HFE Bill - Writing to your MP
The following two reflections on Embryo research and the welfare of the child have been prepared by Thomas Chacko. They aim to help your own thoughts on how to represent your views to your MP, who is unlikely to be looking at the issues from a faith perspective.
Embryo research
1 Objections to hybrids
It is true that making a hybrid embryo does not obviously harm people. However, we respect human material whether or not it involves harming some specific person: for example, this is why we treat the bodies of the dead with respect: abuse of a dead body is a serious and universally abhorred crime.
1.1 We are faced with a choice as to what kind of society we build. There is no inevitability about these choices: to refuse (along with many other nations) to allow these kinds of research is not being Canute holding back the sea, and is not obscurantist. What we allow says things about our view of human importance and dignity, which will have consequences. It is not irrelevant to this that many European countries have banned the research we are about to legalise. The fact that we allow something does not necessarily mean that we are ahead and they backward: they may just take the implications more seriously.
1.2 Making human-animal hybrids blurs the line between the human and the non-human. While some affect to think this line does not matter, our society is based on ideas about our shared humanity and common dignity arising from human-ness: this is the foundation of calls for respect for human rights. Treating this border as negotiable sends out the message that the status of ‘marginal’ humans is also negotiable – and our history is stained with the evidence that we are always trying to take away the rights of inconvenient people who we would like to have outside our common humanity. Playing with the borders encourages people to think that the ambit of humanity is arbitrary, to be drawn where we like. What we do as soon as we entertain that idea that is to draw it to exclude whoever we want to oppress: the poor, the disabled, the ‘inferior’. We know from history that we are terrifyingly keen to be exclusive in this way. For this reason, we must be very careful to respect the dignity of human-ness in and of itself. Allowing hybrid embryos weakens this dramatically.
2 Science
‘This is science’ is not a killer argument to permit something. We could make progress by ordering the bodies of those who die from unusual diseases to be made available for research: but we don’t. The appalling acts of Nazi doctors did produce useful and interesting information: but that isn’t a reason to support them. Some unacceptable practices we rule out whatever the benefits: but with hybrid embryos, there don’t even seem to be any benefits in sight. Lord Winston may have claimed that 95% of scientists supported allowing this research: but 99% of scientists have no more to do with the area than anyone else. Further, as pointed out in the 15/12/07 New Scientist by Yamanaka, the Japanese scientist who succeeded in making adult cells act like embryonic stem cells, scientists engaged in a field will tend to assume that what they are doing is ethically acceptable (like everyone else) – but society must choose what to allow. We cannot surrender our judgement to them, any more than we could ask the police to decide what counted as acceptable questioning practice. We are not a technocracy governed by an elite. We have seen how uncomfortable many people are with genetic modification of plants, let alone humans. Further, it is not as if hybrid research holds any great promise. The fact that some undefined speculative benefit might arise from research is not a reason to engage in it.
3 Cloning
The only reason hybrid research has been requested so far is because it makes embryonic cloning easier. However, embryonic cloning is proving increasingly fruitless for medical purposes: all the 70 medical treatments arising from stem cells come from adult stem cells. This is why Ian Wilmut, who cloned Dolly the Sheep, has announced that he is giving up on embryonic stem cells in favour of the far more promising adult research. This Bill muddies the waters around our common humanity, raising real dangers of equivocation on human dignity, for the sake of a kind of research that is already proving less, not more, important; and with no promised medical benefit.
The Welfare of the Child
1.Considering the need for a father
1.1 Current law merely requires IVF providers to consider a child’s need for a father when deciding whether or not to provide fertility treatment. The Bill removes the requirement entirely – yet as the law stands, this is not an absolute test but a consideration. What, then, is the point of removing it? The usual reasons are that it is seen as insulting to single mothers and to same-sex couples to imply that children are better off with a man in their lives.
1.2 However, it seems that children are better off with a father-figure as well as a mother bringing them up. As human animals, we universally tend to include both men and women in bringing up children. We repeatedly hear delinquency and failure to engage with work or study blamed on a lack of male role models. While many single parents strive to bring their children up well, few would claim that it was not preferable for a child to have both a mother and a father in their life – something borne out by statistics on success in education. While same-sex couples are able to share the problems of bringing up a child as a single parent cannot, such situations are historically so rare that it is pure speculation to claim it makes no difference to a child whether it has a man and a woman bringing it up or not. Prima facie, given that we are made from a man and a woman and that it is almost universal for societies to involve both sexes in raising children, we would expect it to matter quite a lot. Ignoring this amounts to experimentation on children.
1.3 It seems improper to ignore these considerations, which are clearly relevant to the child’s welfare, simply in order to avoid insulting people. Further, this change insults fathers generally by labelling them as essentially unimportant, and we have seen from the agitation of groups like Fathers4Justice that many people already see the UK state as denigrating fatherhood: something reinforced by the recent Court of Appeal statement that a prospective father who had split from his girlfriend had no rights at all regarding the child when she wished to put it up for adoption, including no right to be told of the birth of the child (C (A Child) v XYZ County Council & Anor [2007] EWCA Civ 1206). In these circumstances, the change in the law implies that a child’s father is no more than a supplier of genetic material.
