He … [romances] the pieces of cardboard ignoring the real, living female butterfly. Amazing, isn't it?

However, it's not too unlike some of us consumers. We're attracted to, and want to be a part of the consumerist culture which has grown into a powerful, all consuming parallel culture. It can make us look good, feel good, important or whatever. While caught in its spiral, it's not the real things we're attracted to, but like the butterfly, we flirt with "cardboard-offerings" as it were, never making a genuine commitment to the real choices that surround us, thus succumbing to the all pervasive, impressive trappings of the market culture.

To many of us the market makes most things look and feel and taste like the real thing, or sometimes even like something better. What matters is that through these tactics the market makes a real difference in the manner and quality of the day to day as well as the future life of multitudes of consumers who make choices led by the market. They come to genuinely believe that they have bought them selves a 'better' life, except as the bible says:" You will know them by their fruit.

Grapes aren't gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles, are they?" and indeed it is the health of our future generations and our environment which will reflect the implications of choices we made and are making everyday.

'Our fruit' shows whether our work and the options we chose are genuine or "just cardboard". Consumers today can shop around for their 'fruit' as well, but like for the butterfly, there are unforeseen problems. You bargain and pay for one kid but unlike in the 'commodities' market you may end up getting eight and then work out the profit and loss of this deal for the rest of your life.

Last month front pages of international newspapers reported that the delivery of eight babies in five minutes was 'amazing' for the doctors in attendance and 'incredibly courageous' for the mother. But what really caught the attention of the rest of us was not the medical success of the delivery team of doctors but the implied failure of fertility treatment, an available choice, which is gaining ground amongst hopeful consumers. The logistic problems of this case surfaced when it became known that Nadya Suleman, the blessed mom of octuplets already had six children and now the altogether fourteen children had no father, just a sperm donor, as they were the result of 'in vitro fertilization'.

In India, each child born through technological intervention should raise questions about how each pregnancy and the resulting child and its rearing are not a matter of 'individual choice,’ but also collective responsibility and about the increasing role of technology in the everyday choices of the most intimate or mundane kind in consumer lives. Here what needs to be considered is that regulations are
required in the emerging field of fertility technology. India has had its share of intense debate about:

"does anyone have a right to tell anyone else how many kids to have?". "Can only people who can afford them bear children?". These are questions that have had harsh political and social consequences earlier, therefore they now need to be reconsidered in the light of their long-term consequences.

We need to understand exactly what's happened since reproduction became a business because we now have tens of thousands of children born every year through fertility drugs and IVF. Fertility doctors are only interested in what bioethicist Arthur Caplan calls "a wallet biopsy" to see if the people wanting children through these technologies can pay the bill.

This 'miracle of life'—a result of infertility treatment for an unemployed, single mother of six, by implanting eight embryos in her womb is nothing but 'malpractice'. Laws are far more rigorous about adoption than for fertility treatments or about limiting the number of embryos that can be implanted in one womb. Given the extraordinary high risk of multiple pregnancies for mothers and babies, anyone who endangers patients ought to lose their license. All this needs close consumer scrutiny and stringent rules and regulations about human reproduction through medical and technical intervention.

Dr.Roopa Vajpeyi Hony.Editor