Offshore Pregnancy: The Ultimate in Outsourcing

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about outsourcing, and how we all do it, to whatever extent we can afford. When it comes to outsourcing, few things are more worthy than ‘women’s work’, which is really just all the crap that no one else wants to do. The most obvious example is hiring a housekeeper, but we’ll outsource just about as much as we can get away with. I’m suggesting we bump it up a notch. I say we outsource pregnancy.

When I brought my second baby home from the hospital, I shopped for groceries online. (Why this miracle of modern society hasn’t caught on I’ll never understand.) That was outsourcing. More recently, I’ve discovered companies that prep the ingredents for a month’s worth of recipes so that all you do have to do is pop into their store and assemble the meals. They even clean up after you. (Who am I kidding – for an extra $2 they’ll put them together for you too.) Again, outsourcing.

And then there’s all that child rearing nonesense, which is why we have nannies. And school teachers.

It’s not only household tasks we hire others to do for us. Think about the team it takes to highlight, cut, mani-pedi, and peel. My dad, who is a contractor, calls it ‘subbing out your personal hygeine’. But it serves a purpose. For example, I get a regular massage so that my husband doesn’t have to make good on the silent promise his able hands made to my tired shoulders before we said ‘I do’. Outsourcing. Why not?

I pay people to scrape the crust off my feet, wash my car, and clean my toilets. They’re all crucial partners in the business of my life. I just can’t do it all. And if I wanted to get pregnant again, I’d want the option of outsourcing that too.

I’ve even found a way to make it affordable. We must outsource not to that overly fertile and financially strapped woman down the interstate; we need to go offshore, to find cheaper labor – so to speak. I’m thinking India.

They’re so good with that whole call center thing. They would ROCK surrogacy:

Hello, Mrs. Davidson. My name is Jane. I will be your baby making.

We have the technology. Between IVF and the kind of distribution genius that gets me fresh, ripe strawberries in the middle of winter, how hard can it be to ship a live embryo overseas? We’ll chose birth mothers like some people pick life partners, off a profile on a website. When it’s time, they’ll Twitter labor from the first contraction to the umbilical clip. And once the baby’s sleeping through the night (why not?), they’ll crate him up and send him home. 

Just make sure you line up that childcare.