Life After Death

and identity crises are we sowing for the future? And what do we tell a young man or woman asking the question, "Who am I?" Do you tell them that their mother was a dead foetus and their father was an anonymous sperm donor paid to provide his gametes?

"I'm glad I'm not a gamma".

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.

HFEA: Model for Others If the HFEA were doing its job it would not only have addressed these ethical and social questions, it would be much clearer in questioning the new proclaimed 'right' to have a child. It would also save infertile couples much trauma and agony if, instead of allowing clinics to tantalise them with photographs of successful births, they made it clear that in the last twelve months, the clinics successfully treated only 1,000 people using in vitro fertilisation. 85% of treatments were unsuccessful.

Perhaps it would also be performing its role better if it questioned the costs involved to the NHS and private individuals of performing IVF, while 600 unborn children are daily aborted; babies who would once have been adopted by infertile couples and given loving homes. The HFEA has also helped nurture the false idea that having children is yet another claimed 'right'.

The Adoption Alternative Instead of promulgating the 'right' to have a child or to get rid of a child, we would do better to consider our duties to the child,and make the welfare of children the central issue. After speaking at a school in Dublin in the spring of 1998, a teenager asked if I would have a word with him. He particularly made me stop and think about the obstacles which we put in the way of couples who want to adopt a child.

His story made me wonder why organisations like the HFEA do not promote adoption as an alternative to abortion and to unethical fertility treaments. This teenager had been adopted. His friends often assumed that he felt bitter towards his mother: "I don't feel any bitterness, only gratitude," he said. "It would have been much easier for my mother to have got rid of me. She showed courage in letting me be born and then in letting me be brought up by my adoptive parents. I have received nothing but love." One teenager's story does not constitute an irrefutable argument, but it is the antidote to the widespread anti-adoption prejudice of many childcare professionals. Just consider the figures. In 1975 there were 21,000 adoptions. By 1995 this had fallen to under 6,000. The adoption of babies fell in the same period from 4,500 to a negligible 322. In one year 322 babies are adopted; in one day 600 babies are aborted - 5 million in the past 30 years.

Adoption is the loving alternative to abortion, and to the wholesale destruction of human embryos.