The 37th anniversary of the birth of the first ‘test-tube baby’ was marked last Saturday. The event is heralded as a triumph of medicine and science.
Patrick Steptoe, who was the first to do this, is hailed as a hero worldwide. Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, never looked back and now has her own children.
With an estimated five million babies now born by IVF, it was seen as a miracle for countless infertile couples longing for their own child. It was a 20th-century wonder of medical science.
But IVF has its dark side. Not only have major ethical questions been raised about the procedure but the same basic techniques used for IVF are now being used in multiple new ‘test-tube’ procedures that increasingly depart from traditional medical ethics.
Donor IVF was an obvious next step when a man was infertile. It led the way to sperm donors and banks and, more recently, to egg donors and surrogacy.
A higher incidence of autism is reported in those born from intracytoplasmic sperm injection, but children born of IVF overall do reasonably well psychologically. Only about nine per cent of test-tube babies are told about their genetic origins, however. A recent study by Elizabeth Marquardt of young adults aged 18-45 conceived through donor IVF has shown that many of them struggle deeply with their identity as a result of not knowing their biological father.
They have higher rates of isolation, depression, delinquency and substance abuse than those who were raised by their biological parents. They urge parents to adopt rather than use donor eggs or sperm. One young woman said: “It’s just that we, the children, haven’t been empowered to vocalise our issues yet. The needs and concerns of our mothers and their partners have trumped and stifled our own.”
One of the main ethical issues about IVF is that multiple embryos are produced at the same time. Some are implanted in the uterus and may not survive. Those that are not implanted are either frozen, discarded or donated for research.
Up to 2012, an estimated 1.2 million embryos were discarded in the course of IVF and there are 840,000 embryos currently frozen.
Instead of bowing to laws to extend IVF, we should do all we can to introduce laws protecting the embryo and intra-uterine life
It is difficult to understand how potential parents come to terms with allowing the creation of embryos that are effectively their pre-born children and then, at best, put them at mortal risk and, at worst, allow them to be killed, frozen or agree to research on them in their relentless pursuit to have their own child.
Physicians involved in IVF must also desensitise themselves to all ethical concerns. It may be that the physicians gloss over the negative aspects or, possibly, the single-mindedness to have their own child leads to a lack of imagination on the parents’ part.
How does a parent justify having had IVF to a teenager who finds out that she was the only one of her embryo siblings to survive?
One aspect of IVF that is not often discussed is that couples feel justified in conceiving a child ‘in a test tube’ because natural sexual intercourse ‘failed’.
Even if you don’t believe that children are a gift that only God should give, there is something sacred and even mystical in the way that children are conceived through the love of natural sexual intercourse. Test-tube conception devalues sexual intercourse and the family ties that it enriches.
British writer Christine Whipp, who was conceived by IVF, has said: “My existence owed almost nothing to the serendipitous nature of normal human reproduction, where babies are the natural progression of mutually fulfilling adult relationships, but, rather, represented a verbal contract, a financial transaction and a cold, clinical harnessing of medical technology.”
Once the embryo was deemed expendable, IVF technology opened the door to use of the embryo for harvesting stem cells for research, for experimentation such as cloning, which is permitted on the early embryo, and also to hybrid embryo production from three parents.
IVF also facilitates the acceptance of abortion, because there is little difference between the discarding of a child’s life at early embryo stage or at a later intra-uterine stage.
IVF has unfortunately led to a multitude of abuses against the embryo, the most vulnerable phase of our human existence.
While we in Malta still retain a deep love for children of all ages and still hold abortion as illegal, we must be proud of our strong family culture and, instead of bowing to laws to extend IVF, we should do all we can to introduce laws protecting the embryo and intra-uterine life to Malta and to other countries.
Patrick Pullicino is professor of clinical neurosciences at the University of Kent.