Designing the $100,000 baby

The convention hall at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine's 2007 annual meeting, in Washington, D.C., looked like a luxury shopping mall of futuristic baby making. Company reps held court in brightly colored booths, luring potential customers with bowls of candy and hoping to sell cutting-edge baby-making technology.

What kind of baby can money buy?

Just down the hall, conferees packed a seminar room to hear a talk titled "From Cells to Super Babies." By spending staggering amounts of money, as much as $100,000, picky parents would soon be able to design superior physical, mental and psychological attributes for their babies-to-be, the audience learned.

"Doctors, attorneys and mental-health professionals are all picking and choosing each and every genetic component in order to build a super baby," says Elaine Gordon, a clinical psychologist who specializes in counseling on such issues. "One day you'll be able to select for sex, hair color, confidence index, whether they are an optimist or pessimist, whether they are an athlete or a bookworm."

Talk back: Should parents be able to "design" babies?

That future may be closer than we think. Thanks in part to people choosing parenthood later in life, many would-be parents are already turning to expensive and advanced reproductive technology to beat the biological clock. They are employing prescription drugs, in vitro fertilization, donor eggs and sperm, and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, a technique that lets doctors screen for genetic diseases and gender.

'This is serious, high-tech sex'

So custom baby design may not be far behind, and experts say the biggest obstacles are ethical, not technological.

"As reproductive technologies push the envelope of possibilities, they . . . will blur the edges of what is now formally forbidden: cloning, fetal research," Harvard economist Debora L. Spar writes in her book "The Baby Business." "In the end, the market will win. We will continue to buy, sell and modify our children, generating substantial profits in the process."

Make no mistake: The price tag will be high. And as with most reproductive technology, health insurance is unlikely to cover the cost.

$20,000 for genetic health?

Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, one of the biggest scientific advancements, costs $3,000 to $5,000. That's on top of the $10,000-to-$15,000 price for in vitro fertilization.

In PGD, testers remove a single cell from the fertilized embryos in a petri dish to scan for abnormalities. The test allows couples to choose to implant healthier embryos that don't have abnormalities. More controversially, it also lets them choose male or female embryos.

"It hasn't gotten to the point where we're testing for the breast cancer gene or choosing eye color," says Megan McCoy, an independent genetic counselor in Los Angeles. But she acknowledges the potential is there. "People are more concerned with birth defects that would affect a baby as opposed to adult-onset disorders."

Although some families use sex selection to prevent certain gender-linked defects, it has become a hot button for PGD critics.

"Some believe that the whole purpose of sex selection is for family balancing," says Dr. Dan Stein, a reproductive endocrinologist with St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in New York. "Others believe that sex selection should not even be a consideration because of how it can be abused, in nations that place far greater value on the life of a male versus the life of a female."

Meanwhile, high-priced donor eggs are creating a new economy of fertility between older women in need of eggs and younger women willing to sell them. Agencies often charge more for "premium" donors -- those who are attractive and better-educated. Last year, an unidentified couple placed an ad in Harvard's daily student newspaper that offered $35,000 to "one truly exceptional woman who is attractive, athletic, under the age of 29" and $50,000 to an "extraordinary egg donor."

Though U.S. law prohibits the sale of body parts, broker agencies get around it by claiming that recipients are compensating donors for the medical procedure of removing their eggs. Ethical guidelines of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine suggest that an egg-donor agency should not charge more than $5,000, but prices often run much higher.

"It's not as easy as 'I want to buy an egg,'" says Brigid Dowd, the director of The Donor Egg Bank in Los Angeles. "Not everyone realizes what's involved, and then when they hear the cost, many just pass out."

Dowd takes a white plastic binder off the shelf. "We start by asking if there is something in particular that you're looking for."

Most recipients don't technically design their babies' looks or personalities, Dowd says, but they do tend to look for donors with traits or ethnic backgrounds similar to their own, so that their children will fit into their families.

I flip through the book. Each page shows a picture of an egg donor and her vital statistics: height, weight, hair color and texture, eye color and academic information, including grade-point average. The next page includes educational goals, occupation, health information, athletic abilities and favorite types of music and books. It also shows whether she has ever been diagnosed with a major psychological disorder and whether anyone in her immediate family was born with a birth defect.

Because potential parents can choose egg donors based on their traits and genetic histories, her clients often get a false sense of control, Dowd says. In the end, you never know what kind of child you're going to get. Dowd encourages her clients to be as open-minded as possible.

"If you are too rigid or become too obsessed with finding the perfect image you have in your mind, the choice can become more difficult," she says. "The ones that go with a visceral hunch end up happier."

That bodes well for Samantha and Bill (not their real names), a married couple in San Francisco who turned to an egg donor for their second child. Her own egg quality was compromised because of her age. Cost was not an issue, and Samantha liked the idea of having genetic choice, so the couple scanned the profiles of hundreds of donors in search of someone with a good combination of their personality and physical traits.

'My ovaries had shrunk'

They were casually cruising donor sites one night when they saw a photo of a woman with long red hair, a big smile and big white teeth. "There was something happy about her," Samantha says. "Even though she looked nothing like me, we both really liked her. It was like love at first sight."

Samantha called the agency the next morning, and it turned out that eggs from the redheaded donor were available immediately. The happy parents-to-be are expecting twins later this year.

But although the donor egg itself cost $6,500, Samantha and Bill wound up spending close to $40,000 on the process, including the cost of travel expenses, lawyer and agency fees, medication and doctor's appointments.

Still, Samantha says, they don't begrudge a penny of it. "If it's going to give you a family, it's worth it."

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt is the author of an upcoming book, "In Her Own Sweet Time: One Woman's Unexpected Adventures in Finding Love, Commitment, and Motherhood."

Produced by Anh Ly
Published Sept. 24, 2008