For sale

I've had bioethics on the brain recently.

1) I heard an NPR report about surrogate mothers in India a couple of weeks ago, and I had the same reaction Judith Warner did about a woman named Julie, "an American thirtysomething who’d come to India to pay a poor village woman to bear her baby." On one hand, this is a transaction that transforms two lives: the one of the woman desperate to conceive a child of her own and the one of the surrogate mother who can turn her nine-month transaction -- ethics or no ethics -- into a house. At the same time, this arrangement couldn't exist without an underlying structure of unequal protection under the law and unequal wealth. Surrogate mothers in the U.S. ask for 8-10 times more compensation than those in India and would never agree to the degree of policing and surveillance the mothers in India must agree to in order to participate. Here's a link to the NY Times article: http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/outsourced-wombs/

2) Last night, I read a New Yorker article about "guinea-pigging," or participating in clinical trials as a healthy subject and risking injury and illness to make a quick buck. Again, new options for income are great, but the idea that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere" (MLK Jr.) makes the moral calculus pretty murky.