Same-sex couples could soon have their own biological children by utilizing a reproductive technology being developed by researchers at Cambridge University and Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science. But Christian bioethicists have classified the potential new technology as rife with moral problems.
Exuberance over such technologies is “all expressed in terms of what the adults want and desire,” said Paige Cunningham, executive director of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity. “I would like someone to say, ‘What about the children?’ They don’t have any voice in how they are the subject of an experiment like this.”
Cambridge and Weizmann Institute researchers have discovered how to take skin cells from an adult, transform them into what are known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) and then develop those iPS cells into the precursors of human eggs and sperm. The production of iPS cells is not new, but their potential development into eggs and sperm is.
The next step of the research process will be to develop the precursor cells — known as primordial germ cells (PGCs) — into mature sperm and eggs. The maturation process will involve inserting the PGCs into a human or animal ovary or testicle, or developing a laboratory process to achieve the same effect.
Producing embryos
If the research proves successful, an egg could be developed from the skin cells of a male and then combined with the sperm of another male to produce an embryo. A surrogate mother would have to carry the resultant baby to term. Alternately, a female’s skin cells could be developed into sperm and combined with an egg from another female, with one of the two female partners carrying the baby to term.
Jacob Hanna, one of the lead researchers in the project, said, “We have succeeded in the first and most important step of the process, where we succeed in reaching the progenitor cell state for sperm and egg, though it is very important to emphasize that we have not achieved mature sperm and eggs. So we are now focusing on completing the second half of this process.”
If lesbians someday use this technique to become parents, they will only be able to produce female offspring unless a Y chromosome is somehow imported into their genetic material — because female genetic material does not contain the Y-chromosomes necessary to produce baby boys.
David Prentice, vice president and research director of the Charlotte Lozier Institute in Washington, said, “We’re talking about manufacturing children in all of these [scenarios]. If you get into that mindset, you might envision having not a sperm bank, but a Y-chromosome bank where you can just add a Y chromosome to some of these cells, find the right mix that you want of traits and add that Y chromosome in there. It’s of great concern.”
Cunningham said producing rather than procreating a baby is “intrinsically wrong.”
“When we start constructing children … we are no longer welcoming [the children] but we are creating them, in many cases to fulfill a desire or need of our own,” she said.
Developing babies from PGCs could produce children with genetic defects as well as cause psychological harm not quantifiable with science, Cunningham said.
“Anytime you start messing around with genes, there is a high likelihood of harm,” Cunningham said.
Biological same-sex parents could be a reality by 2017, news sources predict.
(BP)
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