Embryos and lettuce
Joseph Santamaria
Melbourne Writing about in vitro fertilisation in the Spectator (30 April, 1983), James Hughes-Onslow asked of Melbourne's Monash University test-tube baby team: `Who do these people think they are?' Although their own estimate of themselves may not have changed, it is becoming clear that the inflated bubble of reputation accorded them by the media is about to burst.
In May 1982 the Victorian state govern- ment established a committee to consider `the social, ethical and legal issues arising from in vitro fertilisation'. Known as the Waller committee (after the distinguished lawyer who chairs it), it has published reports of IVF itself and the use of donor gametes in IVF procedures.
In its report on the use of donor gametes the committee, under a heading 'Confusion through the use of donor material', made the following recommendation: 'Because of the great importance the committee accords to the interests of the child and its parents in honesty and integrity in the family, the committee recommends that it shall be unlawful to use donor gametes in IVF in such a way as to confuse those concerned about the genetic background of any child born. This means that procedures such as the mixing of donor sperm, or the transfer of several embryos from different sources, should be prohibited.'
While it has long been the practice in AID programmes to mix the sperm of the donor with that of the husband in order to deprive a child of knowledge of its father, the report gives no clue as to what practices had prompted the recommendation.
Interest in the test-tube baby program- mes has revived here with the birth last month of a child which, as an embryo, had been frozen. Last week began with a report that the IVF team had on ice two embryos which had been 'orphaned' by the death of their Californian parents, Mario and Elsa Rios, in an air crash in South America. Mrs Rios, it seems, wanted to have another child after her daughter from a previous marriage was murdered in 1978. Her presence on an infertility programme remains unexplained and seems to have excited no comment.
The test-tube programme in Melbourne has proceeded merrily: the restrictions and sanctions imposed elsewhere in the world have no place here. The laborious achieve- ment of Steptoe and Edwards has been overtaken by the Monash team with its will- ingness to superovulate women and store embryos in liquid nitrogen.
The team defends itself by arguing that the removal of multiple ova from a woman overcomes the need for repeated laporo- scopies, and the transfer of multiple em- bryos increases the possibilities that at least one will implant in the uterus. The next practice on the agenda is flushing, a pro- cedure developed in America whereby a fer- tile woman is inseminated by the husband of an infertile woman and the resulting em- bryo flushed from her and transferred to the uterus of his wife. One of the members of the Monash team was reported as saying that they had not performed the flushing technique. No doubt the reporter was in- formed that the team had recommended the technique to its own ethics committee in October 1983.
The Waller committee is soon to report on embryo experiments. •Its order of priorities is curious as such experiments are the necessary preconditions of all IVF techniques. The leading scientists in the team now say they are waiting on Waller for permission to operate on embryos, not- withstanding the fact that the teams here have been up to their necks in these experi- ments for years. Research on embryos is justified on the ground that it will allow the identification of genetic diseases and genetic abnormalities. Such is the promise that the head of the team is now reported as saying that in the future women who fail to protect their unborn children against possi- ble death or serious defects could face pro- secution.
The test-tube teams have been smarting under attacks made upon them by Dr Robyn Rowland, a sociologist, who was once one of their own team involved in the counselling of infertile couples. The teams have been adroit in using a generally supine press to portray their unassailable achieve- ments: mothers and babies. It has, however, long been rumoured that failure, disappointment and depression are the usual fruits of their labours. According to Dr Rowland: `Anyone who questions medical "progress" can thus be labelled "hysterical moralists" or callous towards the infertile. Few question `Give it to me straight! There's another test-tube isn't there!' whether this technology does in fact help infertile people. It places enormous burdens and stresses on couples to the point of emotional, physical and finan- cial exhaustion, and in one case suicide. Yet it has an incredibly high failure rate as the in vitro programme illustrates; 86 out of every 100 women will "fail" to become pregnant with a "test-tube baby".'
Now that it has become clear that the test-tube babies have been used to give an acceptable face to the work of experi- menting on embryos, the debate has taken a new and amusing turn. The Catholic Ar- chbishop of Melbourne, in calling for a review of the 'callous immoral experiments on living human beings', was clobbered by a philosopher at Monash University who argued that the 'right to life must be based on morally relevant characteristics: such as consciousness, autonomy, rationality, and so on — not the mere presence of life. If it were, then every living thing, including let- tuce and the amoeba, would have a "right to life" and it would be a most serious wrong to infringe that right.'
The inability of the philosopher to distinguish between the life of a lettuce and that of a human embryo was startling enough, and will prove timely for the ex- perimenters and drug companies who thus far have been unaware of the possibility of confusion. To cap it all, the Victorian government is proposing legislation which is a wonderfully ham-fisted attempt to put the lid on the problem. The legislation would create an 'irrebuttable presumption' that the husband of a woman artificially inseminated by a third party was the father of the child born to her. Of course, none of this relates to the powers of disposal of frozen embryos. Careful preparation will be needed here lest it appear that the Victorian parliament repeals an 1807 law, sponsored through Westminister by Wilberforce, deal- ing with trade in human beings.
The scientific director of the Monash team has made a start by publicly express- ing his horror that the Waller committee might come to the conclusion that life begins at conception. We will need another irrebuttable presumption, no doubt. At the same time the Victorian parliament is proposing other legislation which will allow adopted children information about their natural parents, regardless of the arrange- ments in force and undertakings which were made in the adoption. Will not the same in- formation be sought by AID children? It is hard to say. Last week a law professor wrote: 'A semen donor who is a medical student may become a person of some eminence later in life. This information could be of considerable interest to his off- spring.'
Which brings us back to the Rios embryos. Today it was announced, by the attorney representing the interests of another Rios child, that Mario Rios is not the father of the two frozen embryos: Elsa, we are now told, was inseminated with someone else's sperm. We should have guessed.
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