Check out this story at Britain's Telegraph online, about a charity that's selling lottery tickets for fertility services. For your £20 ticket, you get a chance at £25,000 in fertility services...ranging from in vitro fertilization to donor eggs (in case the mom-to-be is over 45) to surrogacy (in case the parent-to-be is a man, or elderly, or simply cannot carry a fetus to term).
The desperation many people feel to become parents, coupled with the often-prohibitive cost of accessing the technology to overcome infertility, may mean that there are folks willing to gamble the equivalent of $32 on the chance to "win a baby." But what does this mean?
It means we're allowing people to win medical treatment in the same way they might win $2 in a lottery scratch-off game at the Kum 'n' Go (I know that access to medical treatment is already a game of winners and losers...but this is worse). It means some children will grow up knowing that their parents obtained them in this way (and something about it feels tawdry and crass, doesn't it?). One commenter to the Telegraph article noted that it means, for some women struggling with infertility, two monthly disappointments. Most importantly to me, it means that a private decision that should be left to a patient, a family, and a doctor about (a) whether to bring a child into the world and (b) how to accomplish that will become a reality-television type circus. Because you know it will.
Found via Gawker.
[Update: Coincidentally, Trent at the Simple Dollar blogged today about why winning the lottery isn't the answer to your problems.]
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