Fertility industry loves an ‘ethical minef ield’

MORE than four decades after Louise Brown, the world’s first test tube baby, was born we are still dazzled by what reproductive technology can achieve. It’s hard to get our heads around the marvel of a child being conceived just five years after their parents, as has happened in Oregon USA when the oldest babies in the world were born from twin embryos frozen in 1992.

The twins began life as embryos created through IVF for an anonymous married couple who ultimately donated them to the US’s National Embryo Donation Centre. That was 30 years ago, while Bill Clinton was in the White House and their father Philip Ridgeway, whose wife Rachel was implanted with the foetuses, was only five.

The Ridgeways, who have other children, wanted embryos for whom it would be difficult to find recipients. ‘I was five years old when God gave life to (the twins), and he’s been preserving that life ever since,’ said Philip. ‘In a sense, they’re our oldest children, even though they’re our smallest children.’

IT’S rare to hear God’s name invoked in relation to reproductive technology, a realm that operates by its own infallible logic. The Ridgeways put their trust in God like fertility experts place their faith in technology and biology. Thirty years is nothing in evolutionary terms but as long as the human genome continues to surprise, there may come a time when freezing embryos indefinitely is banned lest the humans they produce are less adapted for their environment than those from younger embryos.

You won’t hear those reservations though from the fertility industry. Dr Jim Toner, a fertility specialist told CNN: ‘It doesn’t seem like a sperm, or an egg or embryo stored in liquid nitrogen ever experiences time. It’s like that Rip Van Winkle thing. It just wakes up 30 years later and it never knew it was asleep.’

Trust him to put the most positive spin on things.

When IVF was originally finetuned, there was heated debate about whether it was ethical. But as social values progressed, the ethics have moved onto issues like ownership of embryos, upper age limits, how many times should one person donate genetic

material, children’s right to know their identity, donors’ anonymity and parental privacy.

TV presenter Brian Dowling touched on some of these thorny issues as he complained about the homophobia directed at him and his husband since they had a baby via a surrogate.

‘People are obsessed with DNA and biology,’ he remarked about the constant queries about his daughter Blake’s biological father and her egg donor from Portugal.

Brian, whose sister Aoife was a surrogate, would be the first to admit that the road to baby Blake’s creation is unique.

Yet, as with every other advance in reproductive technology, it’s bound to become more commonplace, particularly for rich people.

IN THAT sense, it’s as well to accept that curiosity about our biological origins seems to be a primitive urge that can’t just be swatted away as ‘utterly meaningless’ as is often the habit of the fertility industry. Recently a High Court judge lambasted the State for dragging its heels over surrogacy legislation.

Our legal definition of motherhood as whoever gives birth to the child irrespective of their genetic link means that mums like Rosanna Davison,

whose daughter Sophie was born by surrogate, are not the child’s legal parent, only their guardian.

Couples who long for a child will go wherever they can to realise their dream, legally. The State must legislate for this. Yet the State also is responsible for financially desperate women who may be enticed into surrogacy as an easy payday, so it has banned commercial surrogacy here while recognising it abroad.

The ethical minefield thrown up by reproductive technology is so complex that rather than regulation and uneasy compromise, governments often put their heads in the sand over issues like open donation and surrogacy. Which is just how the fertility industry likes it.