Search

ARCHIVES
CONTACT US
WORLD NEWS

Conditional Love

Arizona Daily Wildcat

Good news. If you want to bring a life into this world, you no longer need to find a soulmate. You don't even need a date. All you need is a computer. The Web site www.ronsangels.com has placed the eggs of models up for auction and has established a trend that is dangerous for the future of humanity: Life should belong to the beautiful and not the plain.

As demographers complain that the six billion human beings on this Earth are possibly too many, more are being created simply because they are the potential children of women who are "beautiful...and between 18 and 30 years old." Meanwhile, thousands of children sit alone or in poverty in the orphanages of the world. Had their parents only been more attractive, perhaps they too could have been auctioned off.

Knowing that the eggs will quite likely be auctioned off for the sake of creating a child, the Web site says that all prospective bidders must have "substantial financial resources to guarantee that the children that are born from these matings have a financially secure and stable life."

Apparently, the only characteristic necessary for someone to be a suitable parent is financial stability.

If the site is going to concede that they have a concern over the future well-being of their eggs, it should not make financial stability the only criteria. What about the other elements of parenting - time, patience and love? Ron's Angels expressed no desire for these traits from their potential bidders.

Beauty is the trait that is driving this product. Ron Harris, the site's founder, was recently quoted, justifying his service by saying, "What mother wants an ugly child...we bid for everything else in this society, why not eggs?"

Mr. Harris must ask himself, "What mother wants a confused child?"

Are we so insecure that we are afraid to have our children be something other than physically attractive? More specifically, has physical beauty become the thing we want most in our children? More than good health or happiness? Perhaps this site would be less disturbing if the eggs purchased were joined with sperm from an equivalent site where people who had exuberant personalities. Because at least then, the child would grow up knowing they were wanted for something other than their good looks.

Parents need to love their children, not love the way they want their children to look.

By associating a bid with a potential child, the child becomes a product, and not a person.

This opens up the floodgates for problems which all consumers face.

If the product, the child, is found to be less than perfect, it could arguably be returned to the owner. Perhaps the child didn't grow up to be as beautiful as the buyer had hoped. Is this a breach of contract on the donor's part? What if they child throws a temper tantrum? Can it be taken in for repair?

Parenting should not be about building Helen of Troy, but about loving and raising Zach or Lisa or Mike or Brett.

Finally, this is Darwinian theory at its worst. There is nothing to stop one model from selling several hundred eggs, thus allowing her contribution to flood the gene pool. The world needs you, not several hundred of you.

By loving the traits we aspire our children to have, we have forgotten to love the traits our children have been given.

We have set the stage for the human harvesting, which is just a hop, skip and a jump away from slavery. If we continue to sell our future children by the traits of their parents, we stop seeing our children as what they are and start seeing them as what we bought.

Let's just hope that Ron's Angels doesn't discover one of its products is defective and issue a recall.