Three parents, Savior Siblings, and the Imago Dei.
This week was big for the scientific community as Britain’s House of Commons voted to pass a law that would allow for an IVF technique where a baby would be created with "DNA from three people". The law still has to pass the House of Lords (way cooler name than our “Senate”) but from everything I read on the issue that is more of a formality at this point.
This technique would prevent absolutely devastating Mitochondrial Diseases (MD) from which many children die before their 20th Birthday.
How could they not vote for that?
The House of Commons Library produced a report that “Contain[ed] factual information and a range of opinions on each subject, and aim[s] to be politically impartial”.
I decided to read the 40 page report and see what Lawmakers in the UK read before making their decision.
According to the report, the way that MD is currently “prevented” is a method called “Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis” (PGD). As you can gather by the name, this method involves testing embryos (i.e. very young babies somewhere between 1-8 days into development) and only implanting ones that don’t have MD. So, this really doesn’t “prevent” any disease, the baby is still created with MD, and will die with MD, but is found to be less worthy of life than his healthy siblings.
This is how the report puts it “[PGD] can be used to test embryos that might be carrying mutation in their nuclear DNA so that only unaffected embryos are selected for implantation”.
Their Worldview is clear and assumes that “unaffected” babies are of more inherant value than their siblings.
The Christian and Jewish Worldview says that everyone is created with what the Jewish people called the Tzelem Elohim, we call the Imago Dei, or “Image of God”. If you believe that every person isn’t just born bearing the Imago Dei, but is actually created bearing God’s image, then you begin to see just how tragic and what an affront to God this is.
Creating an Image Bearer only to destroy him is a tragedy.
There are currently two methods for creating “Three Parent” IVF embryos. The first is called “Pronuclear Transfer” (aka PNT). The following diagram I screen grabbed directly from the report:
As you can see, this method involves creating two babies in the embryonic stage and destroying one of them so that the other might live. This sounds controversial to us, but shouldn’t be for Britain. In 2008 a bill was introduced over there to stop the practice of creating “Saviour Siblings”.
The bill was a miserable failure and the practice continues today.
Mainstream Media also called it “Saviour Siblings” (Brittish spelling) and quoted lawmakers who said that children should not be ”deliberately created to be used for the benefit of another, no matter how pressing the need”.
There weren’t two mainstream terms discussing the same issue (like how sometimes the Pro-Life movement is also referred to as the “Anti-Choice” movement). Everyone over there referred to the practice as “Saviour Siblings”.
Saviour Siblings is a practice in the UK of creating embryos and selecting IVF implantation based on which sibling (embryo) would be a match for a sick older sibling needing tissue, organs, or blood. The first successful tissue transfer from a younger brother to his older sister took place a few years ago.
Between Saviour Sibing transfers and PNT destroying a viable embryo so another might live, I’m reminded of a 2005 film starring Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson in which rich people had genetic duplicates of themselves created in case they ever needed an organ transfer…
Besides, PNT, the other method is called “Maternal Spindle Transfer” (MST) and involves altering the egg prior to implantation. I have no issue with egg manipulation, that’s not a baby. This option is certainly more ethically acceptable in regards to the fact that it prevents purposeful destruction of an otherwise healthy embryo, but you still have the ethical issues regarding IVF that this doesn’t remove. Additionally the new law makes no distinction or preference between PNT and MST.
I continued to read in hopes the report would give some ethical reasons against PNT and MST, so I found something on page 12. Here is their section on the ethical concerns surrounding the bill:
Does that look fair and unbiased? Their attempt at unbias starts off saying that these treatments “should be considered safe and effective” (though not really that safe for the PNT babies that are killed I should point out). The three main arguments against in order to create a supposedly unbiased report are as follows:
1. It’s a “Slippery Slope” for DNA manipulation. They even use the word “Slippery Slope” which is officially classified as a logical fallacy. So their first so called objection they use a well known logical fallacy to argue the other side.
2. Knowledge about how techniques would affect future generations is unknown.
3. Children would have “Conflicted Self Identity”. This same objection wasn’t raised when they legalized “Saviour Siblings”… Let’s see, “Mom and Dad killed my twin siblings while they were embryos and allowed me to be born just in case my parents beloved first born needs spare parts.” I”m pretty sure those are the kids UK lawmakers should be worried about having self-identity problems.
Lest you think they actually leave any argument against the new law, section five of the report goes on to knock down the paper tiger ethical concerns it raised.
These are the three biggest ethical concerns? What about the fact that they are creating a person and then killing the baby because they have a perceived weakness? What about the fact that there are close to a million frozen babies already created worldwide, being held in orphanages where the temperature is 200 degrees below zero just waiting to be adopted?
What about the fact that many of these babies have already been tested for MD and will be born free from it?
