Article Om Infertility

helenquinn · 04-17-2003, 09:40 PM

This is an article or interview that Tony and myself did last week and which was printed in a Sunday newspaper in Ireland.

let me know what you think!

Helen

LIFE BEFORE IT EVEN BEGINS IS ETHICALLY-FRAUGHT ISSUES

It is easy for pro-life activists to debate the technical issues involved in embryo screening but for couples involved it is a very emotional matter.

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BRENDA POWER
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IF EVER a case highlighted the ironies and inconsistencies of the pro-life attitude to the ethically-fraught issue of embryo screening and in vitro fertilisation (IVG) it was the “designer baby” hearing that concluded in the London Court of Appeal this week.

Simply put, if the pro-life activists had succeeded in their opposition to the plans of the Hashmi family, whose dying child prompted the case, then one life would certainly have been lost and another, most likely, never created. Instead, because of the pro-life campaigners lost their case, four year old Zain Hashmi has a good chance of living a normal life, and he will be joined by a sibling who will be free from the rare genetic disease that is threatening the boy’s life.

The pro-life objection to action such as that proposed by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority on behalf of the Hashmi family stems from a fundamental opposition to the methodology of in-vitro fertilisation. Because excess embryos are necessarily created in the process, and are often left to perish of not needed, the pro-life campaigners argue that these are human lives are discarded as by-products of affluent parent’s selfishness.

In the Hashmi case the parents sought to right to screed the embryos before implantation for two reasons – firstly to ensure that the new sibling would be the correct tissue type to act as a stem-cell donor for their terminally ill son and secondly to make certain that the new baby would not suffer from the fatal disease. The got an initial court judgement in their favour, the pro-life campaigners succeeded in challenging it and this week the Court of Appeal finally dismissed the pr-life case and gave them the go-ahead.

But the intervention of the pr-life lobby has meant costly months have passed in the Hashmi’s fight to prevent Zain’s death from thalassemia – and so the irony remains that, if the pro-lifers had their way, the child would have been doomed.

One Irish couple who have had first-hand experience of what they say are the insensitivities and inconsistencies of the pro-life position are Tony and Helen Quinn. A childless couple from Co. Limerick, the yare hoping to conceive with the aid of intrauterine insemination – a pre-cursor to the more drastic step of IVF – and they recently attended the Assisted Human Reproduction Commission hearings in Dublin Castle.

They were Helen says, shocked by the belligerence and intractability of the pr-life campaigners who addressed the commission. “They just wanted to ram their point of view down everybody’s throsat2 she says. “As far as they were concerned the were right and there was no other possible view”

Tony, who is British born, was shocked by their unsympathetic certainty; “If they’re going to heaven,” he says “I’d rather not be there with them. As far as they’re concerned, these embryos are all human beings, it’s that simple. But as somebody said to me, if you were in a burning building and you had to choose between rescuing a new born baby or a petri dish of embryos would have any difficulty deciding which to choose?

“What they forget, I think, is that this is an intensely emotional debate for everybody involved – they leave the human emotions out of it and see it as a black and white issue. They would consider people like us to be on the other side, but when you think about it, who could possibly be more pro-life than a couple trying to have a baby?”

Unlike in Britain, there are no statutory guidelines in Ireland covering the complex questions surrounding assisted human reproduction, and the commission was established to make recommendations on the best approach for legislation. The question at the heart of the debate, according to Commission member Prof. Andrew Greene, is when precisely life begins and it is a basic ethical dilemma.

Green says he knows of a number of Irish couples who have travelled to England for pre-implantation diagnosis to ensure that subsequent children did not suffer from conditions like cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy but not for tissue typing to check an embryo’s potential as a donor. Whether or not such a service will largely depend on the recommendations in the Commission’s report which Green expects will be ready to be presented to government by the end of the summer.

But, he points out, even if a regime as liberal as that permitted by the Hashmi ruling were to exist here, it would still be no comfort to parents who may wish to conceive a baby to act as donor for a sibling suffering from a non-genetic disorder. Even after the Hashmi case the British position is that the parent’s top priority has to be the avoidance of a genetic disorder in subsequent children, rather than the production of a suitable donor to save an existing child – a recent case on that point stopped parents from testing a pregnancy for tissue suitability where their elder child was suffering from a rare form of anaemia which is not inherited. This seems a harsh distinction to draw in what is already a grey moral area.

Helen Quinn, though she believes that the “excesses foetuses” formed in IVF are only potential human beings before implantations successful, says she’d still be reluctant to donate them to strangers if they were unwanted, nor would she allow them to be used for research.

Patricia Browne, who went through years of IVF without success, says she, also would have had concerns about donation fertilised eggs. “They would have been my babies,” she says “It would have been more like gibing hem for adoption.” And yet both women disagree with the pro-life position which holds that fertilised eggs are indeed human beings.

And Tony Quinn has problems he says with the “designer baby” notion – “it’s a bit close to cloning, and yet if you have had a baby with special needs its perfectly understandable that you’d want to avoid hat happening again”.

But, like Patricia Browne, he cannot square the aims of the pro-life campaigners with the belief he heard them state at the commission hearings a few moths back that IVF is “an abomination”.

“There were protests against Dr. Christian Barnard when he did the first heart transplants on the grounds that hew as going against nature and interfering with life. Nobody whose child is alive because they got a new heart or lungs could credit that view now, and nobody who ahs had a baby though IVF could understand the view that what they had done was abominable.

“It seems to me that the scientists and the lobbyists can debate the technical issues involved and argue over when life begins, but neither of them bring very much emotion to the question, and it is an emotional matter. If had an excess of embryos, will you wouldn’t want them all implanted because of the fear of high multiple births, but then you wouldn’t want them flushed away either.

It is not a clear cut issue and you just don’t know how you’re going to feel about those embryos until you find yourself faced with that decision. But the problem with the pro-life position is that hey simply can’t see a viewpoint other than their own”.