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Discovery Institute Fellow Questions Ethics Behind 'Custom Embryos'

by Mary Rettig
August 17, 2006
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(AgapePress) - - The world's first human embryo bank has one senior fellow at the Discovery Institute concerned that its in vitro fertilization services may need to be regulated by some new ethical guidelines.

The San Antonio, Texas-based Abraham Center of Life offers infertile couples seeking help in becoming parents a number of choices, including surrogacy, child adoption, and embryo adoption. And in late June of this year, the Center announced it was starting an embryo bank so that embryos "left over" from genetic parents' in vitro fertilization (IVF) efforts could be donated to other infertile couples.

But Wesley J. Smith of the Discovery Institute is raising concerns about another of the services the Abraham Center plans to provide. He says the facility will take donated eggs and sperm and will create what he calls "custom embryos" for paying couples.

"What they want to do is basically create embryos to order and sell them," Smith asserts. "That is, they will get the kinds of people the prospective birth parents want as biological parents and -- through pictures and so forth -- match the egg donor and the sperm donor, who are actually paid for their gametes, and then create embryos to order."

According to the Abraham Center of Life website, infertile couples are able to choose their egg and sperm donors or surrogates through the Center's extensive database of screened candidates. Detailed information has been compiled on each of these individuals, and the Center presents information on selected donors to the clients, "based on their criteria."

But Smith suggests that this process of "shopping" for gamete donors based on certain "desired" traits is unethical as it commodifies human beings and their biological "products." The in vitro fertilization process "was intended, originally, to help infertile married couples give birth to their own biologically connected children," he points out.

"And now," the Discovery Institute senior fellow notes, IVF has "moved to the point where not only do we have people being hired as surrogate wombs," he says, "but apparently [we have] some people claiming the right -- and they do have the legal right -- to create embryos to order."

But despite the fact that all this is legal, Smith contends, allowing lab technicians to create embryos designed to meet a couple's list of desired traits is not ethical. And it is a very disturbing trend, he adds, that people want to create specific children rather than simply children.


Mary Rettig, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.

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