Josephine Quintavalle talks about the value of the human embryo

Josephine Quintavalle

A Scottish fertility clinic recently said it would soon allow women to genetically screen their unborn children and discard those with defects and abnormalities. Earlier this year the UK's fertility regulator HFEA unveiled a list of a 116 different conditions from which doctors can legally destroy embryos conceived through IVF. Many of these are considered minor, non-life threatening, or medically treatable. Doctors at the Glasgow centre for reproductive medicine claim that the genetic screening of IVF embryos would lessen the risk of miscarriage and conditions such as Down Syndrome which are more likely for babies carried by older women. Besides the controversy of this procedure for the purposes of medical advances, some people believe that this takes another step towards the creation of designer babies.

Josephine Quintavalle is the co-founder of Comment On Reproductive Ethics and Jonathan Bellamy asked her about her views on these issues.

Jonathan: You co-founded the company CORE, Comment On Reproductive Ethics, in 1994 to focus on ethical issues about the embryo. What led you to your strong beliefs?

Josephine: Well at the time IVF was gaining momentum as a solution to fertility problems and there was more and more focus on the human embryo. I felt that having spent a considerable time of my life defending the baby in the womb and working as a crisis pregnancy counsellor and helping women in difficult decisions about their unborn babies, I realised that an even more vulnerable member of the human race was the human embryo. Created outside the human body it was becoming more of a product than being recognised for what is was, for its humanity.

I think a lot of people need to understand a little bit about basic biology. We live in a very scientific world yet it's extraordinary how willing we are to deny the fact that when the human egg is fertilised by human sperm a new human life comes into existence. It's very tiny and it's very wonderful in that tiny bunch of cells, as some people like to describe it. It's a unique human being. You can tell very quickly whether it's a boy or a girl.

As these horrifying genetic tests that they're talking about show as well, you can find out things that might happen along the pathway of the development of that embryo, conditions that it may develop later in life.

Jonathan: Do you think this subject of ethics really depends whether embryos are considered to be human life or not?

Josephine: If we're talking about them not being human then obviously what is the problem? I mean there could still be a problem if we decided that we want a perfect child and therefore will go around manipulating eggs, manipulating sperm in many ways, trying to make sure we get something better than we might get if we just left it up to nature. There isn't a biology book that medical students would study anywhere in the world that will deny the fact that when the sperm hits the egg a new human entity comes into being. We have to reclaim our enthusiasm for that human embryo.

I was just looking up on the web, because I remembered that when hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, there were human embryos in the fertility clinic in the freezer. These embryos were saved and one of the embryos that was implanted was a successful pregnancy and the baby was called Noah when he was born. That's how real a human embryo is. It starts off very tiny and can be extremely vulnerable. You could imagine in a freezer in a hurricane, when all of New Orleans was in this disaster zone and yet that tiny little embryo was saved and went on to become a little boy called Noah. We've got to get in touch with our inner embryo. I sometimes say to people, "hands up who wasn't once an embryo". There's nobody on the face of this earth who wasn't once an embryo. You just have to accept it and you have to think how amazing it is that everything that we are today as grown-ups or growing ups, was contained in those very few cells at the very beginning of life.

Jonathan: Why do you think there are many people who take a different view on it, in terms of denying it as human life up to a certain point?

Josephine: Because even though we do live in a very scientific age, it's surprising how little people seem to know about early human biology. I think that's why it's very good to have these kinds of radio stations and websites and just underline it.

Some people take the position that it's very small so it doesn't matter as much what you do to an early embryo. I say to those people, well by that kind of moral reasoning, it wouldn't matter what you did to a two year old because it's smaller than a twenty year old. You know it's not size that gives the embryo it's humanity it's its very nature that is human.

Removing the whole process of reproduction from the human body and putting it into a laboratory, has distanced us a little bit from understanding what it's all about. The embryo created in a test tube, we have to respect it just as much as the embryo developing in the womb right from the start. I think nevertheless, that doing things in a laboratory sounds more like a product than it does a human being.

I don't suggest that everybody who goes through IVF doesn't think carefully and doesn't identify that what they're doing is creating new human life. Unfortunately the process of IVF has created something else, which we associate with products and that is surplus. They create too many embryos. It isn't possible to implant all the embryos that are created, so then you start making choices and the choices are always going to be, I want the better one; I want the embryo tested, so if I have to make a choice I want to make sure I make the right choice. I think sometimes there is an ability to forget about what happens to the embryos that weren't chosen. Some of them are sent off to be researched on, but many of them are just simply thrown away.