'Win a Baby' Contest Puts a Price on Life

By putting a baby up as prize to be won, an Ottawa radio station has breached a foundational societal value.

An Ottawa music station, Hot 89.9, recently launched a “Win a Baby” contest. The prize offered was up to three rounds of fertility treatments, worth $35,000. It’s reported that the station received around “400 applications from a diverse range of people, including same-sex couples, single women, and cancer patients.”

Entrants had to explain, in no more than 100 words, why they most merited the prize treatment. The infertility stories of five finalists, who were all opposite-sex couples having difficulty conceiving naturally, were selected and posted anonymously on the station’s website. Listeners could vote, but the winner was to be chosen by a panel of judges. Bizarrely (in light of the nature of the prize), the finalist(s) chosen for the award had to answer a skill-testing math question in order to receive it, presumably to comply with Ontario gaming laws.

Advertisements for the competition featuring photographs of babies were displayed in Ottawa. One showed a very cute baby holding a sign reading, “Win me!” Written in small print at the bottom of the ad were the words, “Baby may not be exactly as shown” – again, a bizarre twist. One presumes the radio station is using this statement as a legal disclaimer to avoid accusations of false advertising of a “consumer product.”

Early in the morning on Oct. 11, all the finalists were gathered at the radio station in what the host described as a “win a baby showroom.” Each of the five finalist couples was offered “up to three fertility treatments.” Listening to their reactions to the results live on air, it was impossible not to empathize with their joy.

But many people, including, interestingly, those who are usually very liberal with respect to the social and ethical values they believe should govern assisted human-reproduction technologies, had an ethical “yuck” reaction to this competition. I believe that reaction expresses an intuition that it’s morally wrong. Some people, however – especially those who believe in “absolute rights to reproductive freedom” and give priority to individuals’ rights to self-determination – say they have found it difficult to articulate why that is the case. So what might be the features that make it unethical?

First, a baby is being treated as a thing, an object, or a product – a prize to be won. It’s being reified and objectified, both of which are ethically wrong treatments of a human being. Slavery is wrong for these same reasons, among others.

The radio station is putting a price – up to $35,000 – on a baby’s head. This breaches the foundational societal value that human life is priceless and “hors de commerce” – that it’s not commensurable in money and must not be commercialized. To suggest otherwise is to disrespect the individual life in question, and human life in general.

Making conception of a baby a prize in a competition overtly cuts across any idea that the transmission of human life requires deep respect and that it should, perhaps, be governed by some sense of the sacred, even if just the “secular sacred.” It involves a trivialization of the transmission of human life, of conceiving a child, and of becoming a parent.

Might the intuition that this competition is inherently wrong stem from the fact that the radio station is taking assistance in such a momentous undertaking as having a child and making it into a game? It brings to mind a racehorse club running a competition to attract publicity, and offering as the prize the services of a stallion or mare to breed a foal.

Some people have objected because they fear the competition will bring the “fertility industry,” which is now a $12-billion-a-year industry globally, into disrepute. It might make people who wouldn’t otherwise question that industry wonder whether there are other abuses we should know about and stop (which there are). Sometimes an “everyday” example of an unethical practice, such as this competition, can have a much more powerful impact than the “exotic” examples that we are not likely to encounter personally – at least in Canada.

Even if this competition were otherwise ethically acceptable, offering this treatment as a prize in a competition that attracts notoriety by exploiting the suffering of emotionally and economically vulnerable, infertile people is wrong. The overall harms far outweigh any benefits. More than 400 people placed their hopes on the line, but only five couples won, and even their suffering has been exploited.

Finally, and most importantly, we must consider the impact on any resulting child of being won as a prize in a competition, as well as the station’s lack of ethics in creating that reality. According to the station, there has been interest in this competition from around the world. The competition rules stated that “the finalists must be willing to share their story on air (and to) be interviewed, filmed, taped and accompanied for the duration of the Contest Period.” Although the information is gathered with the couples’ consent, it also involves any future baby’s right of privacy, and raises the question: Is the station planning some sort of follow-up? Recently, some women have decided to broadcast the birth of their children live on the internet. I shudder to think of something similar happening with respect to any babies that result from this competition.

This article originally appeared in the Ottawa Citizen.