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The Baby Merchant by Kit Reed
01/09/2006 . Source: Sue Davies 
pub: TOR/Forge. 334 page hardback. Price: $24.95 (US), $33.95 (CAN). ISBN: 0-765-31550-5. Buy The Baby Merchant in the USA - or Buy The Baby Merchant in the UK  check out website: www.tor.com
Babies, children, eggs, donors, it's all emotive stuff. We are living in a scientific age where a 62 year-old woman can choose to have a child if she can afford it. Infertility is a real source of pain for many couples. The right to a baby of your own, if you want one, has taken over to some extent from the right not to have one.
Maury is one such person. The perfect life, a perfect celebrity marriage but one thing is mussing from this perfect existence. There are ways to get a baby but it opens up areas that should have been kept in the dark.
Sasha has a baby on the way. The result of a half-forgotten one-night stand with a forgettable companion. She is in the Newlife clinic - wayward young mums a speciality. But she's different isn't she? A student with prospects, a rich if truculent grandmother, she could have it all. Sasha's made her choice, this viable commodity she is growing inside will have a better life courtesy of the clinic. Dad has turned up though, wanting to bounce the baby on his knee and sell it to Grandma for a life of ease. Hey, his rights are being compromised after all. So Sasha runs and in doing so exposes herself to the baby merchant.
Tom Starbird helps people get what they want. He is in business, the ultimate economist, a king of supply and demand. But what they want needs changing, clothing and feeding and getting too close makes the product too real. His social service relieves over-stretched families of an additional burden. He gives the infertile hope and comfort. He helps out until the day he realises the full emotional hammer blow that a baby can deliver.
This topical tale in the days of falling fertility and closing borders will be a distressing read for those who are afflicted with the real-life crisis. The cover notes refer to 'Rosemary's Baby' but don't read this for any supernatural horror because everything here is down to earth and possible. This is an intellectual construction of an emotional web that crushes its participants. The only element of Science Fiction is the opening premise of reduced fertility and that is as close to our current reality as makes no difference.
This is a well-constructed and convincing book. It dissects society's relationships with its children. It has thriller elements but at its core is an examination of what makes us humans tick and how we learn to hide away our deepest emotions and longings. Tom Starbird's rational approach is entirely believable and it is at first easy to go along with his 'procurement' policy. What changes us and him is the drawing together of the raw grief of the mother, the feelings of the potential adoptive mother and his final realisation that he cannot stand aside from humanity.
Gripping stuff and lots of food for thought.
Sue Davies
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