Three Genetic Parents?

The UK's Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority is conducting a public consultation on the question of whether they ought to permit the creation of children with three genetic parents. The question is about a new assisted reproductive technology that could prevent children from suffering from diseases carried in mitochondrial DNA. In essence, the fertility clinic would fertilize an egg, and then remove the genetic material from that egg and pop it into a de-nucleated egg from a donor. The result would be an embryo with Mom and Dad's nuclear DNA, but with mitochondrial DNA from Donor--free from any mitochondrial diseases of which Mom is a carrier.

I'm not actually bothered by this. While having three genetic parents is something new, surrogacy has given us many children with three biological parents (egg Mom, sperm Dad, and surrogate Mom--who, make no mistake, makes some serious contributions to the basic makeup and future health of the child, via hormonal and epigenetic influences, diet, gestational environment, and so on). And after all, what will we call the child of this high-tech intervention, with her three different pro-genitors?

"Baby."

Lesbian Couple's Parental Rights

A lesbian couple in Florida had a child. One of the couple was the child's birth-mother and the other its genetic (egg-providing) mother. (The genetic father was a sperm donor, not involved in the case.) After years of jointly rearing the child, the two mothers split up. Genetic mom sought parental rights to the child, and birth-mom resisted, claiming that 1) Florida common law recognizes only birth-mothers as mothers; 2) since Florida doesn't permit adoption by gay couples, it has prohibited lesbian couples from sharing custody of children; 3) the genetic mother was an "egg donor," required under Florida gamete-donation law to relinquish parental rights; and 4) the biological mother had relinquished her parental rights contractually, in the text of her agreement with the fertility clinic which helped the couple create the child. In this opinion, the Fifth District of Florida finds 1) that Florida in fact has no common law recognizing exclusive parental rights in birth mothers--particularly in a case like this, where the birth mother is not the genetic mother; 2) that if Florida law prevents gay couples from sharing parental responsibility for a jointly-conceived child for whom they cared as mothers for years, then that law is unconstitutional under both the US and the Florida constitutions; 3) that a biological mother who provided her lesbian partner with an egg for purposes of fertilizing and implanting it in her partner and then raising the resultant child together, is not an "egg donor" under Florida law; and 4) that the provisions of the standard pre-printed form used by the fertility clinic did not apply to the facts in the case and could not operate to vitiate the genetic mother's parental rights. This is big news, because it appears to establish a fundamental, constitutionally-protected right to procreate--even for gay couples who, under current Florida law, can neither marry nor adopt.

ABC reports that birth-mom intends to appeal the case to the Florida Supreme Court.

That's waaay more than "surrogacy"

Wow. This BioEdge article, somewhat tamely titled "Surrogacy thrives in China, despite illegality," includes the following shocker: "[One s]urrogacy agency promised an undercover reporter posing as a customer that for 1 million yuan (US$150,000), the company would enlist 5-7 surrogate mothers and impregnate them with the customer’s sperm all at once, solely to ensure that at least one baby is a boy...[F]emale foetuses who are not wanted are aborted. If all babies are girls, the mothers have to keep getting pregnant after abortions....In the more likely situation that two or more babies are male, the customer chooses a mother to carry the foetus to term, and the other babies are aborted." I'm generally pro-choice and pro-surrogacy. But this industrial-model combination of bodily commodification and the callous routinization of abortion as a form of manufacturing quality control (where "quality" is maleness) is just evil.