An anti-abortion group lost its case in Britain’s highest appeals court to challenge the right for British couples to create babies via in vitro fertilization to help cure sick siblings.
UK’s Medical News Today reports:
This ruling is the result of an appeal by the Hashmi family, whose son who was born with thalassaemia major. The Hashmi’s say the only hope for their son, who is now six years old, is to create a child with the same tissue type.
Zain (the son) has to have regular transfusions plus loads of medications throughout the day. Thalassaemia major is s serious genetic disorder. Patients with thalassaemia major doe not produce enough red blood cells.
Doctors aim to take stem cells from the newborn’s umbilical cord and transplant them into Zain.
Mrs Hashmi was overjoyed with the new ruling, she said “It is nice to know that society has now embraced the technology to cure the sick and take away the pain. It has been a long and hard battle for all the family and we have finally heard the news we wanted to hear.”
Making ‘designer babies’ is a controversial subject throughout the world. Many scientists and doctors say it would cure many sick children. Some worry that this could be the beginning of more ominous things to come.
Indeed, as England’s Times Online notes, this has been a long — and emotional — case with implications throughout the world:
Two years ago Raj and Shahana Hashmi, his parents, were granted the right to have the embryo of their next baby, produced using in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment, screened to ensure its blood-type was compatible with Zain’s.
They hoped that once the baby was born, its tissue could be used in a bone marrow transplant.
Mrs Hashmi has since had a number of miscarriages and is now 40. The case continued in the courts, nonetheless, because the campaign group Comment on Reproductive Ethics (CRE) – which opposes the selection of embryos on the grounds that the unselected embryos are not given a chance of life – pressed for the High Court judgement to be overturned, claiming that the creation of designer babies was against the law.
Josephine Quintavalle, who heads the group, argued that the screening of embryos had broader implications and could be used in future to select children with particular traits, such as sex, appearance and intelligence.
Prediction: Given the passions this issue arouses, we’ll see ripple effects from this ruling in other countries…and probably not in the all-too-distant future.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.