IT IS almost inevitable in the UK that anyone who encourages the use of technology to help people choose the sex of their baby, or to make any other intervention in the 鈥渘atural鈥� reproductive process, is accused of playing Frankenstein 鈥� or, perhaps, God. And so it was with the recent report on reproductive technologies published by the House of Commons select committee on science and technology, which recommended a more liberal regime in embryo research and IVF treatment.
The report 鈥� which a number of members of the committee disagreed with 鈥� suggested removing some of the layers of regulation set by the current 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act. It gave two main reasons: that scientific advances are making that act obsolete; and that public opinion has become more relaxed in this area.
None of this will appear controversial in the US, where individuals are relatively free to decide whether and how to use reproductive technologies. In the UK, however, many will be surprised by the claim that attitudes have liberalised over the past 15 years. This has much to do with the way the public debate is conducted. There are vocal lobbies, mainly religious ones, that oppose the intervention of medical technologies in reproduction, but the noise they make is considerably out of proportion to their public support. The media follow the worthy principle of 鈥渉ear the other side鈥�, giving both sides of the argument a chance to put their cases, which makes it seem as though opinion is evenly divided.
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But the select committee consulted widely, and says a significant shift has taken place in public acceptance of reproductive technologies. If that is true, the change is welcome. If embryo research and parental choice in IVF take place openly, under the scrutinising eye of competent bodies and the public, they are far less likely to be misused and abused than if squeezed by impermissive regulation into shapes that only the rich or criminal can wriggle through. This is a real risk. In a world where money can buy anything, anything that becomes possible soon becomes actual. And it is better to have the actual out in the open than hidden.
More to the point, though, is the fact that embryo research promises a great harvest of medical advances in connection with a number of distressing diseases, and the prospect of alleviating suffering is too intrinsically good to be sacrificed to the mistaken view that a cluster of cells in a Petri dish is the moral equivalent of a baby in a crib. The argument that the two are equivalent because the former could in the right circumstances become the latter fails on the grounds that this makes any arbitrarily chosen pair of a single sperm (say, in a testicle in Toronto) and ovum (say, in a pelvis in Prague) morally equivalent to a baby, for they too in the right circumstances could become one.
Of course a line has to be drawn. But to draw it at the moment a zygote is formed rather than at the point where a fetus becomes independently viable 鈥� from where something really can 鈥渂ecome a baby鈥� 鈥� is to ignore the fact that nature itself is profligate with the zygote, the morula, the blastocyst, the embryo, the fetus, voiding itself of any it is not satisfied with, in numbers unimaginable to the moral sentimentalist for whom the mere existence of life rather than its value 鈥� its quantity, not quality 鈥� is what matters most.
What might be most contentious in the select committee.s report is the welcome it gives to the idea that prospective parents by IVF should be able to choose the sex of their hoped-for child. The principal argument offered in opposition is the slippery slope: if we allow a couple to choose their baby.s sex, soon people will be choosing to have blond Aryan giants with IQs of a million. Slippery-slope arguments are logically fallacious: drinking one cup of tea does not incur the risk that one will thereupon lose control and proceed to drink a thousand cups of tea.
In any case, if or when reproductive technology permits 鈥渄esigner babies鈥�, we can then have a debate about their merits. All that is now being mooted is parents fulfilling their wishes about balancing their families, or having a child of one or other sex. If ever IVF became cheap and easy, which it is extremely far from being, and was employed to produce just boys in cultures that prefer them, those cultures would soon find the choice self-defeating. Sex carries its own correctives.
It is high time we had a rational debate about the questions that press, especially about cloning and chimeras. Simply outlawing them for fear of usurping the role of chance or providence is equivalent to putting one.s head under a blanket, for the technologies are here or coming, and the choice lies between using them wisely, or missing the valuable opportunities they offer.
A. C. Grayling is professor of philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, and author of What is Good? (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2003)