One of a series of articles in the National Post on “Extreme Babymaking” has alarmed a US bioethics expert who warns that the creation of children from corpses is only the beginning if current research is allowed to continue. Dr. Dianne Irving, Ph.D., a graduate of the Kennedy Center for Bioethics at Georgetown University, told LifeSiteNews.com that research is moving forward to create cloned children out of left-over body parts from aborted babies and “spare” IVF embryos.
The September 29 Post article quotes Dr. Gulam Bahadur, head of fertility and reproductive medicine for University College Hospitals in London, England. Dr. Bahadur tells a Montreal audience of fertility specialists to “imagine a scenario” in which a man tells his date that he was created from ova collected from an aborted child. Dr. Bahadur says, “It's extremely frightening, it's bizarre, but in some years' time, with no regulation, we could be creating a child from mothers who were never born. Using fetal ovaries… Can you imagine? A genetic mother who was not born?”
Commenting on the article Dr. Irving says that what was omitted is even more alarming. She says that in the near future, children may be created “from 'reconstructed' oocytes (ova) and artificial gametes.” She says, “imagine the scenario 20 years from now when a woman or a man will have to explain to their partners and children that neither their mothers nor their fathers were ever born.”
It may sound farfetched, but New Zealand has already passed legislation that would allow scientists to create children for experimentation from sperm and ova artificially constructed from other cell parts. This type of cloning was also among those allowed, though not specifically named as such, by Canada's Reproductive Technologies Act. This permission, camouflaged as a prohibition, is found in clause 5 (1)(c) and allows the creation of “an embryo from a cell or part of a cell taken from an embryo or foetus,” provided that the individual so created will only be used for experimentation and will not be allowed to live.
Dr. Irving calls for an honest public debate on such issues, which she says, has not been forthcoming while these and nearly identical laws are being passed around the world. She says that the era of human genetic engineering has already begun. “Similar scenarios describing the asexual reproduction of human beings or a combination of both should also be addressed publicly.”
(This update courtesy of LifeSiteNews.com.)