Life After Death

There is not, and never has been, a single member of the HFEA who upholds the sanctity of human life from fertilisation: such old-fashioned religious belief is thought of as quaint, at best, and dangerous bigotry at worst. The HFEA behaves in an arrogant and unaccountable manner, assuming powers for itself - refusing, for instance, to allow Members of Parliament sight of the study which it undertook into the freezing of embryos. So much for freedom of information, public disclosure and access. The HFEA has also been deceptive - being forced to retract a published claim that French scientists had withdrawn their work demonstrating a link between the freezing of human embryos and subsequent disabilities. A simple telephone call to Paris proved this to be a lie. The Authority has been given extraordinary power by Parliament. The Order allowing clinics to destroy up to 3,000 human embryos, whose parents had been "lost" by the clinics, and which allows embryos frozen for five years to remain in deep freeze for a further five years, was made without a single vote being cast (18 July, 1996). The Order was debated in an obscure committee room on the upper corridor of the House of Commons, with debate-time limited to half an hour.

HFEA: Robbing Graves The HFEA has also been radically out of step with public opinion. When the Edinburgh scientist, Roger Gosden sought permission to use the eggs of aborted baby girls for fertility treatment, the HFEA did not demur. It embarked on a public consultation. Parliamentarians were genuinely appalled and immediately approved an amendment, proposed by Dame Jill Knight to the Criminal Justice Bill, outlawing what I described as contemporary grave robbing. That a child should have an aborted foetus as its mother and the aborted girl's mother as its grandmother proved too much for even the most virulent and hardened abortionists though not, apparently for the HFEA. Be clear about the subject on which the HFEA was proposing to hold a public consultation. First a little unborn girl was to be selected out. Then she would be aborted while still alive, in order to protect her tissue and her eggs which the clinic wants to use. They would then rob her ovaries of her eggs, and having plundered her womb, they would kill her. Her child - and perhaps dozens or even hundreds of her brothers and sisters - would then be fertilised and placed in another woman's womb. A woman is at her most fertile at just twenty weeks gestation. At twenty weeks gestation she has 5 million eggs in her womb, 4 million of which are naturally shed between 20 weeks gestation and birth. She is a rich source of organs and tissue. We hear a lot about choice but she has no choice. Her donations are entirely involuntary. The widespread anonymous use of gametes can have other shocking consequences. In America there is already a reported case of a man almost marrying a woman whom he discovered - just before they wed - was his biological daughter. She had been conceived from sperm which he had donated many years previously. In their consultation, the HFEA raised no questions about these considerations. Nor did they raise the issue of parenting. Is it wise for a society to allow the birth of children who, in the fundamental biological sense, have no idea of who they are? What psychological