TV: Behind the laboratory doors of fertility clinics

By FIONA BARBER

Don't expect a tentative tip-toe around the thorny issues in The Friday Files: Perfect Babies - Baby Market (TV3, 8.30 pm).

The first episode in this British three-part documentary series makes it brutally plain that baby-making for those who can pay is a thriving global business.

And when consumer demand is the driving force, scientists and doctors in unregulated fertility markets take risks.

Take the 55-year-old American mother carrying quads who went into premature labour. One baby died, the three remaining were born seriously ill and may need long-term care.

It turns out the woman had been implanted with seven embryos. In Britain the maximum allowed is three.

And let's not forget the needs of the person paying the bill.

When baby production becomes big business the customer gets what the customer pays for. Want a green-eyed blond baby? No problem finding an egg donor with just those characteristics.

Has there ever been such a graphic illustration of the collision between science and ethics?

Perfect Babies roves around the world finding out what is possible in the world of fertility medicine. Some of the practices might come as a shock - many of us don't have a clue what happens behind laboratory doors.

The programme starts with a British couple striving for a baby. Their fertility clinic uses a technique involving taking sperm directly from the man's testicles. No natural selection here - the fertility specialist chooses which sperm will fertilise which egg.

On the surface it all seems so right, so necessary for the loving couple desperate to be parents. Why shouldn't they have the chance to be called mum and dad?

But with nature taken out of the equation, what becomes of a resulting baby? Or, further down the track, that baby's babies?

The first episode of Perfect Babies also investigates a technique where undeveloped sperm is used to fertilise eggs. Again there is no science to gauge the long-term effects of such treatment.

Or what about the New York specialist who had leftover human eggs in storage so took it upon himself to match them with sperm. The results: ready-made embryos for potential clients.

The brakes were put on this practice but the specialist didn't really see a problem with what he had been doing.

It was the sort of thing fertility specialists did every day, he said.

In the United States, prospective parents can still choose the characteristics of a potential baby through special agencies or through the internet.

This is business, pure and simple - "sperm for sale, womb for hire, eggs to order," declared the programme's narrator.

American Bill Handel, who deals in potential baby components, put the business in perspective for the British interviewer this way: "You guys are embarrassed about making money."

Which leads to one of the central issues facing ethicists and regulators. If one country bans practices, it is almost certain that someone somewhere else will be only too happy to exploit the gap in the "market."

There will always be desperate would-be parents who will pay any monetary price to have a child. It is the other prices - present and potential - which need weighing up.