Google Baby - Controversial Topic of the Week

Last week Josh and I went to a film called Google Baby. Seven days later I still can't get it out of my head - which says a lot when usually I struggle to even recall the names of movies I've recently been to.

The film starts with a gay couple in Israel who have had a child with the help of a surrogate in the USA - costing them a grand total of $140k USD. One of the guys works in IT and has the slightly disturbing thought of "Hey, if we can save money outsourcing technology to India, why can't we do the same with pregnancy?"

Um, no reason why not apparently. And so we follow his journey into setting up a global reproduction business. From egg donors in the US, to laboratories where the embryos are created, to being frozen and flown across to surrogacy clinics in India, where there are litereally house fulls of Indian woman who spend nine months on their backs acting as incubators for Western babies.

On the surface of it it's a disturbing introduction into a whole new world of commoditisation and further exploitation of the wealth gap between the West and the third world. Want to have a baby but it's too expensive in your own country? Don't worry - there's a poor Indian woman a mere continent away who will be your human incubator for a fraction of the price.

Regardless of your ethical standpoint going into the film, you can't help but feel conflicted when you leave. One one hand the whole commoditisation of pregnancy just feels intrinsically wrong. We're not talking about a t-shirt or IT, we're talking about creating baby factories in the third world so that wealthy Westerners can fulfil their dreams of being parents at a discount price, and the reality is that the Indian women carry it for nine months and are torn at having to give it up, even though it has no biological relation to them.

But on the other hand, when you see the difference that this money makes in the lives of the surrogate Indian women and their family, enabling them to escape the poverty cycle and do things like buy a house and educate their children, you also see the good that it can bring.

The really scary part came at the end when one of the Indian doctors took things a step further and proposing to jointly impregnate two surrogates with two embryos each - thus increasing the odds of a pregnancy but also taking the chance of three or four babies resulting. The Israeli man who started it all is on the phone with one of the "parents" who flippantly says "oh well if that happens we'll just do a selective abortion and reduce them down" and you suddenly see him thinking "What on earth have I created?"

Which basically is what you leave thinking. This isn't some future facing movie about the possibilities - it's a documentary about what is happening right now. Thoughts?