How many parents is too many?

In the modern world, parenthood has become a fiercely complicated business, as demonstrated last week by the news that in three years British scientists – subject to permission by the regulatory authorities – will be able to create babies with “three biological parents”. To paraphrase Dickens, the popular prejudice runs in favour of two.

The scientific detail is less flashily disturbing, and more pragmatic. There are some severe, incurable diseases – muscular dystrophy being one – passed down exclusively by the mother in the DNA of the mitochondria, which provide the power supply to the cells. Scientists are proposing to take the nucleus from that mother’s egg, and implant it into a donor egg without a nucleus. Although 99.8 per cent of the DNA of the resultant embryo, after IVF, would belong to the biological mother and father, that of the mitochondria would relate to the donor.

Sir Mark Walpole, head of the Wellcome Trust, which is funding the research, has said that the genetic impact would be “as minimal as changing the batteries in a camera”. This seems a pretty fair analogy. Mitochondria aren’t the things that determine your eye colour or musical ability, say: they’re just the enablers.

But what if scientists, somewhere in the future, were indeed able to mingle some genetic material that does help dictate “what you are” from a number of people, in order to create babies that really did have three or more “parents” in a genetically meaningful sense? It might sound far-fetched, but if such a possibility were made commercially available, I’m sure there would be as many takers as there are crazy people with cash. It would be seized upon for social reasons, and enthusiasts would spring from the ranks of cults and weirdly devoted clusters of friends to create genetically communal children, in whom all notion of a single mother or father had been erased.

Such speculation does not, of course, invalidate the serious, limited intent of the Wellcome Trust and Newcastle University research, which has quite a different purpose. But not all scientists are morally scrupulous. Plenty of them – often beyond the reach of UK regulations – like to do new stuff just to see if it can be done.

The modern world, and the development of IVF, has separated motherhood from its mechanics, creating possibilities which can be either boon or nightmare. You can become a mother without enduring a pregnancy, by paying a surrogate. Conversely, a woman can give birth to a baby biologically unrelated to her, by means of egg donation. A couple or individual can produce a child using donor sperm from a man they have never met. In the main, these technologies have been beneficial, giving innumerable infertile couples the chance to have a baby (who will often be welcomed with more thought and delight than the results of many “traditional” conceptions). Yet as fertility science advances, it also perpetually throws up a minority of shocking abuses: what starts in morality ends up in the marketplace.

From the United States, we have seen the “Octomom”, Nadya Suleman, a psychologically frail woman who carried eight of 12 implanted embryos to term: the doctor responsible was subsequently struck off. An impoverished 70-yearold Indian woman, Rajo Devi Lohan, who had taken out loans to overcome the stigma of being “barren”, was medically assisted to have a baby girl, and announced soon after that she was dying. In India, poor women sit out pregnancies in mass “surrogacy houses” to supply babies for wealthier Westerners and Indians. Some tales are merely oddly counter-intuitive: last week a US sperm donor – and biological father to 14 children – revealed that he was a virgin.

One effect of the commercialisation of motherhood has been the tendency to view babies as the end result of a procedure, rather than the beginning of a person. But that person, of course, is likely to be very interested in all aspects of his or her origins. Adopted children often have a psychological relationship with their birth mothers and fathers – or the idea of them – even when the parent in question wishes for no continued link. The writings and discussions of the children of sperm donors, for example, suggest that many think about their biological father in similar style. As such children grow in numbers, so they are gaining a voice, and society must be prepared to honour their difficult questions.

At the same time, as science moves ever faster to rearrange the building blocks of existence, we must not only consider “What is the best that could arise from this innovation?” but increasingly, too, “How can we prevent the worst?”