2 Surrogate mothers
2.1 It is currently impossible to form binding contracts for surrogacy. The Bill includes measures by which a surrogate mother can agree to a court declaring other people to be her child’s parents, and permits non-profit-making organisations to offer surrogacy services.
2.2 There are good reasons why surrogacy agreements should not be binding: no mother should be compelled to give up her child except for that child’s safety. The six week waiting period envisaged by the Bill before the mother can make such an agreement is insufficient. Further, formalising the machinery of surrogacy as envisaged is likely to put pressure on surrogate mothers to agree to give up their children, even though they are not allowed to be paid.
2.3 Further, the Bill seems to run on the assumption that being taken from its mother makes no difference to the child. By the time of birth a child has been listening to its mother’s voice for months: being removed is always going to be a damaging experience. There are enough children needing adoption as it is: we do not need to encourage people to have babies so as to alienate them from their mothers deliberately.
3 Right to know
Many provisions in the Bill, such as the parental orders envisaged for surrogate mothers and many of the IVF-related provisions, order registration as parents of a child people who are not in fact its biological parents. While it may be socially convenient to pretend on official documents that the situation the new parents wanted to create is the only one that ever existed, this is false. Making people feel good is not a reason to falsify official documents. In the kind of dispute where this becomes important – such as where the child wants to know who its birth mother is or where the biological parents want contact, the courts should not be hamstrung by the destruction of this information.
4 ‘Saviour siblings’
4.1 The Bill permits the selection of embryos so as to provide tissue matches for sick relatives. While one can understand the desperate situation of parents wishing to do this, the consequences for such a child are very serious. The child is envisaged as an organ donor from before its birth. This raises great difficulties with allowing the parents to give consent on the child’s behalf for its tissues or organs to be used: having given the child life in order to use it in this manner, they are likely to be biased in favour of donating even where there are serious risks involved. In Parliament Lord Darzi appeared to imply that the control of this problem would be given to the Human Tissue Authority: this is manifestly inappropriate. In any such circumstance the donor child ought to be given the protection of the courts, as its parents’ ability to choose on its behalf and discern its best interests has been fundamentally compromised.
4.2 Debate in the Lords has shown a disturbing vagueness about the circumstances in which this would be permitted: statements ranging from ‘life-threatening’ illnesses to those which are ‘serious’. Lord Winston claimed that ‘life threatening’ included diseases which merely reduced the quality of life of the sufferer. This wide freedom to choose children so as to be useful to someone else is to be left under the control of the HFEA – a body with no expertise in weighing the seriousness of the relative’s illness against the dramatic interference with the very identity of the donor child or the risks involved in using them for future organ donation.
4.3 In general, though, selecting children on the basis of whether they will be useful to someone else is in itself improper, no matter how useful to other people they may be. Each of us is important in our own right: we should not bring people into the world labeled as tools without their consent. Choosing whether an embryo will be implanted and live or be rejected and die based on such an external consideration is a huge interference with that child’s personal dignity and autonomy which is likely to stay with them throughout their lives. If the transplant fails or is prevented as too dangerous for the donor, will the parents see the donor child as a failure? Will the child see itself so?
5. Consent
5.1 The cavalier attitude to the personal dignity of each child shown by selection of a child to be useful for someone else is seen writ large in recent calls (by scientists and hospitals) for consent requirements to be relaxed when taking tissue for research from a child likely to die before it comes of age to give consent. Currently, its parents cannot consent on its behalf as (unlike a medical operation) future research cannot be of benefit to the child, so the operation cannot be in its best interests. Allowing tissues to be taken from such children (or the mentally disabled) would assist in some research.
5.2 Such a policy is incompatible with the liberal basis of UK society: there is a fundamental difference between my being generous with my own body and with someone else’s body. Even a disabled child’s body is its own: not its parents’. Those who cannot give consent to having their bodily integrity violated can have consent given for them for their own protection, but not for the common good, no matter how great that common good is. If consent is dispensable when enough science is at stake, why doesn’t that apply to adults who unreasonably refuse to give consent? The principle at stake here is the only reason why we can’t just take organs from unwilling living donors, though that would certainly save lives – my body does not belong to the rest of society. What is being called for is not the alteration of a minor regulatory rule, but for the licensing of what would otherwise be a serious crime – whether it is skin or a kidney that is being asked for. This is especially worrying for its application to disabled children, who are probably the group in society most at risk of having their rights ignored.
6. Children are not given life for the parents’ benefit.
Central to all of these problems with the Bill is the way that children seem to be treated as existing for the benefit of their parents. The wishes of a single woman to experience motherhood trump any need of a child to have a man in its life; the wishes of a couple to adopt a very young child that has been earmarked for them without the messy personal histories of adoptees and foster children trump the fact that this involves setting up a child for removal from its mother. This Bill sends out the message that a child is another life-enhancing device that some people want. This is not an appropriate way for us to think about other human beings.