The women who donate eggs or allow their wombs to carry someone else’s child have voluntarily allowed their own bodies, and thus their own selves, to become objects. As individuals they may have done this with good intentions—to help an infertile couple, for example. But the means by which they have done so reinforces a broader cultural intuition that sees children and women as commodities.

Britain’s Daily Mail recently reported how around one hundred young Thai women were kept against their will, pumped full of hormones, and subjected to having their eggs forcibly harvested every month, to be sold on the black market by Chinese criminals. The women were lured to a farm in the eastern European country of Georgia under the impression that they were to act as surrogate mothers for couples who could not have children. The story is horrific, involving the reduction of these women to the equivalent of farm animals. But the question of what exactly it is that constitutes this reduction is perhaps instructive.

The Hungarian philosopher György Lukács argued that under the logic of industrial capitalism, the commodity form becomes the universal category for understanding society. Behind this rebarbative Marxist jargon lies a very simple idea: Industrial capitalism transforms the moral imagination of society so that everything, from a paperclip to a human person, comes to be valued in monetary terms and thus as things that can be bought and sold. All become commodities, exchangeable for cash.

Lukács’s point arises from his Hegelian Marxism, but it captures something of our late modern, technologically dominated existence that is separable from his revolutionary politics. In a world where consumption is the key to social status and where personal happiness is the moral imperative, there is a powerful tendency to treat everything as instrumental to these ends.

The human battery farm in Georgia indicates that modern reproductive technology is taking this to a new level. I have noted before how modern fertility technology tilts society toward treating babies as things. That is an integral part of the philosophy that the technology brings with it. It makes babies to order, creating a level of control of the reproductive process that is absent in nature. And this process also requires that the child becomes an object of contract law, both for its own protection and for those of the other parties—the parents, biological and otherwise—involved.

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