Snowflake babies and Nobel sperm.

Two articles in today's NYT caught my eye.

There's this front-page article about "snowflake babies," grown from embryos produced by fertility clinics:

People on this part of the political spectrum have begun calling the process "embryo adoption," echoing the phrase that Snowflakes uses instead of "embryo donation." The Health and Human Services Department has termed the process embryo adoption in certain grants. Bills that would formally call it "embryo adoption" have begun to filter into statehouses in California, New Jersey and Massachusetts, states that, not coincidentally, are at the forefront of legalizing and encouraging embryonic stem cell research.

The adoption terminology irritates the fertility industry, abortion rights advocates and supporters of embryonic stem cell research, who believe that the language suggests - erroneously, they maintain - that an embryo has the same status as a child.

But for some conservative Christians, that is precisely the point.

The children are sometimes dressed in T-shirts that say "snowflake baby" and used in political displays.

The second article is a review of a book about "the rise and fall of the Repository for Germinal Choice, the sperm bank that opened in 1980 and purported to offer top-echelon sperm -'dazzling, backflipping, 175 IQ sperm' - courtesy of Nobel Prize winners." The "genetically ambitious" pregnancy-seeking clients of this place were quite different from the embryo-adopters.

So, what do you think? Is it good or bad for women to use their capacity to produce children in either of these ways? At least in the case of a woman who needs to employ modern technology to become pregnant, what is wrong with acting out your religious beliefs by adopting an embryo that would otherwise be destroyed or experimented upon, and what is wrong with seeking out the best possible sperm? Do we worry that the child will be mistreated, that the parents will think of their child in the wrong way? Do we worry that the women in question will have the wrong religious beliefs or the wrong ideas about what good sperm is?

UPDATE: I'm thinking that there are a lot of people who believe in "choice" when it comes to abortion rights who don't really endorse choice when the woman produces a child, because this woman exercising choice then has a real child under her control, and we may worry about the consequences. If you have that split view of choice, you reveal your mistrust in women. Then there's the split view of the other way: you oppose abortion but you approve of broad autonomy in letting women use various methodologies of reproduction and in acting out their religious, political, social, and intellectual goals through their children.