The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday September 11 2005
In the article below, we said: 'Abortions, at 17.8 for every 1,000 women, are at a record high.' Those 2004 figures, supplied by the Department of Health, relate to women aged between 15 and 44 only.
This summer, I met a man who was about to be cloned. His skin cells were to be sent to South Korea, where scientists would inject his genetic material into human eggs. Stem cells from the resulting embryos would then be sent back to British experts hoping to find a cure for motor neurone disease.
The man I met is dying. He may have only a year or two to live and any breakthrough will come too late for him. By volunteering to be one of the first Britons to be copied, he wants to help save others. But he is young and cannot give up hope, so he did something else.
Though he is far from rich, he paid £12,500 to travel across the world for a treatment so unproven that his consultant, who has no links with the clinic in question, warned him that the chance of any improvement was, at best, 3 per cent. The therapy failed, but he thought the risk worthwhile. What else could he have done, this man caught in the gap between scientific marvels still to come and a remedy hardly more reliable than the application of leeches?
Welcome to the biotech century, in which scare stories about runaway science are balanced by trudging progress. Last week, the government announced the first shake-up in legislation since the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990 set the ethical framework for a generation. The new discussion agenda includes 'saviour' siblings, allowing social sex selection and human-animal hybrids.
Already, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis means embryos can be screened for fatal diseases, such as cystic fibrosis and Huntington's. Ever since the first test-tube baby was born, in 1978, the UK has been a world leader. That makes it all the odder that some changes have seemed so slow. The Warnock committee decided, long ago, that embryos could be used for experiments for up to 14 days. The beginning of human life, it argued, was an ethical rather than a biological question. Years on, ethics trump biology in less desirable ways.
Just after the government announced its consultation, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority allowed a clinic to select embryos lacking the gene that can trigger eye cancer in children. This was either a godsend or, to pro-lifers, another possible shortcut to bio-hell.
'What's the hurry?' asks Josephine Quintavalle of Comment on Reproductive Ethics (Core), as if parents at risk of having sick children had all the time in the world. Earlier this year, in a test case involving the Hashmi family, Core lost its battle to ban 'saviour' siblings created to help treat a brother or sister with a potentially fatal genetic disorder.
The House of Lords ruled the procedure lawful, but the case should never have got so far. Individuals, and doctors, who want to save or enhance life should not have their reasonable dreams crushed by lobbyists seeking to impose a private credo. That is not, though, an argument against all regulation, especially on social selection.
As Lord Winston argues, it will soon be simple to choose a child's sex, but that does not mean 'family balancing' has to be legalised, against the wishes of around 80 per cent of people. If accessibility is the test, we might as well concede that Iran must have the nuclear bomb. Nor should the West embrace policies it deplores elsewhere. In India and China, cheap sonograms and abortions have so skewed the ratio of male to female that the deficit of girls in Asia has been estimated at 100 million.
There is a third reason to be wary. Any treatment based on whim rather than health provokes the argument that Britain is opening the floodgates on designer babies. This mantra is so well-worn that you might expect the nurseries of Hampstead to be full of particle physicists in nappies. Except that there is no Mozart gene or get-into-Oxbridge gene, only the web of biology and background that no eugenicist could hope to deconstruct.
The fertility debate should provoke anxiety, but that concern should hinge not on the imaginary children of the future. It should centre on the babies we are having, or not having, in Britain 2005.The baby boom of the late 1980s has given way to an ageing population and a fertility rate of 1.79 children. Abortions, at 17.8 for every 1,000 women, are at a record high. The mistaken clamour to lower the top limit of 24 weeks rumbles on, partly because ever younger babies are being kept alive.
Too few ask whether it is ethical to force life on premature children who may be gravely damaged, or why the old and sick are compelled to endure hideous lives they no longer want.
There is no proper compass on who should live or who may die. The state is rarely to be found by an incubator or at a deathbed. And yet, in assisted fertility, it is the most officious regulator imaginable. Last week, a minister made clear that NHS fertility treatment is to be strictly for the two-parent, heterosexual family.
Such social engineering would be thought sinister if it applied to any other branch of reproduction or any other state provision. It also ignores both the make-up of the modern family and the particular problems of today. The youngish mothers of 1990 have been replaced by older women. In caricature, they are sad, old Bridget Joneses, weeping into their pregnancy-testing kits or wishing men were as effective sperm providers as Michael Buerk imagines.
In reality, many women who want children have left it too late. Along with other factors, such as obesity, that has created an infertility crisis so acute that one in three women may need IVF or similar treatment by 2015. Meanwhile, the government has abandoned a target of three IVF cycles on the NHS. Instead, former Health Secretary John Reid promised one. That would give most women a meagre conception chance of roughly 20 per cent, if the directive worked. But as few as one in five primary care trusts is providing one free cycle and many women face a two-year wait.
What future can there be for high-tech science when people are denied the breakthroughs of long ago? Far from inhabiting a post-ethical age, we are in a limbo where ethics have become either the morality of the religious right or a synonym for rationing. In that climate, available treatments get labelled a luxury and so-far undiscovered cures dismissed as perilous. Both should be seen as a birthright of a society that believes in science and its own future.
The guiding principle has to be humanity. Take human clones, the modern spectre. The man I met this summer did not believe in reproductive cloning, only the therapeutic sort. He had no Raelian vision of a world of simulacra or think, like George Bernard Shaw, that perfectibility was no bad goal.
In common with the 1,200 Britons who will die of motor neurone disease this year, he simply wanted not to have to waste away as death closed in. It seemed a reasonable aim.
