"A Legal, Moral, Social Nightmare

Society seeks to define the problems of the birth revolution

Alexander Morgan Capron, a sandy-haired professor of law at Georgetown University, stood at a blackboard in a hearing room of Congress's Rayburn Office Building and began writing formulas: the symbols represented ten different ways of making babies. The fourth formula that he chalked up read XM & YD by AΙ with Gestation M, meaning that a married woman is artificially inseminated by a male donor's sperm. The fifth formula, XD & YM by IVF with Gestation M, meant that the beginnings of life could be created through the uniting in a laboratory dish (invitro fertilization) of a woman's donated egg and a married man's sperm. Capron's final version — X1 & Y2 by IVF or Natural/ AΙ w/embryo flushing with Gestation 3 and Social Parents 4 & 5 — outlined how a baby could theoretically have five different "parents."

One reason why Capron resorts to formulas is that biology is now creating concepts of birth and parenthood faster than the standard English vocabulary can define them. As Capron testified before a House science subcommittee early last month, "Many the new reproductive possibilities remain so novel that terms are lacking to describe the human relationships they can create. For example, what does one call the woman who bears a child conceived from another woman's egg? I'm not even sure we know what to call the area under inquiry."

The answers are sometimes rich in emotional bias. "In some places, it's called 'unnatural reproduction'; in others it's 'abnormal reproduction,'" says Lori Andrews, a research attorney for the American Bar Foundation and author of New Conceptions, a guide to the new reproductive techniques. "We prefer 'artificial' or 'alternative reproduction,'" she adds. As for the increasing number of children born by these methods, there is no standard term at all.

The linguistic confusion echoes in the laws and theories applied to these various new methods of having babies. To some experts it seems nonsensical for such children even to be born at a time when high birth rates and burgeoning populations represent one of the world's most challenging problems. There are other paradoxes: the new techniques of fertilization are becoming almost commonplace, but there are no federal laws to guard against the dangers of exploitation and manipulation; nor is there federal financing to provide research guidelines. The state and local laws that do exist—many of them outdated—have sprouted into thickets of illogicality and contradiction. About all they have in common are moralizing judgments and a squeamish avoidance of controversial details. "It's a legal, moral and social nightmare," says Doris J. Freed, head of the American Bar Association's family-law section committee on research. "It's going to take years of debate, legislation, trial and error to figure out how to deal with these problems." Or, as Samuel Gorovitz, a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, summarized it for the House subcommittee chaired by Congressman Albert Gore Jr., "We have a patchwork of laws and gaps, stigmas, deprivations, uncertainties, confusions and fears."