But Wait, There's More

Discussing the previous two posts with JF, we came up with the rich man's way of skirting around restrictions against screening embryos. Simply line up enough surrogate mothers to handle every possible embryo generated -- and once you have a pretty good idea N children are likely to be born, line up N-1 adoptive parents. Then once they're born, you do the screening process (genetic testing should work just as well on a live kid as on an embryo), keep the best kid for yourself, and give the others up to the adoptive parents.

Now, if you're anything like me, your first reaction to that is "Yuck!"

But think about it. If you take the "no screening embryos" exception as given, where is the downside here? The rich guy gets the kid he wants. N-1 other families get kids they desperately want. The surrogate mothers pocket a nice chunk of change that they apparently wanted. As long as no one is coerced, this is a win-win-win situation.

If there was some medical reason for the screening (risk of a terrible disease, perhaps), you can argue that you are more likely to get a kid who actually has the disease this way; but each individual embryo's chance of having the disease is exactly the same as before. And the judgment that every embryo is inviolable rests soundly on the notion it is better to be born with the terrible disease than not born at all, so I cannot see that as an argument against doing this.