Fertility watchdog to allow creation of ‘saviour siblings’

PARENTS of seriously ill children whose only hope of survival is the creation of a “saviour sibling” will be overjoyed at yesterday’s decision by Britain’s fertility watchdog.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) announced it has changed its policy to allow screening of embryos for purposes other than simply weeding out genetic disorders.

But the issue of so-called “designer babies” will remain controversial, with many claiming it is a slippery slope to human cloning and selection based on a baby’s sex, hair colour or intelligence.

The plight of the Fletcher and Whitaker families has prompted widespread debate on the morality surrounding “made-to-order” babies conceived to help cure an older sibling with a life-threatening disease.

In the case of Joe and Julie Fletcher, they want to screen an IVF embryo to provide a genetic match to help cure two-year-old son Joshua of a rare type of anaemia. It is a mirror of the case of Jamie Whitaker who was born last year, after IVF treatment in the US, to cure brother Charlie of the same disorder.

In the absence of a suitable donor parents can choose a selected embryo using a technique called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), and IVF, to have another child that is both disease-free and a good tissue match.

The embryo is implanted into the mother’s womb and after the baby is born, doctors with transfer stem-cells from the baby into the sick sibling to cure the disease.

Ostensibly it is pushing back the boundaries of medicine to save another life.

Few have qualms about using PGD to weed out embryos with genetic disorders. The problem arises when doctors want to go a step further and intervene to create an infant with just the right set of genes to help treat a brother or sister of the baby - effectively, creating a “designer baby”.

Critics say this process is unethical, and the next stop on the road will be to choose skin colour, sex, eye colour, intelligence or some other characteristic.

Pro-Life groups say the process treats the new baby as a commodity as the child is wanted simply to be a donor for its brother or sister.

In the past the HFEA refused to licence such “tissue-typing” IVF treatment to generate an embryo in the Whitaker case, leaving the parents to go abroad.