Moratorium on in vitro fertilization? (News in Brief: Great Britain).

London--Embryologist Dr. Sammy Lee has exposed wrong practices at IVF (in vitro fertilization) laboratories. Lee has listed dozens of errors, ranging from the implantation of the wrong embryo, to the careless handling of human eggs, to unpleasant treatment of women. His account shows that improper methods of accountability and control are prevalent in the world of assisted reproduction. After admitting that successful fertility treatments can produce a feeling of elation in the doctor who has helped a couple to conceive, he added, "Yet I have also found an ethically and scientifically dubious world in which specialists are driven by extraordinary ego to do things for their own purpose--which is to advance their careers."

An insistence on shoehorning our technological prowess into an acceptable social framework, he said, without examining the most basic issues about the purpose of human life, will invariably produce technicians who lose sight of the awesome responsibility put in their hands.

One horrifying fact uncovered by Dr. Lee is the number of donor insemination or donor egg pregnancies which end in deliberate abortion. It seems that many couples lose confidence in the process which they have so long striven for, and decide that they do not want to settle for the second-best solution of a child not genetically related to one or other of them after all. In short, you have the right to what you want, and if you decide what you have bought into is not satisfactory, you send it back.

In response to these revelations, prolife activists have demanded a moratorium on "test tube" babies. The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) commended Dr. Lee for exposing the industry as one in a crisis of competence, corruption, and moral bankruptcy, and condemned the many thousands of lives destroyed in the creation of "miracle" babies (Catholic Herald, Nov. 15/02).

Separately in another column in The Catholic Herald, writer Mary Kenny commented on another atrocious trend, namely, performing very late abortions because the baby has a minor handicap. In October, she wrote, an almost full-term baby was aborted because it was diagnosed, prenatally, with a hare lip, something which can be corrected easily by surgery. The previous week, she said, doctors actually revolted over the planned abortion at 35 weeks of a twin because the child had a "serious, but operable" heart defect.

If the pro-life groups get together to fight this trend, Kenny wrote, this is one campaign they could win.