A Baby Bazaar
The next time you see a baby, look closer. It may actually be a doll, lifelike to the point of creepiness. Reborn dolls are collectible items that can cost up to $10,000 each, often seen festooned in a high-end stroller or in the arms of its owner. With 2024’s total fertility rate hitting an all-time low of under 1.6 children per American woman, more women of all ages are turning to these dolls, for various reasons, in place of actual children.
The dolls come, as might be expected, with influencers and fairs and marketplaces. Doll collectors call themselves, well, “parents.” One reborn doll, dainty in a onesie with a bow in its hair, is given a name by her owner: Naomi. A whole cottage industry involving luxury baby accoutrements goes with the dolls: outfits, bottles, car seats, pacifiers, stuffed animals. At a baby bazaar called the Dolls of the World fair, a doll owner winced upon handing her prized possession to a Wall Street Journal reporter, saying, “You have to support the head.” Meanwhile, at the convention center, perfumes are peddled to bazaar shoppers for the dolls to get the right smell. You know, of real babies.
What the dolls don’t do, of course, is fuss and cry, run a fever, cluster-feed, throw up, and keep you up through the night. A couple of visitors to the fair initially thought that the babies were real, that is, “until we did not hear any crying.” A grandmother (of actual grandchildren) who is nevertheless a reborn doll collector says that her grandchildren come to visit her—but, she said, “Sometimes I just want one that doesn’t cry.”
I’m not commenting on the reported use of the dolls as a means of comfort in instances of, say, miscarriage. But to the extent that women are swapping out real babies for the dolls for reasons of convenience, ease, and control, the dolls offer all the feelings and none of the heartache, all the fun and none of the dying to self. The dolls may be costly, but no love is involved—costly love, love in the real. I want to be a parent and I want it to be fun; therefore I get to. We also ought to note that, save for the intentionally weird (for example, a Yoda-looking, green-skinned doll), the dolls represent humans on the beautiful spectrum exclusively. All the babies in this bazaar are awfully cute.
A world away from the Dolls of the World fair, but in a way not really, three women of the power suit sort started a company called Cofertility. The company lets women freeze their eggs, ostensibly for free. (Egg-freezing usually costs a steep $10,000 or so, not unlike reborn dolls.) Ostensibly, because the women do have to pony up—with the currency of human eggs. In place of cash, they hand over to Cofertility half of their retrieved eggs to be sold to buyers.
One of the co-founders, Lauren Makler, used to work for Uber and founded Uber Health. When a health scare led her to look into the fertility industry, she found out how expensive things were, and how the market for eggs—thus, bluntly, for babies—prefers certain types of humans over others. Makler is Jewish, and if she were to look for an egg from a Jewish woman, such an egg would be more expensive. There’s more to the insidious market. All manner of traits are ranked: physical attributes, family health history, IQ, SAT scores, GPA, résumé. A tall, thin, athletic, blue-eyed, blonde Jewish or white woman with an Ivy League degree at the top of her class fetches the most coveted barcode leading to the highest priced egg of all.
Reminiscent of Makler’s Uber days and the meaning of “peak demand,” she said, “It felt sort of like surge pricing for egg donors, which felt icky to me” (her wording, not ours). But yes, that’s exactly what it is. Of course eggs, on their own, are not and do not become children. But egg buyers don’t buy eggs to keep them in the second freezer in the garage. They buy eggs (and sperm) shooting for a baby, turning around from signing the purchase docs via DocuSign to converting that spare bedroom into a nursery. It’s a bazaar of babies, and there we rank humans eugenically.
Is Cofertility a marketplace of man? Makler bristles at that description, but then again she “agrees that it works like one.” Shouldn’t we be concerned that our society is going at it heedlessly, shamelessly? Makler: “There is zero shame in however you become a parent. Doing that with the help of a donor who’s also interested in freezing her own eggs is a really exciting option.”
Cofertility calls its business model “Split,” and the currency of human eggs with which women pay an “egg sharing model.” In calling it “Split,” the company calls it better than it knew. Should a woman’s egg that she “shares” with Cofertility be fertilized to become a small baby called an embryo and continue growing unto birth, that baby will be split from his mother, and perhaps also from his father. If the woman has other children, that baby will be split from his siblings. He’s split from his grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, a whole extended family. The child will wonder why he doesn’t get to be known, raised, and loved by his mother. His siblings do, but not he. Split indeed. His very person is characterized by fragmentation, a sense of loss, an open wound. It is not a cofertility, odd term that it is, of man and wife together in the marital embrace—but, crazily, with strangers, splitting apart whole persons and families.
Compounding that wound is the child’s very existence being put together from a website catalogue of eggs, ranked with most desirable traits to least in descending order and prices. (This is common in the fertility industry, although self-reportedly not the case with Cofertility in particular.) The child would not be wrong in being angry for having been treated as if he is a manufactured commodity out of a marketplace of luxury goods, not a person of immeasurable value by virtue of being human. Whether art imitates life or the other way round, like reborn dolls, we’re making (only) beautiful (and smart and healthy) humans here. But the fertility industry says, You want to be a parent, means be damned; therefore you get to.
The lovely story of Ruth in the Bible records Ruth’s oath to her mother-in-law, Naomi. Naomi had urged Ruth to go home to her parents’ house after Ruth’s husband died, and other family members too died or had since left. But Ruth said, “Entreat me not to leave you, or to turn back from following after you.” She means it too:
For wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if anything but death parts you and me.
Ruth’s solemn oath to Naomi is woven into marriage vows, and for good reason. The kind of steady faithfulness there is precisely the thing that marriage is. In the beautiful poetry of the Book of Common Prayer: “To have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance, and thereto I plight thee my troth.”
But the fruit of marriage is children, and the kind of selfless commitment proper of a mother and father to their children is a harmonious melody to that oath. Were a couple to have a child and name her Naomi, that enduring love would say, “Naomi, we will love you and never forsake you, no matter how many sleepless nights to endure, no matter how fussy or messy things get, no matter what you do or don’t do in life, or what you become or don’t become—no matter.”
It’s the kind of faithfulness that makes Psalm 27 so striking: “When my father and my mother forsake me, the Lord taketh me up.” Our father and mother do not normally, not naturally at least, forsake us. Thus the Psalmist is showing how great God’s love and care for us is compared to the love that our parents bear for us. It is incomparably greater—as far as neglect and abandonment are from love.
But that promise, of course, also stands exactly as written. For those among us whose parents have forsaken us, who abandon us to the hand of the bazaar or strangers alike, with however sincere a good will: The Lord taketh us up, for His mercy endureth forever. And may we each choose what is real, no matter the cost, that we may come to know this kind of love and pour it out for our own children.
Image licensed via Adobe Stock.