Designer babies made to order: Wacko Jacko isn't alone, you know

AMONG the many bizarre moments in Michael Jackson's interview with Martin Bashir, broadcast on TV3 on Monday night, was the pop star's claim that the mother of his third child, Prince Michael II, 'can't handle' contact with her child.

Which is a great pity, because if the mother was around she might have prevented Jackson from dangling the unfortunate child over a hotel balcony railing in Berlin some months back.

Maybe not. Jackson has three children now and their mothers seem to have no influence in their lives.

In what looks like a dodgy surrogacy arrangement, Jackson's ex-wife and former plastic surgery nurse, Debbie Rowe, reportedly earned 30 million to carry his first two children.

Whether she can 'handle' contact with her children or not is academic. She has to give about a month's notice before she can see them, according to some reports.

We are quite correct to ask questions about Michael Jackson's fitness to be a father. But in his 'consumer' attitude to children he doesn't differ that much from some of the great and good in our society. Take Baroness Mary Warnock, the chairperson of the UK Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology and the single biggest influence on UK laws governing assisted human reproduction. In her latest book, 'Making Babies,' Warnock demonstrates just how permissive she has become about human reproduction since the UK government first entrusted her with responsibility in this area in the early 1980s.

She would allow reproductive cloning in extreme cases, surrogacy, IVF for homosexual couples, the storage of embryos to postpone childbirth (until career objectives are met), and even the design of a child to donate spare parts to a sibling.

More controversially, Warnock enthusiastically supports experimentation on human embryos. Recently she expressed her 'regret' for once using words such as 'respect for the embryo.'

"You cannot respectfully pour something down the sink which is the fate of the embryo after it has been used for research, or if it is not going to be used for research or for anything else," she now explains. "I think that what we meant by the rather foolish expression 'respect' was that the early embryo should never be used frivolously for research purposes."

Thus, according to Baroness Warnock, human embryos don't deserve respect because we kill them off when they are no longer any use to us. But even though they don't deserve respect, they still shouldn't be used 'frivolously for research purposes.'

Hello? Isn't there something of a contradiction here?

Surprisingly, even though the baroness has no respect for embryos, our own Commission on Human Reproduction seems to have a lot of respect for her. She has been asked to present a paper on the 'international context' of assisted human reproduction at the commission's 'public conference' in Dublin Castle tomorrow.

This commission was established by the Minister for Health, Micheál Martin, "to prepare a report on the possible approaches to the regulation of all aspects of assisted human reproduction and the social, ethical and legal factors to be taken into account in determining public policy in this area."

So far, so good. Since the birth of the world's first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, in 1978, we have ridden a roller-coaster of reproductive technology and the techniques themselves went forth and multiplied. Artificial insemination for couples, the use of anonymous sperm and egg donors for infertile couples, commercialised harvesting of women's eggs, surrogate parenting for homosexual and heterosexual parents, embryo freezing, disposal of surplus embryos, implantation of surplus embryos near the woman's cervix (so that they won't survive), embryo screening (to destroy embryos with genetic defects), designer parenting, sex selection, embryo research using cloned embryos, research on 'surplus' IVF embryos all these things are now possible, that's clear.

People are much more fuzzy on whether all these are acceptable.

Generally, the scientists lead the way, with the media, the politicians and the philosophers following breathlessly behind.

Political debate only gets going after the techniques themselves have become established practice. As a result, those advocating restrictions find themselves rowing against the tide.

Perhaps they should row nonetheless. The problems with IVF include its high failure rate (about 85%) and that it's a painful, invasive and costly treatment. What's more, reports indicate an increased risk of ovarian cancer following fertility hormone treatment, and there is some evidence to say that certain rare but serious health problems may be more common among IVF children. At the very least, infertile parents deserve to be advised about this.

Then there is the status of the embryo. In 1996, Irish IVF practitioners admitted to RTE's Prime Time that 'surplus' or 'low-grade' embryos were not being implanted in the mother's uterus but rather placed in the cervix with the intention that they should perish there.

It's a neat way to 'dispose of the body,' as it were, but no different really from Baroness Warnock's idea that they should be flushed down the sink.

Hence the establishment of the Commission on Human Reproduction in Ireland is timely, to say the least.

It is also good that, having invited the public to make submissions on what should be done, the commission now feels it is time to engage in a little public consultation. But disturbingly, there is no medical figure in the ranks of the commission with a track record in promoting the rights of the human embryo.

By contrast, the commission has some members coming from institutions with possible vested interests in the provision of IVF services.

The line-up for tomorrow's conference is nearly as unbalanced. Again, there is no medical figure to articulate the importance of medical care for the human embryo.

Even worse, among the six foreign speakers invited, three are associated with the British Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.

Yet Britain is the only European country with legislation permitting the creation of human embryos for research purposes.

Its values in this area are a million miles from those of the Irish constitution, which guarantees to vindicate the rights of the unborn.

Things might look different if Prof Leon Kass, chairman of President Bush's Council on Bioethics, was addressing the conference. Kass is a molecular biologist and medical doctor who spent 30 years grappling with the ethical and philosophical issues raised by biomedical advances.

"By putting the origin of human life literally in human hands," Kass writes, "in vitro fertilisation began a process that would lead in practice to the increasing technical mastery of human generation and, in thought, to the continuing erosion of respect for the mystery of sexuality and human renewal."

As Michael Jackson might say, the commission clearly 'can't handle' opinions of scientists like Kass.

But where, then, do they get the right to set the agenda for Ireland's laws on assisted human reproduction?