In 1896, the body of a baby, wrapped in a bag, was fished out of London’s Thames river. An investigation led to the hanging of Amelia Dyer, a “baby farmer” who had killed hundreds of children.
In the Victorian era, unwed motherhood was shameful and economically ruinous for the poor. It was an opportunity, however, for “baby farmers.” These were brokers who took infants from poor women and, in the best cases, gave them to wealthier couples. The brokers made a profit on both ends. The plot of Gilbert and Sullivan’s "H.M.S. Pinafore" turns on the switching at birth of the captain and a sailor by a baby farmer.
In our century, we have a new form of baby farming. And it’s far more troubling than the Victorian variety. Cross-border “assisted reproductive technology,” or ART, enables parents living in one country to pay a surrogate mother in another country to gestate a baby using their sperm or egg. It’s the ultimate outsourcing of, well, labor.
