Our society has odd, inconsistent notions about what is corrupt and what is worth protecting. Consider spectator sports and reproductive technology.
Our media and government have recently expressed deep concern that steroids are corrupting baseball. In our "ends justify the means" culture, it's not clear why. It can't be esthetics; a steroid-juiced home run looks much like a natural home run. If fairness is the concern, we need not ban steroids; they can be legalized so everyone can use them. And aren't concerns about the potential long term health effects paternalistic and invasive of privacy? Why not let athletes use their bodies as they wish, in the free exercise of their reconstructive choice?
In contrast, few actively oppose - and insurance rate payers actually subsidize - the use of "donated" sperm and eggs. As the attorney/author Lori Andrews states in The Clone Age, such sperm is purchased, through catalogs, after having been "generated" for quick cash by strangers who view pornography in vinyl sofa-ed "masturbatoria" and then conveyed, via Fed Ex and lab ware, to the end user/"mother." Human eggs are procured, shopped for and sold under similarly corrupt - and more physically dangerous - circumstances. Many unthinkingly justify these practices by noting that the offspring created look much like those conceived naturally by men and women that love each other.
Surely a society so deeply concerned about steroid-corrupted home runs should also care about what the social commentator Andrew Kimbrell calls technological adultery and of the damage intrinsically corrupt sperm and egg sales wreak on human meaning, identity and authentic family. Instead of legitimizing illegitimacy, American governments should move, as the European Parliament and those in Canada and Italy have, to ban sperm and egg sales.