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What Could Go Wrong? UK Approves Three-Parent Babies

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We live in an anything-goes culture in which preventing suffering, or using medicine to achieve anything in life you desire, rules all.

The UK Parliament voted to approve the creation of three-parent embryos. From the BBC story:

The UK is now set to become the first country to introduce laws to allow the creation of babies from three people.
In a free vote in the Commons, 382 MPs were in favour and 128 against the technique that stops genetic diseases being passed from mother to child. During the debate, ministers said the technique was “light at the end of a dark tunnel” for families.

Proponents said the backing was “good news for progressive medicine”.

What could go wrong? Well, I noted a few things a little while ago in an article I wrote for the Center for Bioethics and Culture:

The arguments against three-parent IVF involve both safety and ethics. We already know that children born via IVF have poorer health outcomes than children conceived naturally. The danger would probably be even more pronounced with three-parent reproduction.

The technique literally uses broken eggs. Mammal cloning — which involves a similar genetic modification of eggs — can lead to terrible developmental problems during gestation and born clones often have significant health concerns. For example, Dolly the sheep died before her normal lifespan, perhaps as a consequence of being a clone.

Animals born of this method have had health problems.

There are also ethical issues:

Three-parent IVF would further the commodification of reproduction — adding to the meme that people have the right to have a baby by any means they desire — and to have the kind of baby they want. Moreover, it would further the radical social engineering of family life. For example, in a different context, the California Legislature recently passed legislation allowing a child to have three legal parents…

While the technique is being touted as a way to prevent mitochondrial disease and permit a woman so afflicted to have a biologically related child, as these things go, it could eventually be used to make novel family structures.

I understand that want-to-be mothers suffer great anguish when deciding not to become pregnant because of a heritable genetic condition. But surely, that can’t be the only consideration. The welfare of future children and the moral health of society must count for more.

But hey: No limits! What about adoption? Shut up, Wesley!

This decision might make some people happy — unless things do indeed go wrong. But it won’t leave us with much of a cohesive society when the only standard is “Do whatever you want and damn the consequences.”

Image: � julief514 / Dollar Photo Club.

Cross-posted at Human Exceptionalism.

Wesley J. Smith

Chair and Senior Fellow, Center on Human Exceptionalism
Wesley J. Smith is Chair and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Wesley is a contributor to National Review and is the author of 14 books, in recent years focusing on human dignity, liberty, and equality. Wesley has been recognized as one of America’s premier public intellectuals on bioethics by National Journal and has been honored by the Human Life Foundation as a “Great Defender of Life” for his work against suicide and euthanasia. Wesley’s most recent book is Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine, a warning about the dangers to patients of the modern bioethics movement.

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