Ethics of designer children
By Moyra Ashford
LONDON (IPS): More than 10 years ago, people around the globe were alternately fascinated and repelled by the advent of test tube babies, or children who were conceived in a laboratory instead of a bedroom.
But a battery of new phrases -- all relating to a highly emotional debate on the ethics of using artificial methods of procreation -- have since been added to the English language, especially in the past few months.
The new phrases, some scientific, some not, include "granny mothers", "designer babies", "pick-and-mix-kids", color- controlled children" and, the so-called "yuk-factor" -- a phrase describing the revulsion many feel about the whole matter.
Behind each phrase lies a scientific advance and an ethical dilemma. If 1993 was the year that science fired a volley of new quandaries, 1994 promises to be the year that they are thrashed out in public.
The debate is already raging. Says Stuart Horner, chairman of the British Medical Association's 18-strong Ethics Committee: "A Pandora's box has been opened."
Every day we find something that raises an ethical problem to which we don't know the answer," says Professor Daniel Cohen, director of the Centre d'Etude du Polymorphisme Humain in Paris. "I feel that society should decide."
First there was the case of the twins born last Christmas to a wealthy, healthy 59-year-old British businesswoman. They had been conceived in an Italian laboratory, run by controversial gynecologist Severino Antinori, from a donor's eggs fertilized by the sperm of the businesswoman's 45-year-old husband.
New dimensions
This year the debate has taken on new dimensions with news that a black woman in Italy, married to a white man, had opted for a donor egg from a white woman on the grounds that the child would have a better chance in life if it were white.
In Britain, Peter Brinsden, a fertility expert at the Bourne Hall clinic in Cambridge, revealed that more than 20 couples -- black, Asian, Chinese and mixed -- had approached him for a child with European features.
He had turned down all except one couple, where the woman was black and the husband of mixed race, because the couple had waited in vain for four years for a black donor egg. Brinsden said he had agreed to implant the egg of a white woman.
"I am not being racist but mixed race children can suffer (from discrimination) in life and if there's a benefit they can receive, then why not?" he told journalists. "The trouble is, at what degree of color or shading do you draw the line?"
For those able to pay, gender-selection is already a reality. The private London Gender Clinic in Hendon, north London, has successfully performed more than 100 selection under the guidelines of the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, an organization set up three years ago to supervise Britain's 110 fertility centers.
Recently, the Sunday Times newspaper revealed that scientists at Edinburgh University have developed a technique whereby the eggs from an aborted female fetus can be grafted to the ovary of sterile adult females, enabling then to give birth.
The team have already performed the operation successfully on mice. They think it could be done with humans within five more years.
To get an ethical go-ahead, the team has taken the unprecedented step of throwing the debate open to the public.
So far, reaction has tended to follow the "yuk factor." "It is a sinister Orwellian development," said Dame Jill Knight, head of the ruling Conservative party's backbench health committee.
Opinions
On a BBC radio phone-in program that devoted some time to the issue, callers' opinions ranged from the childless couple who welcomed the idea to the adopted woman who asked what parents would tell a child who was the "result" of a mother who had never been born.
The question of consent was raised: what if the aborted pregnancy was the result of rape? A woman who had suffered a hysterectomy suggested a national ovary bank and "donor cards" similar to those held by people willing to become kidney donors.
Some callers could see no reason why a fertile career woman should not store her own eggs in a laboratory and then give birth after the menopause. The same technique can be used for women about to undergo cancer therapy that could render them infertile.
The BMA ethics committee and the HFEA, are both due to present reports soon. Specifically, the BMA committee is currently debating the question of fetal ovaries.
Virginia Bottomley, Britain's Minister of Health, has proposed a joint effort among European health ministers to explore what she described as "ethical controls" to deal with potential abuses of medical technology that extends a woman's child-bearing years.
"Women do not have the right to have a child," she said last month. "(But) the child has a right to a suitable home."