A recent story in The Washington Post came with this headline, “America has a Black Sperm Donor Shortage.” There’s so much wrong with this headline, it’s hard to know where to begin. 

Assumed here is a commodification of people, echoing the repulsive slave markets of America’s past, except that today’s demand is for babies who are made, bought, and sold. The word “shortage” implies that we’re talking about just “stuff,” like steel or grain or labor.  

Beneath all of this is a worldview that sees reproduction as primarily about “production.” Missing is not only the word, but the framework that comes with seeing the making of human life as “procreation,” or as the word implies, that human life is created.  

In the end, through the various industries of artificial reproductive technologies, kids are robbed of one of their most fundamental rights: the right to be raised by their own mother and father.