade: the fertility clinics that oversee treatment for approximately 1.2 million people a year in the United States alone. Inherently, all these facilities are chameleons of a sort. They are medical facilities and counseling facilities, the sites of high-tech research and intimate personal tragedy. They employ prize-winning scientists, hard-core marketers, and a bevy of lab technicians. At their core, however, all fertility centers do essentially one thing: they manufacture embryos that turn into babies.
This content is authorized for use only in the HarvardX course "Bioethics: The Law, Medicine, and Ethics of Reproductive Technologies and Genetics," September/October 2016. Copyright 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the permission of Harvard Business School.