Skin cell babies

Rory Leishman:

In yet another deeply disturbing development in the rapidly evolving science of in vitro fertilization (IVF), Professor Shoukrhat Mitalipov of the Oregon Health and Science University announced in a paper published in Nature Communications on Sept. 30 that a research team led by him has succeeded in transforming human skin cells into human eggs.

Mitalipov anticipates that once this technique has been perfected — a process of trial and error that could take years — “The largest group of patients who might benefit would be women of advanced maternal age.” Among other potential beneficiaries, he cites women who have been rendered infertile by chemotherapy. In addition, he explained: “You could make eggs for men, and that way, of course, this would be applicable to same-sex couples.”

That is to say, Mitalipov foresees the day when IVF technicians could create a human egg from the skin cell of one male in a same-sex couple, fertilize it with the sperm of the man’s partner and then have a surrogate mother give birth to a baby having genetics from both men, but no biological mother.

Mitalipov expressed no concern about the risks for the well-being of babies with only male parents. Given the vast amount of social science evidence confirming that, on average, children thrive best under the care and guidance of their own biological mother and father, Mitalipov and like-minded colleagues display a callous disregard for the welfare of the IVF children they would deliberately create with either no biological mother or no known biological father.

That is not the worst of it. By means of IVF, Mitalipov and his team fertilized 82 eggs derived from skin cells with natural sperm. Seven survived to the beginning of the embryo stage six days after fertilization and were then discarded – that is, destroyed.

That is typical of IVF: It invariably entails the deliberate killing of some human beings and the freezing of others. As long ago as the 1960s, Paul Ramsey, an internationally renowned professor of bioethics at Princeton University, deplored the mass killing of viable human embryos by practitioners of IVF. In a seminal article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1972, he denounced IVF as fundamentally incompatible with due respect for the sanctity of human life and called for a complete legal ban on the death-dealing procedure.

Ramsey was a Methodist with a PhD in theology from Yale University. Ironically, the principal opponent of his pro-life viewpoint in the 1960s was a fellow Christian, Joseph Fletcher, an Episcopalian priest and professor in the Harvard Divinity School. In 1966, Fletcher published Situation Ethics: The New Morality, a bestseller in which he argued that there are no fixed moral rules. For a Christian theologian, that was, of course, an odd argument inasmuch as Jesus urged his followers to abide by the 10 Commandments handed down by God to Moses, including the immutable moral rule “Thou shalt not kill.”

Nonetheless, Fletcher insisted that a person should not look to the natural or divine law for guidance, but choose in any situation “the course of action that is most likely to contribute to human well-being.” Unlike Ramsey, Fletcher denied the sanctity of all human life. In his opinion, the only human beings with a right to life are “self-aware” persons who are “consciously related to others.”

On this basis, Fletcher had no objection in principle to abortion, euthanasia, IVF, or even infanticide. In a notorious article published in The Atlantic in 1968, he argued that a Down syndrome baby is not a person with a right to life. He also held that “the only difference between the fetus and the infant is that the infant breathes with its lungs.” Therefore, he concluded, the mother of a Down syndrome baby has “no reason to feel guilty” about aborting the baby or, if born alive, “putting the baby away, whether it’s ‘put away’ in the sense of hidden in a sanitarium or in a more responsible lethal sense.”

Mitalipov and other IVF researchers are no better than Fletcher in that their justification for routinely killing unwanted IVF embryos also implies that the parents of a handicapped baby should have no qualms about having a physician deliberately kill their child either inside or outside the womb.

Postscript: Having decided that Jesus was a fallible man who misunderstood morality, Fletcher deduced that Christianity makes no sense. However, unlike most progressive clerics, he did not just keep silent about his loss of faith and carry on preaching. Instead, in the late 1960s, he publicly renounced all belief in God. Yet even as an avowed atheist, Fletcher carried on teaching in the Harvard Divinity School.

Read original article