Since when has parenting been just another consumer choice?

AS a child I was particularly chilled by the story of Pandora’s Box. In Greek mythology Pandora and her husband Epimetheus are visited by Jupiter’s messenger, Mercury, who gives them a box for safe keeping.

They receive instructions not to open it, but Pandora is overcome by curiosity and is seduced by voices within the box begging for release.

Jupiter has malignantly crammed into the box all the diseases and vices that afflict humanity; and when the box is opened, these ills fly out and attack the world.

Like the Biblical story of the Fall, Pandora's Box contains a lesson for humanity. It teaches that there must be a limit to our curiosity and ambition, because when we dabble with forces greater than ourselves we may be overwhelmed by the consequences.

I thought of Pandora's Box last week as yet another heart-rending story about reproductive medicine hit the headlines in Britain. Tabloid newspapers carried front-page photographs of little Charlie Whitaker, three, who has a life-threatening blood disorder. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has blocked his parents from using IVF and an embryo-screening procedure to produce a child who can give him a tissue donation.

In Vitro Fertilisation can help a small percentage of infertile couples to conceive children. The technique involves artificially removing sperm and eggs from donor parents and fusing them in a test-tube. After 'defective' embryos have been removed, a small number of embryos are placed in the woman's womb and one or more of these may carry to term.

While IVF is aimed at infertile couples, it is a technique increasingly attractive to those who want designer babies. These parents would like to screen their embryos, selecting only those whose physical characteristics match their desires. But defenders of artificial reproduction prefer to highlight cases like that of Charlie Whitaker, because in sad cases such as his, the selection of compatible embryos might attract broad support.

The HFEA's decision to oppose embryo selection in this case has surprised many people, because the Authority has always bowed to 'compassion' arguments, permitting highly controversial practices in the realm of human reproduction.

For example, the HFEA has already given the green light to therapeutic cloning (which involves creating human embryos in order to grow spare body parts) and it allows human embryos and aborted babies to be used for medical research.

There is some evidence to suggest that the HFEA is motivated by pragmatism on this occasion. Having been criticised by a House of Commons committee for allowing embryo screening in a previous case, the Authority may wish to show that the scientists are not running completely amok. Thus it is striking a moral pose, citing the psychological welfare of the donor child to refuse embryo screening to the Whitakers. It claims the child may suffer in the future if it feels it was merely chosen for its donor potential.

While it is refreshing to hear such child-centred thinking, the HFEA has already missed the ethical boat. It objects to embryo selection in the Whitaker case, because the blood disorder affecting Charlie is not hereditary and would be unlikely to affect his parents' other embryos.

But, in a twist of logic, the HFEA did not oppose embryo screening by another couple, Shahana and Raj Hashmi, to select a tissue donor for their child. The HFEA treated this case differently because the Hashmis' embryos had a high risk of carrying the disorder and the authority believes it is acceptable to screen out and destroy embryos which carry a defect.

Such reasoning may make sense to the HFEA, but only because they have already entered a moral wasteland. While we should all think twice before denying potentially therapeutic procedures to children like Charlie Whitaker, it is wrong to treat any embryo which is a unique, tiny human being as a means to an end. Thus screening of any kind should be unacceptable, just as the creation of surplus human embryos should also be outlawed.

This is unlikely to happen in Britain in the near future. While ultrasound and genetic knowledge gives an ever-clearer picture of life in the womb, the vision of its lawmakers on the subject of abortion is increasingly blurred. Termination is legal up to birth in circumstances where the unborn child has a disability. So it is hardly surprising that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has little time for embryos with genetic defects.

Britain ended up in this mess partly because it excluded the voices of traditional morality and philosophy when examining these issues. In the 1980s, Mary (now Baroness) Warnock was appointed to report on assisted human reproduction. Warnock was not a neutral choice she believes that Downs Syndrome children should be aborted, and boasts that as a schoolteacher she recommended teenage girls to have abortions.

Yet she played a pivotal role in determining Britain's current law on reproductive medicine, and along the way vetoed appointments to her committee on the grounds of religion and moral beliefs.

"There was one particular person who was supposed to be the Catholic and I said I would not have him", she told the BBC in 1993. Warnock's committee went on to exclude, "questions of when life or personhood begins" from its deliberations, even though her report led to the legalisation of experimentation on human embryos.

Now Warnock is in the media again, this time declaring her support for human cloning which she believes should be justified if a couple is infertile and unable to conceive a child using other means. Regardless of the consequences for the child involved, this pillar of the British establishment believes a man or a woman should be entitled to create a child with an identical genetic make-up to themselves in preference to living with their own infertility.

This is the crux of Warnock's and Britain's problem. They want a society that never says no, regardless of the moral side-effects of always bending backwards to facilitate people's choices.

Where once upon a time people accepted the pain of infertility, and perhaps considered adoption, now having a child is considered to be a right and heaven and earth must be moved to facilitate it. Everything must be sacrificed thousands of embryos and the psychological welfare of cloned children to meet the consumer's desire for an heir.

In Pandora's case, when all the misery and evil had been released, there still remained one voice within the box that of hope. And although the present culture of reproductive libertarianism is causing all sorts of moral problems, medical science can continue to give us hope by finding new, ethically-acceptable, treatments for children like Charlie Whitaker.

Let's hope such treatments are forthcoming soon. Because Pandora's box has now been opened, and it may take some time for society to realise just how large a pestilence has been released.