A Leeds couple, Shahana and Raj Hashmi, have been given permission to create a baby to act as a bone marrow donor for their son Zain, who suffers from thalassemia. No compatible donor has been found. The couple will undergo IVF treatment with the resulting embryos being screened for both thalassemia and tissue compatibility. Any resulting baby will donate umbilical stem cells after birth.
In defending the judgement, Michael Nazir Ali, Bishop of Rochester, who chairs the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority’s ethics committee said, ‘We are minimising harm and maximising good - this is not a liberty hall for the child to be created as some sort of spare parts factory’.
The use of umbilical cord stem cells in bone marrow transplants is an exciting scientific advance, which if successful, offers the chance of a cure for otherwise fatal inherited blood disorders, with minimal risk to the donor. But in allowing preimplantation diagnosis and embryo selection in order to ensure the birth of tissue-matched donor babies, the HFEA have set an unethical and dangerous precedent.
It is unethical because the approved procedure involves destroying embryos that fail to fulfil the selection criteria. Whilst it is true that in very rare circumstances, the only way of ensuring that a tissue-matched donor is born, is to use this kind of ‘search and destroy’ technology, the end of saving a human life never justifies such means. This ruling moves the goalposts even further than before as embryos, which are of the wrong tissue type, but otherwise normal, are to be discarded in order to treat a condition which is not necessarily fatal.
The precedent is also dangerous because, despite the HFEA’s assurance that the procedure will be used only in ‘very rare circumstances and under strict controls’, the ruling is likely to lead to a slippery slope whereby designer embryos and fetuses can be created and destroyed for more and more trivial reasons. It also cannot be in the best interests of any donor child, however much they are subsequently loved, to be created for the primary purpose of providing transplant material for somebody else. And if the umbilical cord transplant fails to work, for whatever reason, then pressure may well be on the resulting child to provide stem cells via more invasive harvesting procedures.
