Infertile couples and the right to have a child: Warnock fudges the issue

Mary Kenny discusses the implications of the Warnock Report and concludes that it not only fudges the issue, but also appears "hopelessly inconsistent and wrongheaded".
IN the matter of fertility treatment, I think that most women instinctively sympathise with a woman who is trying to have a baby. One starts out from this point. It is always thrilling to hear from a friend or colleague that, after years of hoping for a child — one is at last born, or expected. One always hopes that someone who is having fertility treatment will be helped. For most of us, it is such a blessing to have children that those of us who have been blessed can even feel guilty about their good fortune, when others are denied it.
And it is all very well saying sternly that no one has the right to have a child — or anything else that they desire. It is true that no one has such a right — it is a gift, not a right — but there
` are some desperately hard cases.
I sat in a gynaecologist's consulting room a few months ago and could not keep back the tears as he read me a letter from a mother whose only child, a five-year-old boy, had been killed in a road accident. A postnatal infection had blocked her Fallopian tubes irrevocably, and her only change, ever, of having another baby of her own was with in vitro fertilisation. The mother's humble, tearful pleading with the specialist was simply heart-breaking. Was he going to try to help her? Yes, he was — with in vitro fertilisation treatment. I could not see how anyone, in all humanity, could refuse.
When the technique of IVF burst upon the world in 1978, I believe the common reaction was that here was a real breakthrough in helping women achieve motherhood. At the time, I also felt that the development of early embryos in the laboratory proved a point that anti-abortionists have made for many years: that life begins at conception. Dr Robert Edwards, Patrick Steptoe's partner, spoke glowingly of looking down the microscope and seeing baby Louise Brown as a person when she was just two cells.
Things have moved at an incredibly fast rate over the past six years, however, and the subject has become more dense and more complex all the time. It was quite right that the Government should appoint Dame Mary Warnock's Committee to examine test-tube research.
While the Warnock Committee was actually deliberating, the various specialists doing IVF were themselves altering their approach. If we thought that IVF began as a means of fertilising the egg of a woman with her husband's sperm, and replacing that embryo in the womb, we were deluded. Working with one embryo is not cost-effective, and does not give a useful enough chance of success. It is much more likely that the technique will succeed if you give the woman fertility drugs so that she will produce a multiple number of eggs, fertilise all the eggs, replace one, or two at most, and keep the rest as "spares".
Spare embryos have now become a routine part of IVF. And that changes the whole picture from one of a single treatment for fertility, to a brave new world of experimentation. Emboldened by the progress they have made, the scientists have come out of the closet and admitted that they "need" these extra embryos, not just as a fallback in case the first embryos do not implant properly, but for laboratory work on genetic disease.
With the manipulation of human life at this early stage have come all the other options now being mooted: surrogate motherhood, womb-leasing, and the need to look, legally, at the growing practice of artificial insemination by donor.
Fertility treatment has become not just a means of alleviating the distress of yearning women, but a Pandora's Box of scientific tricks which will lead only God knows where.
Dame Mary's Committee deliberated and took evidence, and came up with the findings that we all now know: IVF is to go ahead, within the National Health Service as well as privately, but with Government licence and control. Embryos can be stored, but must not be used for experimental work after 14 days' development. AID — whereby a woman is inseminated with the sperm of a stranger when her husband is infertile — is to be legalised. And surrogate mothering whereby a woman bears a child on behalf of another woman, and hands the child over at birth — is to be outlawed, either commercially or on the lines of traditional adoption practices. I can see that Dame Mary strove in the great English tradition of the compromise. Mindful that there are some barriers over which humanitarians would not wish to pass, she drew the line at embryonic experimentation after 14 days. I can see that it is a well-meaning attempt to define some ethics, and I appreciate what Shirley Williams said to me
by way of comment, "Surely some control is better than none at all?" Surely half a loaf is better than no bread?
The trouble is that the whole wretched thing is so hopelessly illogical. How can the law of the land decree that it is wrong to experiment with embryos at 15 days' growth and still allow abortions to take place up to 28 weeks?
How, moreover, are these experiments to be policed? If the Government cannot, or will not, police the Infant Life Preservation Act — 4,000 late abortions take place annually in this country and in many of these cases, the baby is "capable of being born alive" — how can it possibly police every reproductive laboratory in the country, every tiny embryo under a microscope? How can a Government Committee talk about respect for human life at 14 days when we openly destroy human life at 180 days?
The arguments of the scientists — that they have to experiment with embryonic life in order to research disease — were exactly the arguments used by Nazi doctors (and claimed in their defence at Nuremburg) for their work. The IVF experiments are nothing of the same gravity as those of the Third Reich, of course, but the principle is the same.
Paradoxically, too, the Warnock ban on surrogate mothering goes against the fashionable principle today that a woman's body is her own to do with it as she pleases. If a women is free to choose to destroy a pregnancy, or to refuse one, why should she not be equally free to conceive one? Surrogate mothering is at least giving life, not taking it away. In legalising AID, the Committee opens itself to the charge that the law will now be conniving at a deception. The law will now say that the father of the child is the woman's husband, when in biology it was an anonymous medical student who delivered his sperm in a laboratory for a fee. And while history is full of incidences where a wife's infidelity produced the odd stray child, that was a matter of making the best of a bad job: it was not embarked upon as a deliberate and legalistically endorsed act. It is one thing to turn a blind eye to human error: another to make it a matter of policy.
Personally, I retain great sympathy for the infertile woman, and I would not go against the original notion that a single-embryo transfer Is ethically permissible. Surrogate mothering cannot be morally right because it is fundamentally adulterous and may be damaging to the child; but instinctively I cannot condemn it because, in the last analysis, it is at least giving life, and it could be done for altruistic reasons.
But my overall reaction to the Warnock Committee proposals are that they are hopelessly inconsistent and wrong-headed. The report falls between the two stools that is the fundamental risk of compromise: it will not gratify the scientists, who are straining at the leash to experiment a lot more: and it does not, in my view, meet Christian, or Judeo-Christian, ethical principles. It fudges the issue, and within five years, it will already be regarded as out of date. Its guidelines will not be maintained. Remember how the abortion act was hedged about with protective guidelines concerning women's health risks and doctors' judgement? Sixteen years later we have abortion by convenience and effectively on demand.
1 realise that, finally, there is a basic divergence between what others would call the Catholic view of life, and the modern, scientific view. This difference is deep and radical. The modern, scientific approach tends to the idea that we have a right to do whatever we are able to do, whether that is aborting a handicapped baby just because it is handicapped, or committing suicide if we believe our lives have no further meaning. The modern, scientific view is that suffering has to be alleviated and serves no purpose.
The Catholic view — while it admits of all ethical endeavours to help humanity — is still that we must accept some conditions of life, and allow God and nature to take its course. And suffering is part and parcel of man's — and woman's condition. The modern, scientific view is that man's will is paramount. The Catholic view is that this is called pride. Thus it is to be expected that the Catholic sensibility will be finally irreconcilable with that of the secular scientist.