Outsourcing Childbirth: Surrogacy itself seems to have come out of the mommy closet, to judge from recent media coverage. The New York Times and the Boston Globe have both reported on the practice of outsourcing wombs to poor Indian women. On a recent cover of Newsweek, the abdomen of a pregnant woman appeared with the words “Womb for Rent” emblazoned upon it. The issue’s lead story, “The Curious Lives of Surrogates,” ignited a small media frenzy with its sensationalistic revelations about military wives cashing in as surrogates — in part by bilking their government-provided health plans. The attention has rekindled the debate over the morality of renting wombs. [WSJ]
Brand names ‘as old as civilisation itself’: The urge to brand products with images of macho men and curvaceous women is as old as civilisation itself, according to a new analysis. Bottle stops used five millennia ago in ancient Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq), the birthplace of cities and writing, carried symbols that marked them out as the earliest evidence of branded goods. A London based archaeologist believes that they were promotional logos, along the lines of those used by Microsoft and Nike. [Telegraph]
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