Womb outsourcing... what's coming next?

(or The US: if there hadn't been them, we shouldn't have invented them anyway..)

A US company is settling a new lucrative business: outsourcing pregnancies from US and other perspective western countries to India. US hospital stays to give birth are so expensive that it seemed pretty much a good business opportunity to have ready-made children on the cheap side of the world, especially convenient for those that can't have children and are thinking of a surrogate mother: US mothers' surrogation expenses normally include not only hospital treatments, but also the mother's remuneration and are still not affordable for many mums-to-be.

In India, impoverished jobless women are getting the chance to earn good money and be respected by their families by renting their wombs to US and UK women that provide their own egg, their husbands' or donated sperms and get a ready-made Caucasian baby from them.

With all the respect for unfertile women and men who have been long wishing to have a baby, there is something sharply disturbing about this new surrogation.

Already multinationals didn't have any barriers (or had very few) to exploit the global leverage of underdeveloped countries to move there cost-effective factories, acquiring raw materials, setting monocultures, etc.; now, in the neoliberal phases 2, even normal individuals from our hemisphere enjoy the opportunity to earn something from this long-lasting unbalanced North-South relationship. Actually, it worked also before, when hour houses got full of Polish or Philippine nannies forced to migrate; but the birth outsourcing business sounds completely different stuff.

But why not, after all? Many Indian women are poor, culturally educated to give birth to the largest possible number of children, living in small villages with no job opportunity: by renting their wombs they manage to buy a house or send their children to school.

On the other side, many US women can't afford the price currently needed to cover the whole surrogate mother affair, which still is forbidden in most European countries, where the vitro fertilization practices are strictly regulated. Are economic considerations enough to allow the practice and to consider it as mutually beneficial?

Not in my opinion. Just imagine if the practice goes on: what would happen in a few years when western women busy with their careers and actually more and more stressed by their bosses not to benefit of maternity leaves (which in Italy is already a common thing whit temporary or atypical job contracts) will increasingly avail themselves of the practice? Doesn't sound like a barbarian form of exploitation getting poor women to give birth to our children cause we might not feel like, cause it might not be the right time, cause "I can't get a part-time right now"?

More, it sounds like the extreme turning point of the specialization trend that has been shaping our global society in the past 50 years. If any economic initiative must be cost-effective and take advantage of the local features where it could be best performed, why not doing the same with human beings'lives, that stay at the very core of the economy? In a 1984-like scenario, human beings' functions, even the basic animal ones, will be divided according to birthplace and social position: western offspring will study and access the higher intellectual and managerial positions, Asian human resources, well educated but cheap, will be used to produce high-tech, give birth to our children, take care of them and our houses; for African and middle-east low income people is not so odd to imagine a ghastly organ business future, with people literally selling parts of their bodies to western clients (something like that is already happening in Iran where the government promoted a liberal kidneys market and people are allowed to sell their kidneys to the best offerer).

International agreements are needed to regulate the matter and to reaffirm the untouchable dignity of human beings that, as Kant perfectly said more than 3 centuries ago, can never be means of other human beings' ends (nor can be used as "rented properties") but must be ends themselves.