Baby M: The Contractual Legitimation of Misogyny

The emergence of what have become known as the "new reproductive technologies" is a phenomenon which is neither essentially good nor essentially bad. On the one hand, such developments provide opportunities for social choice, family planning and procreative autonomy which, until recently, were impossible. This expansion of horizons is clearly a "good". However, on the darker side, as a community, we must be concerned about the directions which such opportunities might take. There are very real dangers involved, including excessive genetic engineering, raised expectations of perfect "products" with the correlative dissatisfaction with the "imperfect", inequality of access to these new avenues of reproduction and, most importantly, the exploitation and instrumentalization of other human beings in this process.