Most people object to markets in babies. I disagree, at least in the case of the gamete markets. I take this position because market mechanisms provide unique opportunities for law and culture to recognize that people form families in different ways. If state or federal law, rather than the laws of supply and demand, determines who can have children using reproductive technologies, then many single and gay people likely will be excluded from this important life experience. Moreover, many children will not have the chance to be born at all. Gamete markets allow some minorities – those who, by virtue of their numbers, are unlikely to obtain legal rights and protections through the legislative process – to skirt the majoritarian morality that would otherwise prevent them from forming families.

Majoritarian hostility to families headed by gay and single parents often finds expression in legislative enactments such as the 1996 Welfare Reform, Defense of Marriage Acts, and popular opposition to decisions such as Goodridge v. Dept. of Health, in which the supreme judicial court of Massachusetts overturned the legislative ban on same-sex marriage. Supporters of measures protecting so-called traditional families (and harming so-called nontraditional families) often make moral arguments that heterosexuality and two-parent families are natural, relegating others to the category “unnatural.” Moral or natural are flexible terms that carry multiple meanings such as “inevitable” (“it's only natural”) or “mandated by either biology or God” (i.e., designating nonprocreative acts as “crimes against nature”).