Post by Sapphire Capital on Feb 7, 2009 5:03:19 GMT 4
The Debt Financing of Parenthood
Melissa B. Jacoby
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - School of Law
Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 72, No. 3, 2009
UNC Legal Studies Research Paper No. 1335534
Abstract:
In this contribution to the symposium Show Me the Money: Making Markets in Forbidden Exchange, I explore an under-appreciated participant in the assisted reproduction and adoption industries: consumer lenders, particularly repeat playing lenders. Through fertility clinics and third-party providers of money-back guarantees, financial institutions market and distribute assisted reproduction loans to finance acquisition of treatments, drugs, and eggs. Adoption foundations and agencies advertise for-profit secured and unsecured loans to intended parents, as well as loans by small foundations that may condition loan approval on intended parent characteristics such as religious observance, marital status, sexual orientation, and adherence to traditional gender roles. These loans, and the concept of parenthood debt, raise too large an array of research questions to be considered in a single symposium contribution. In this piece, I observe that integration of consumer lending with assisted reproduction and adoption suggests that some time spent debating the desirability of a hypothetical parenthood market might be better invested seeking to improve the market that does. This is particularly true to the extent that loans complicate a common narrative that assisted reproduction is financially inaccessible to intended parents of modest means, and thus the assumption that this unregulated market is relatively limited in scope. This article refrains from offering a grand assessment of whether the entry of lenders improves this market or makes it worse, but offers three examples of how lenders potentially alter the political economy.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1335534_code224683.pdf?abstractid=1335534&mirid=1
Melissa B. Jacoby
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - School of Law
Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 72, No. 3, 2009
UNC Legal Studies Research Paper No. 1335534
Abstract:
In this contribution to the symposium Show Me the Money: Making Markets in Forbidden Exchange, I explore an under-appreciated participant in the assisted reproduction and adoption industries: consumer lenders, particularly repeat playing lenders. Through fertility clinics and third-party providers of money-back guarantees, financial institutions market and distribute assisted reproduction loans to finance acquisition of treatments, drugs, and eggs. Adoption foundations and agencies advertise for-profit secured and unsecured loans to intended parents, as well as loans by small foundations that may condition loan approval on intended parent characteristics such as religious observance, marital status, sexual orientation, and adherence to traditional gender roles. These loans, and the concept of parenthood debt, raise too large an array of research questions to be considered in a single symposium contribution. In this piece, I observe that integration of consumer lending with assisted reproduction and adoption suggests that some time spent debating the desirability of a hypothetical parenthood market might be better invested seeking to improve the market that does. This is particularly true to the extent that loans complicate a common narrative that assisted reproduction is financially inaccessible to intended parents of modest means, and thus the assumption that this unregulated market is relatively limited in scope. This article refrains from offering a grand assessment of whether the entry of lenders improves this market or makes it worse, but offers three examples of how lenders potentially alter the political economy.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1335534_code224683.pdf?abstractid=1335534&mirid=1