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A Cluster of Cells: Mechanics of the Modern Fertility Market

By the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.

—KARL MARX, THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO

IN FERTILITY, as in any market, we must start at the very beginning, where supply and demand collide to produce some kind of market exchange. We need to understand what drives demand in the fertility trade; what determines supply; and how the price of desire is set. We need to explore who is making money in this industry, and how.

The first piece of analysis is painful but simple. In the fertility market, as described earlier, demand is nearly constant. Roughly 10 to 15 percent of all adults experience some form of infertility. It may stem from the female or the male, or it may be unexplained. Commercially, it doesn’t much matter: the crucial fact is that 10 to 15 percent of any given population suffers from a condition that subsequently gives rise to a specific demand. They want children, and they can’t have them.

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.