TELEVISION REVIEWS : NEW WORLD OF ‘BABYMAKER’

Before modern science got into the act, making babies was a pretty simple business. You either had them or you didn’t. But today, fancy new fertility technologies, such as in vitro fertilization, ova donations and frozen embryos, offer help and hope to couples who desperately want babies but can’t make them.

The medical, legal and ethical complications that these advances in high-tech baby making have raised are the subject of KHJ-TV’s excellent documentary, “The Babymaker” (Sunday at 8 p.m. on Channel 9).

It addresses such questions as: Do we need new laws to regulate these scientific breakthroughs? What do we do when a surrogate mother decides she can’t give up her baby? Is the contract between the surrogate mother (probably paid about $10,000 to bear the child) and the infertile couple (who paid a total fee of perhaps $30,000) valid? Are babies just being sold like chattel? Are fertility specialists playing God?

These and other as yet unresolved questions are addressed with great skill and good taste by producer, writer and director Rob Sharkey. Along the way, host Cindy Williams shows a lot of goo-gooing children, test tubes and several somewhat graphic operating room scenes of babies being born and eggs being harvested and ova being transferred and semen being inseminated. Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of whose egg is whose.

Despite a heavy cargo of biotechnical and legal jargon and lots of talking heads, however, the documentary never lags. It fairly covers all sides of a complex issue and avoids sensationalism when presenting the emotional testimony of willing surrogates and hopeful would-be mothers.

Best of all, instead of merely clamoring for a battery of new laws to be invoked, “The Babymaker” sensibly concludes that “perhaps it’s time for state and federal lawmakers to open up a public dialogue” on the issue.