Josephine Quintavalle talks about the value of the human embryo

Jonathan: Recently I had on my show Professor Wilkinson from the Centre for Professional Ethics at Keele University. He was talking about selective reproduction. He said that "if they could have created somebody who is like me in many respects but even healthier, even happier, then why not go for that option"? What would you make of that moral justification?

Josephine: I think it's a bit of a throwaway line. I don't think it's thought through very carefully. You have to consider the rich variation of human beings who come in all shapes and sizes. I think we also have to accept the fact that some human beings are given a bigger burden by God to bear through life, by perhaps being not as able bodied as others etc. We live in a society though, that once you're born, is adamant that everybody is equal; adamant that the disabled must have exactly the same rights as everybody else. That's got to start before birth. It shouldn't be kicking in once you're born.

We have a situation where you can do what you like to the embryo; you can abort the baby developing in the womb for a number of reasons, including very trivial reasons. The developing human being has no rights, but suddenly, something extraordinary happens at the moment of birth and it acquires these rights.

Any gesture towards perfection, or that people could be better and that you could get a better human being, I think we're always making very unpleasant observations about those who are not so fortunate. I mean, it's obvious that everybody would enjoy being perfect, brilliant, maybe highly sporty etc. We all have our own ambitions, but none of those qualities are what makes us human. The humanity of us all is an intrinsic thing. It's not dependent on beauty or brains or athletic ability.

Jonathan: It does appear though that particularly with this recent genetic screening with the Glasgow Centre that we're gradually inching down the road towards designer babies. Do you think that's going to happen?

Josephine: I think you're quite right to point out that when you do these kinds of tests, you are looking for some kind of perfection. I think at the moment they're focusing very much on trying to find the embryo that doesn't have a risk of getting disease later on in life, or doesn't have it already, but inevitably we'll find more qualities in the early embryo that can be identified. You'll probably find, as the years go by, there'll be a capacity to get, not just one that doesn't have a risk of disease, but an embryo that's got positive qualities that we might, in our very competitive world, think are very important and very positive.

I'd just ask anybody reading this, to think about their friends and the people they've met in recent years and think, was the nicest person, their greatest friend, necessarily the most beautiful, the cleverest, and the most athletic? You know one of the loveliest people I know is a man who is now in his fifties and I've known him since he was 19. He suffered physical problems at birth and he's also got a learning disability as well. He cleans the streets. He's one of the loveliest people I've met. He's got a great sense of humour. I really enjoy being with him. We all know that the quality of people's humanity and their worth as friends is not based on the qualities that they're looking for in the IVF clinic.

Jonathan: What about IVF? I mean, IVF has been around for a long time and for many mothers, for many women, it appears to be the last chance and the only way they seem to get children. What are your thoughts on IVF, because you could say that the natural process of childbirth has not actually worked and IVF is a substitute?

Josephine: I think a lot of the time we're looking at IVF being used more for social reasons, in so far as the infertility of the woman is often based on age, rather than other factors. On the other hand there may be many cases where there is very serious and very sad infertility in couples.

It is possible to undergo IVF without creating surplus. You try and mimic nature. You create one embryo or two embryos and you implant those. If you're not successful you go back and do it again, but you don't create surplus embryos.

You can also freeze the human egg and freeze human sperm, so you can undergo the cycle of IVF and create embryos that you can implant immediately without any testing and then go back later and create embryos a second time around.

It's possible to avoid this issue of destruction and it's also very clearly possible to avoid the issue of testing them.

I think the testing has to be described to people. It's not that you just run your eye over the embryo. They take cells away from the developing embryo, usually at the sixth to eighth cell stage. If you take one cell away from that developing embryo and often they take two, what have you done to that embryo? What have you taken from it? It's an invasive procedure and there's evidence already in the literature that embryo biopsies are not good for embryos. So ironically you're testing for perfection and there is a feeling that we may find later on that we're going to have to answer for other effects that the embryo biopsies had on that particular embryo and the developing child.

A lot of what's going on in IVF is fairly straightforward and fairly effective, but there are many aspects of IVF over which there are big question marks as to their longer term safety and the longer term health of the babies who are born.

Jonathan: Josephine this is a huge topic, which we could spend hours talking about. If people want to investigate it a bit more and hear more of your thoughts on this, do you have a website?

Josephine: Yes, they're welcome to get in touch with me. Its www.corethics.org