Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS

Laboratories around the world are working on strange new forms of assisted reproductive technologies aimed at treating infertility no matter what the cost to human dignity.

The Daily Mail is reporting on some of these new technologies that will make it easy for people to reproduce – with or without a mate or even functioning reproductive organs.

For instance, women may soon be able to have their eggs “powderized” in a new procedure developed by Israeli scientists. Researchers were able to flash-freeze cow eggs so as to avoid the formation of ice crystals which can damage cellular structure. These eggs were then converted into a powder where they were stored at room temperature. The method could be used by women in the future who could freeze dry their eggs for future IVF procedures. Women would need to do little more than add water and sperm and they would have a fertilized egg ready for implantation.

Skin cells are also being used to make eggs and sperm. Japanese scientists have already reprogrammed mouse skin cells to make egg and sperm cells which means infertile men and women may be able to use their own skin cells to create healthy egg and sperm cells in a laboratory to make up for whatever deficiency is causing their infertility. Because stem cells are master cells that can turn into many types of cells in the body, this procedure may allow women to donate a skin sample rather than eggs for future fertility treatments.

“It would also mean there would be no upper age limit for having a baby that shares your DNA,” said Mike Bowen, a consultant gynecologist and obstetrician to the Mail. “Egg cells have a shelf-life while skin cells, which are constantly renewed, do not.’

Vincent, the first “womb swap” baby

The world’s first womb swap baby, Vincent, has already been delivered using a donor womb. This procedure is performed on women who were either born without a womb or who had a hysterectomy. The procedure involves implanting a donor womb, then putting the woman on powerful immunosuppressant drugs for a year to be sure the womb is not being rejected. At the end of the year, an embryo that has been grown in the laboratory is implanted in the womb. The mother is carefully monitored to be sure the pregnancy is proceeding normally. The baby is then delivered via C-section. Depending on the woman’s future plans, she can “use” the donated womb for up to one more pregnancy.

Scientists are also able to build artificial ovaries to grow and mature eggs for women who have fertility problems associated with conditions such as endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome. A U.S. team from Brown University used donated ovarian tissue to create a “honeycomb-like” structure which was “seeded” with human eggs. Testing proved that this artificial ovary was able to nurture eggs from early follicle stage to full maturity.

Cloning is also well under way. Just last year, a team of scientists in the U.S. and Thailand announced that they had made an embryonic clone of a human being. The stem cells used were taken from an adult and genetic information was placed inside a donor egg that had been stripped of its own DNA. Electricity was used to prompt the egg to develop into an embryo, which it did. The tiny creature was allowed to grow for a few days before it was killed.

Speaking of killing embryos, scientists have come up with a new piece of technology known as a embryoscope which will help personnel in fertility clinics to better discern which embryos are the healthiest and which ones to discard. The scope, which costs more than $160,000 US, serves as a kind of incubator that mimics conditions in the womb and allows the growth of the embryo to be monitored around the clock. The scope’s cameras take 5,000 images to check the progress of the embryos over five days.

“Experience has shown that embryos with certain chromosomal abnormalities have particular growth rates and shape characteristics,” said Professor Simon Fishel, managing director of the private CARE fertility clinics, told the Mail. “Using the embryoscope we can classify which embryos have the highest chance of a live birth and which have the lowest without even touching them.”

The value of the scope is measured by the fact that it increases the chance of pregnancy by up to 50 percent. Notice how nothing is said about the lives this scope will be used to destroy.

Even more callous is the invention of new Matchright technology which will read the DNA of two people and create “virtual embryos” so parents can see what their child will look like before it is even conceived. At the moment, it will only be used at clinics that provide sperm donors and will be used to screen out donors whose DNA could, when combined with the mother’s, create a child with genetic disease. Of course, it will also be used to see what color hair the child will have, how tall it will be, it’s skin color, and other characteristics influenced by genetics.

In other words, it will enable women to pick whatever donor gives them the child they’re looking for – much like previewing the way certain paint colors look on the wall or how a sofa might look in different fabrics.

But when we’re discussing human life, we have to ask ourselves some hard questions, such as – do we really want to go here?

It’s no wonder the Church refuses to condone these practices, and not because she’s out-of-touch. The Catholic Church has always supported scientific advances but only those that are used in morally acceptable ways which are based on the belief that  human beings bear the image and likeness of God and are to be reverenced as sacred.

“Never are they to be used as a means to an end, not even to satisfy the deepest desires of an infertile couple,” writes Dr. John Haas, president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center. “Husbands and wives ‘make love,’ they do not ‘make babies.’ They give expression to their love for one another, and a child may or may not be engendered by that act of love. The marital act is not a manufacturing process, and children are not products. Like the Son of God Himself, we are the kind of beings who are ‘begotten, not made’ and, therefore, of equal status and dignity with our parents.”

We adults might squabble among ourselves about whether or not to accept these teachings, but that’s easy for us to do. We’re not the ones facing life or death while lying helpless in a petri dish somewhere.

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