The press
Bossing the embryos
Paul Johnson
Considering the fuss Fleet Street has been making about what it terms 'test tube babies' and 'rent-a-wombs', I thought that its coverage of the Warnock Report on human fertilisation and embryology was rather patchy and failed to raise some of the fundamental issues. There was general praise for the Report itself. In a leading article, the Guardian thought it 'calm and balanced', full of 'conspicuous virtues'. 'As a text for the political debate which is to follow,' it concluded, 'Warnock could hardly have been improved upon'. 'The Warnock Report,' Katharine Whitehorn wrote in the Observer, 'is a triumph of com- mon sense over theology. Its detailed, sensi- ble and far-sighted recommendations deal not with the abstractions of fanatics, but with what ordinary people mostly feel and do.' I note without comment Miss Whitehorn's assumption that theology is the opposite of common sense and the pro- vince of 'fanatics', and the excited sub-head on her article — 'the government will need to act speedily on its recommendations if Aldous Huxley's vision of our genetic future is not to come to pass'. Most papers took it for granted, as did Dame Mary Warnock and her colleagues, that the government had to `do something', though the committee differed on the degree of restrictiveness. One of its members, David Davies, writing in the Tunes, defended his minority recommenda- tion that, although the Government should
an all commercial surrogate-mother agen- cies, they ought to be legal if they did not make a profit. In my simplicity I assume that businesses which make profits are more likely to be well-run than businesses which don't. Is Mr Davies saying he does not object to agencies dealing with surrogacy provided they are inefficient? Of course among the middle-class liberals of which such committees are mainly composed, the notion of any form of commercialism is distasteful, and 'profit' is a naughty word, much worst than the old four-letter ones.
No paper I have seen asked the funda- mental question: why should the state in- terfere in these matters at all? There are, as it happens, inconsistencies in our attitudes to the moral issues raised by our growing knowledge of biological processes. The state has only recently withdrawn its legal ban on abortion in any form, and now per- mits the embryo to be destroyed, or murdered, up to 28 weeks from conception. In this case the destruction is carried out with no direct social purpose at all, merely (in effect) on the desire of the mother, and in accordance with the moral principle that 'a woman should decide what happens to her own body'. Now, however, the War- nock Committee comes along and says that, once the embryo is 14 days old, you can destroy it but you may not carry out experi- ments on it. In the Observer, Katharine Whitehorn noted this inconsistency, only to dismiss it as a mere debating-point likely to be made by 'the anti-abortionists'. It seems to me a very substantial point. According to the Guardian, Dame Mary was asked to ex- plain the reason for the 14-day limit and replied: `If one put the question, When did I become Me, the answer would be 14 days and not before'. The distinguished philosopher did not reveal the process of ratiocination by which she reached this arbitrary conclusion, but one is surely per- mitted to ask: if the state declares that I become Me after two weeks, why does it allow 'Me' to be annihilated for a further 26? As it happens, there is disagreement among the experts about the Warnock 14-day rule. Violet Johnstone and Carolyn Cloan, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, pointed out that the Royal College of Obstetricians and - Gynaecologists' 1983 Report put the limit at 18 days, and that one leading embryologist has suggested 30-40 days for the limit on experiments `when there is a great deal of information to detect abnormalities which might arise in the future'. In any case, how can anyone, even the most experienced expert, pro- nounce authoritatively on such a point? It is all a matter of opinion or, as some would say, a 'value judgment'.
Moreover, such judgments are bound to be influenced by increasingly rapid changes not only in our state of knowledge but in practical applications of it. The Sunday Telegraph quoted one member of the Com- mittee, Mrs Jean Walker, as saying: 'Frozen embryos didn't exist when we started the inquiry, but by the time we finished, the first baby had been born!' I suspect that, if work now being carried out in laboratories all over the world, but not yet published, were available, many of the assumptions in the Report would already be called into question.
So I'm surprised that so many papers echoed the pleas for rapid statutory enact- ment of the Report's main recommenda- tions, and in particular for the setting up of an ugly-sounding quango to issue licences and generally to boss people about. Naturally such committees tend to recom- mend more quangos: the kind of people who serve on the committees usually get appointed to the quangos, which epitomise the (to me) insufferable nanny-mentality of middle-class establishment liberals, the legion of the Great and the Good. But Parliament should hesitate before setting up another of these objectionable bodies and endowing it with statutory powers of life and death.
It's worth remembering that in 1980 a determined effort was made by similar do- gooding busybodies to prevent American firms specialising in genetic engineering from taking out copyrights in their pro- ducts. The Supreme Court voted down the proposed ban by a narrow majority. if the ban had gone through it would have killed the biotechnology industry stone dead, which was what the banners wanted. As it is, copyright protection has produced huge investments, and the first results are now coming through in the fields of preventive and curative medicine (and many others).
Modern Britain swarms with interven- tionists who believe that, if anyone does anything new, the Government must immediately enact a law to control it, and preferably add a statutory body to admin- ister the law. The likelihood is that, if Parliament legislates about embryology now, it will be obliged to repeal or revise the law within a few years just to keep up with scientific progress. Far better, pace War- nock, for parliament to wait and see, and in the meantime — just for once — allow peo- ple to make their own arrangements.
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