A few weeks after the OctoMom story sent jaws dropping all over the world, another assisted reproduction controversy emerged: A Los Angeles fertility clinic announced a new program to screen embryos not just for sex – an increasingly common practice – but also for future children’s eye color, hair color, and skin color.

The “designer-baby service” didn’t reach the level of media super-saturation that OctoMom did. But it too prompted condemnation, enough to cause the doctor who offered it to back off, at least for now.

Where does that leave our assessment of the U.S. baby business? Millions of people have formed families through assisted reproduction, and its appropriate uses should be accessible without discrimination on the basis of marital status or sexual orientation. But as the IVF octuplets and designer-baby program demonstrate, assisted reproduction techniques can be terribly abused.

Multiple births – even triplets and twins – put mothers and babies at much greater risk than single births. Pre-ordering the sex or cosmetic traits of a child is a recipe for family discord and societal conflict. If parents pay a lot of money for a blond-haired, blue-eyed athlete but instead get a freckled poet, do they send her back? If the affluent start buying "better" babies, what new kinds of discrimination and inequality are in store?

Nearly every industrialized country has adopted regulations to protect fertility patients and their children, and to prevent unacceptable assisted reproduction practices. But not the United States. Around the world, America is known as the "Wild West" of assisted reproduction.

Instead of enforceable regulations and oversight, the U.S. relies almost entirely on voluntary guidelines issued by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the fertility industry's professional organization. But the sad fact is that the majority of U.S. fertility centers break these rules with no apparent shame or consequence. Data from the Centers for Disease Control show that more than 80 percent of U.S. clinics disregard recommendations to implant no more than two embryos at a time in young women.