Emily Graves spoke with Josephine Quintavalle about the controversial Government proposal

Josephine Quintavalle

The UK Government is pressing ahead with proposals to allow a controversial IVF technique that will result in the creation of children with three genetic parents. The technique, known as 'mitochondria replacement therapy', can only be used for research purposes under current legislation.

If the proposals get the go ahead, Britain would become the first country in the world to allow more than two genetic parents.

With both ethical and health concerns being raised by critics of these plans, Emily Graves spoke with Josephine Quintavalle, the co-founder of Comment On Reproductive Ethics.

Emily: Please would you start by telling us about yourself and the work you're involved in?

Josephine: I started my pro-life work some years ago when I worked as a crisis pregnancy counsellor. During my work in Central London I was continually coming across issues that were related to assisted reproduction, as opposed to the crisis of the naturally conceived child. I became more and more interested in those issues and I realised that there were some very big feminist issues here as well, because there was a great desire for those who couldn't have children easily to get hold of the eggs from what they call donor women. Then I started to explore the issue of where the 'donated' eggs came from and we unravelled trafficking that was going on in some of the poor countries in Eastern Europe where very wealthy, affluent societies were encouraging women in those societies to sell their eggs in order to attempt to solve fertility problems that the women with the big bank balances were facing. So there became a network with other feminist groups across Europe and in America as well. These were not necessarily pro-life women, but women who were very concerned about the integrity of the female body nevertheless. So that's how I started to get interested in the issues of assisted reproduction. I think since the birth of Louise Brown in 1978 the issues associated with assisted reproduction have never gone away and the current controversy over whether or not we should be creating the so-called three-parent embryo is fruit of the processes that allowed the creation of children in a petri dish as opposed to natural conception in a womb.

Emily: Please could you explain more about these three-parent babies?

Josephine: As a result of being able to create embryos in a laboratory, there's quite a selection of trying to get the best baby; looking for the best egg and sperm. This has been part and parcel of the process right from the start, as it gives you the opportunity to try and achieve this. The three-parent embryo has been proposed because of the capacity to do things in the laboratory with a human embryo, but it has been proposed for what is a legitimate purpose and the purpose is to try and find a cure for a condition, mitochondrial disease and mitochondrial disease is carried in the egg of the woman.

I don't think we need to go into this in too complicated a way because the ethics are often much simpler than the actual science. Here we've got a valid objective to try and cure disease, but what we immediately have to say is that this is not a process of curing disease, much as abortion for Down's syndrome doesn't provide any cure or any improvement for the babies with Down's; it's simply a process of elimination. This process does not cure mitochondrial disease. It's a very complicated way of trying and hoping that a baby will be born without the condition, but it requires meddling around with the initial building blocks of life in a way that is both dangerous and unethical.

What you're trying to do is to take parts of a good egg from a donor woman and substituting them in the parts that are carrying the disease in the woman who wants to have the child. That would be moving material from one egg to another. In those circumstances you would be having some of the maternal genetics of the woman who's donating the egg. There's also another proposal in the United Kingdom, which is the preferred way to do it, which is using an already-existing healthy embryo, so human life that's already been created and taking the material from that embryo and transplanting it into the embryo that's carrying the disease. In that process you'd actually be destroying one human embryo; sacrificing it in order to donate the parts to the embryo that is carrying the condition. So you can see this doesn't cure the disease; it's a way of trying to avoid it.

What is extraordinary is how much opposition there is to this. It's not just coming from people who have an absolute respect for human life and the belief that it begins at conception, but also for people who are very concerned that we shouldn't meddle with the human genome; we shouldn't try and change the embryo at the very beginning of life, we shouldn't be meddling there. That's known in general terms as germline modification; changing the embryo at the very beginning of its life. Any changes that you achieve at that stage would be passed on to subsequent generations as well, so when you're using genetic material from more than one adult you would be changing the building blocks, the traditional building blocks of life. Change in human evolution takes place very, very slowly; hugely slowly. This would be a catastrophic change done in an instant, so we don't know what the consequences would be. It would be a process of trial and error and you've also got to consider that what you're creating is a human being. What are you going to do if it doesn't work out?

Emily: Surely the babies will have to be monitored over the years?

Josephine: What would you do if the baby was incredibly abnormal as a result of this? You are using the child as an experiment. This is one of the issues that stopped some ethicists as well; that you can't translate this research from animal models to human. The human is different and there are many areas where these differences are extremely significant. The only way you could do it is by experimenting and we're not allowed to experiment on human beings. Those who have no problems with assisted reproduction in the laboratory are still opposed to this and say categorically that all you should do is just use donor eggs. But we have problems about donor eggs; you don't get donor eggs without women having to go through stressful procedures where there are risks of hyperstimulation. Women have died in the process of donating and selling their eggs and in some of the European countries that we investigated the stories are harrowing of the exploitation of very vulnerable women and this urge to get hold of eggs. As I say the ideal way forward according to the scientists working on this in the United Kingdom is to use embryo to embryo, but then you have to say why you would destroy a perfectly healthy embryo to take parts from it to give to another embryo that isn't healthy? You know, is this a cure for a disease? I'd draw a parallel, which people who think this is a great idea get a bit upset about, but it is similar; do you have a right to help yourself to organs from the street children of Brazil who nobody wants? And people would say, of course not, you couldn't possibly take organs from children. But in a way this is what you are doing here; you're saying nobody wants that embryo so we'll take bits from it and implant them in the other embryo having removed the defective mitochondria from that embryo.

Emily: It's really reshaping the value that's put on the embryo in the first place.

Josephine: It does. There is an inter-European campaign at the moment, which is called One of Us and it's establishing that the human embryo is one of us.