Eight healthy babies were born over the last two years in the United Kingdom who have each broken new ground in how we create new human beings. They are the biological offspring of three adults. One more is expected to be born in the coming months. The Free Press highlighted this news in late July with this headline: “One Embryo. Three Parents. The Future is Already Here.” They ask, “Is it ethical to create polyparental hybrids?”
These children have one biological father and two biological mothers.
Even though this development did not result from some nefarious effort to redefine the family, that could certainly be an unfortunate by-product. We are indeed on the verge of creating biologically related throuple (and beyond) “families” as polyamory grows more “hip” and boldly experimental. The implications of this experimentation for children, the meaning of parentage, family itself, and what it means to be mother and father are all deeply concerning.
An academic paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine in July details how this troubling development stems from efforts to prevent a mother’s harmful mitochondrial mutations from causing serious diseases as it is passed to her child. The paper explains, “Mitochondrial donation by pronuclear transfer involves transplantation of nuclear genome from a fertilized egg from the affected woman to an enucleated fertilized egg donated by an unaffected woman.”
The resultant child is more protected from mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) disease. This is achieved through in vitro fertilization where the fertilized egg of the at-risk mother is enlivened with a small amount of healthy mitochondrial DNA from a healthy female donor.
The Free Press explains, “This is how we arrive at a single embryo with three parents: nearly half of the DNA from dad, nearly half of the DNA from mom, and less than 1 percent of the DNA from the egg donor.”
An additional ethical concern is the fact that this all happens through the mechanized fertilization of far more eggs than will ever be used. Therefore, the experimentation needed to achieve this result, not to mention the process to create these nine pregnancies, has likely resulted in the creation and destruction of thousands of embryos who are the tiniest form of a human being.
Roughly one out of every 7,000 births is affected by untreatable mitochondrial disease, and because mitochondria are in every cell of the body, this disease can present in numerous way through the heart, brain, muscles and gastrointestinal tract.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration thankfully prohibits this process because it introduces “a genetic modification” and “raises safety concerns.”
Even though this process was engaged with and resulted in altruistic ends, we should all be concerned about efforts to manipulate how human life is created, especially those that challenge the integrity of the natural family, the meaning of parentage, and the procreative marital sexual union of husband and wife.
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