It’s controversial, yes, but I believe we should ban IVF babies
NHS psychiatrist Max Pemberton may make you rethink your life
EVer since Louise Brown, the world’s first ‘test-tube baby’, was born in 1978, medical science has made incredible progress in developing techniques to help couples who are struggling to conceive.
these advances have bred a perception that conception is a right rather than a blessing — as well as throwing up a raft of increasingly complex ethical issues. this week, we were provided with another. While around 2,000 babies are born each year as a result of sperm donation, ever stricter regulation of the sector — including the child’s right to know its biological father — means there is a growing shortage of willing donors.
In an attempt to address this problem, the Journal of Medical ethics is proposing a scheme by which sperm is obtained from the bodies of dead men.
sperm can be harvested from corpses by electrical stimulation of the prostate, and the authors of the article say this would be ‘morally permissible’ if the donor had opted-in to such a scheme before their death — just as some organ donors currently do.
I am sure I’m not the only one who sees something sinister in this — and in the host of ethical issues it raises.
SUPPORTERS of the proposal say that sperm donation is no different from organ donation. except it is. Donating an organ doesn’t result in another human being coming into the world.
What about the psychological impact for a child who is conceived in this way?
While children conceived using the sperm of a live donor have a legal right to seek out their biological father , children conceived using the sperm of a dead man will never get to meet their father. this has the potential to bring up all sorts of complex — and mostly unanswerable questions — for the child as he or she grows up.
I will go further . I have reservations about the very concept of IVF. An entire industry has sprung up around the idea that everyone, regardless of biol - ogy, has the right to be a parent.
In the sixties, the inability to conceive was known as ‘involun - tary childlessness’ and couples had to choose between either adopting or remaining childless.
Now the condition has been given a medical gloss and called ‘infertility’, a disease that must be cured. But it’s a false promise. sally Cheshire, chair of govern - ment watchdog the Human Fertilisation and embryology Authority (HFeA), has warned that older women especially are being exploited by IVF clinics who are ‘trading on hope’.
some unscrupulous clinics extract large sums of money from those desperate to be mothers — despite the fact that they often have the tiniest chance of getting pregnant.
even for younger women, success is by no means guaran - teed. the live birth rate for women under 35 who start an IVF cycle is 40 per cent. F or women over the age of 42, the rate is 4 per cent.
Having worked with children in care, I question the ethics of the availability of IVF at all.
My view — which I appreciate is not going to be popular — is that while there are so many children in the world who desperately want and need a loving home, we should not be using technology to create more babies.
I appreciate that many people want to pass on their genetic heritage and are wary of the complex emotional aspects of adopting, especially when it comes to older children.
BUT adopting a child is an incredible act of grace and love and we should be making it easier for anyone who wants to be a parent, but who can ’t conceive naturally, to do it.
Children are amazingly resilient providing they have a stable home life. When this is taken away, they crumble and carry the damage into adulthood.
It pains me to think of the children denied the love that they need, while IVF means that many wonderful would- be adoptive parents never even consider it.