Test-tube idolatry

Parliament may be asked whether test-tube embryos may be chosen for their sex. A particularly slippery slope, warns the former Archbishop of York

EVERY week, it seems, reproductive technology faces us with new ethical challenges. I have just been reading a briefing paper available to members of both Houses of the British Parliament on sex selection. The question it asks is likely soon to be confronting the legislators, and last year the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) issued a consultation document on the subject. Should screening of sperm before in vitro fertilisation be allowed, so as to select for non-medical purposes the sex of the embryo? Sperm-sorting techniques are at present unregulated; should they remain so?

Other techniques which involve screening of the embryo are more reliable but also more invasive; these are at present regulated by the HFEA. Is it right to use these to replace a child who has died by one of the same sex? Is it right to use them for the purposes of ?family balancing? ? to ensure, say, a girl is born to ?balance? three boys?

The briefing document raises three main questions. First, particular cultures place a different value on the sex of children. Many Asian people, for example, have a cultural preference for sons. But on this the document sensibly concludes that the imbalances are likely to be self-correcting. One culture might prefer sons, another daughters. So the paper sees no serious reason here for being worried about sex selection.

Secondly, is the welfare of the children themselves likely to be impaired? Using sperm-sorting, there is a one in 10 chance that a child of the ?wrong? sex will be produced, and fears have been expressed that this might damage subsequent relationships between parents and children. But, the document asks, is this possible complication in a small number of cases enough to warrant legislation against a sex-selection procedure some parents are desperately keen to use?

The third and final ethical consideration is the slippery slope towards ?designer? babies. The document notes this risk, leaving the politicians to make a decision. Since this kind of argument is itself somewhat slippery, it may be useful to look at it more closely.

Slopes are identified as slippery when techniques judged to be relatively harmless in themselves, or of concern only to a small minority, are capable of extension in much less benign directions. The progression from sex selection, which involves only the simplest of genetic choices, to designer babies created by much more medically invasive, and ethically dubious, genetic manipulation, is a typical example of a technological slippery slope. There are also legal slippery slopes: new interpretations are accepted, and loopholes discovered, which reduce much of the force of the original legislation. The 1967 Abortion Act is an obvious example.

Equally significant are the social and psychological slippery slopes involving widespread changes of attitude towards practices which were once regarded with abhorrence. The growth of abortion-mindedness in Britain in the wake of the Abortion Act illustrates how it is not so much technical innovation, but social familiarity, which has been responsible for changing public perceptions about what is ethically acceptable.

Medicine, as currently practised, is not well adapted to assess the long-term social impact of new forms of intervention. Most doctors are rightly concerned with the well-being of individual patients and, except in the field of public health, the balancing of costs and benefits is a strictly limited exercise. It is no surprise, therefore, that the briefing paper for Members of Parliament which I have mentioned carries no hint that there are wider issues at stake in the matter of sex selection than the possible attitude of individual parents towards individual children. But it can be argued that, in a social context where the choice of one of a child?s major characteristics came to be regarded as acceptable or even common, profound changes in the perception of what childbearing entails would inevitably follow. There would be a gradual loss of that aura of otherness which is such a striking feature of the newborn child, that impact of a new self in its own right, and our recognition of it as a gift to be welcomed and loved simply because of what it is.

I stress the phrase ?social context?. Individual cases can always appear to be justified, and individual needs met without immediate harm. It is the accumulation of cases, the growth of habits and attitudes of mind, which gradually mould public perceptions of what is happening and what it means. The history of much well-meaning legislation points overwhelmingly to the strong likelihood that sex selection for non-medical reasons would in the long run bring consumerism and consumerist attitudes right into the heart of one of the most awesome personal experiences in any human life.

There is a familiar retort to this argument, namely that children are subject to consumerist attitudes from the moment they are born, so why not before it? From the choice of a suitable mother or father, to designer baby clothes, the right food, the best schools, carefully chosen friends, and lavish care, parents are attempting to shape their children in ways no less manipulative than if they had chosen their sex. But there is a difference. To control a child?s upbringing, however restrictively and with whatever consumerist motives, is still to treat it as a person, whereas to impose selected characteristics on a child about to be conceived is to treat it as an object. Though they may in practice be difficult to distinguish, there is a vitally important personal difference between what belongs to us, and is accepted and assimilated by us as part of our history, and what is simply given in the act of our coming to be.

From the parents? perspective, manipulation of an unborn child as an object in furtherance of one?s own desires looks to me uncommonly like idolatry. The essence of idolatry is the attempt to escape from the dangerous reality of what is genuinely other than ourselves, into the self-regarding worship of what our own hands have made. Creation, by contrast, endows another being with the freedom to be itself, with all the risks and disappointments that might entail.

I welcome scientific creativity, which is one of the fruits of our being made in the image of God, but not when it threatens what is most characteristic of our humanness. I hope, therefore, that those who may eventually have to legislate about such matters will look beyond the immediate wishes of frustrated parents to larger questions about the nature and nurture of human persons.