Daily Mail, August 5 2002

People may be forgiven for feeling bewildered, even repelled, by recent developments in assisted reproduction and the manipulation of embryos. The science of fertility is hurtling ahead at supersonic speed, leaving our ethical values torn to shreds in its slipstream.

Michelle and Jayson Whitaker have been refused permission by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to create a ‘designer baby’ to produce a tissue match for their three year-old son, Charlie, who suffers from a rare and life-threatening form of anaemia. Yet six months earlier, the HFEA gave permission to Shahana and Raj Hashmi to create a similarly tissue-typed baby to provide cells for their three year-old son, Zain, who suffers from a potentially fatal genetic blood disorder.

The HFEA says the two cases are crucially different because unlike Zain Hashmi, Charlie Whitaker does not suffer from a hereditary genetic disease. So any new Whitaker baby would be unaffected.

The rules state that tissue-typing can only take place to prevent any future baby from suffering the same disease. It cannot be used solely to benefit an existing child. That’s why it was permitted with the Hashmis, to screen out any embryos that might be carrying the fatal disorder, but not with the Whitakers, whose future babies would be normal.

That’s all very well as far as it goes. But the HFEA’s distinction fails to address the central issue of using one child to benefit another, which surely applies to the Hashmis as well as to the Whitakers. The danger is that any such ‘designer’ children will think they have been chosen and others discarded principally to save a sibling’s life.

What if the attempt fails and the older child dies or remains seriously ill? And might the parents feel differently towards the child that needs to be saved and the baby they have brought into the world to provide that help? Children need to be valued for themselves. They should never be used as commodities.

But that’s precisely what they’ve become through all this mucking around with human embryos. Last week it was revealed that Natallie Evans of Trowbridge, Wiltshire, had 11 of her eggs fertilised with her lover’s sperm and stored before losing her ovaries to cancer. But after their relationship broke down her lover, Howard Johnston, asked for the embryos to be destroyed.

The reason he gives is revealingly tawdry: he is afraid that he might be chased for financial child support. He has shown no concern that he abandoned these embryos, nor that he wants all 11 of them to be destroyed. His ex-girlfriend is challenging the embryo destruction in court because all she wants, she says, is to have children. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that fatherlessness might not be in those children’s interests.

Indeed, the interests of these potential children are not in the frame at all. That is because embryos have been generally dehumanised: suspended in time and space, detached from their biological or genetic moorings, destroyed in vast number. And that is because the delivery of adult happiness simply drives out any other interests that may conflict.

Of course, it is all very well to say this if one is fortunate to be the parent of a healthy child. And of course it is a tragedy if people become infertile through cancer. Surely, it might be argued, one should rejoice if science permits them subsequently to have their own children? Surely it is heartless to deny the gift of healthy children to those whom nature has cruelly cheated?

But the belief that nothing should stand in the way of human happiness has driven medical science into ethical chaos, in which the fulfilment of adult desires has come to threaten the interests of children and of society as a whole. The same argument was used (against the HFEA’s judgment) to justify Diane Blood using her late husband’s sperm to produce two children, despite the obvious risks posed to the emotional well-being of posthumously created children and their relationship with their mother.

The architect of Britain’s fertility laws, Baroness Warnock, herself illustrates the prevailing confusion. She once thought that sperm donors should remain anonymous. Now she believes that children conceived by this method should be able to trace their parentage because of the acute distress caused by not knowing where they came from, so visible among such unfortunates.

And yet she supports other developments which pose an even greater threat to personal identity. Her 1984 report which formed the basis of our embryology law said that cloning should be proscribed. But in her new book, Making Babies, she says that if cloning should ever become physically safe, it should be allowed as a last resort in cases of male infertility.

She places her faith in governmental controls to prevent any mad dictator producing a Brave New World where human characteristics would be manipulated to exclude undesirable traits. But such an outlandish scenario is unnecessary; we are well on the way to screening out undesirable characteristics already. We don’t need an Aldous Huxley to anticipate an entirely humdrum nightmare: that if man clones himself to produce a ‘son’, the relationships that would arise from creating his ‘child’ out of his ‘twin’ would be simply abhorrent.

Cloning is utterly inimical to human flourishing. Yet it isn’t surprising that Lady Warnock has warmed to the idea, since her thinking conveniently manages to shift the ethical goalposts to satisfy the burgeoning demands of a society which has made a fetish of the self. Thanks to her, we have turned procreation into manufacture with barely a qualm.

For it was her committee in 1984 which first set us on the path into this swamp. It held that an embryo did not deserve protection until 14 days’ gestation, an utterly arbitrary benchmark created purely to open a window of opportunity for research to take place on unprotected embryos.

This was the crucial watershed. It meant that early human life was to be used to benefit others. Implicit in this was the understanding that there were no intrinsic or unalterable values any more. Instead, ‘ethics’ depended on a wholly subjective definition of what might be useful in making people happy. Morality, in other words, was to be made up as we went along.

Using life as a means to an end cannot be anything other than dehumanising. And indeed, children have been turned into artefacts. Artificial insemination by donor first bust the biological link between parents and children. In-vitro fertilisation turned it into a multi-million pound business -- in which the vast majority of infertile couples are, in fact, cruelly disappointed.

Surrogacy, genetic manipulation and cloning are further turning children into commodities to be created, frozen, or destroyed -- the instruments of adult desires, regardless of children’s need for genetic integrity or biological attachments.

The result is a quagmire in which the respect for human life on which freedom and security depend is now threatened, along with the essence of humanity itself.

Posted by admin at August 5, 2002