The creation of up to five babies by three-parent in vitro fertilisation has come under criticism from the Catholic bishops of England and Wales.
Auxiliary Bishop John Sherrington of Westminster, the lead bishop for life issues, said revelations uncovered by the Guardian newspaper were “deeply concerning”.
The Catholic Church opposes the technique to create babies for parents with genetic abnormalities because two embryos are created and destroyed in the process of harvesting their parts to create a third.
Bishop Sherrington said: “It shows a further step in the technical manipulation of new life with the loss of human life as part of the technique.
“The technique depends on the destruction of two human lives who had inherent dignity and rights and must be protected from their creation as persons in order to create a third embryo and life.
“It also fractures the child from biological parenthood. It steps into the unknown world of genetic engineering with manipulation of the human germline.”
The bishop added: “The gift of life, to be respected and treated with dignity from conception to natural death, is a mystery which cannot be reduced to technical manipulation.”
His remarks came after journalists used the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to discover that 30 licences have been granted by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, the regulator, to create children by mitochondrial donation treatment (MDT) since 2018.
The HFEA confirmed that a small number of babies have been born, but did not give a specific number other than to say it was “less than five”.
The Newcastle Fertility Centre is understood to be the only clinic in the UK where such techniques are being carried out.
The first licences were granted in 2017, two years after Parliament voted through regulations to permit the genetic modification of the human germ line in an attempt to fight inherited diseases connected to defective mitochondria such as muscular dystrophy.
Mitochondria are the biological power packs that give energy to nearly every cell of the body but when they fail to work fully cells can be starved of energy, causing muscle weakness, blindness, heart failure and death in extreme cases.
The procedures covered by the regulations include “three-parent” in vitro fertilization by which material is extracted from an ovum and inserted into a donor egg before it is fertilised by the father’s sperm.
The second technique, pronuclear transfer, involves up to four parents creating two embryos which are destroyed before the maternal embryo is cloned and repackaged with parts from the donated embryo.
The Anscombe Bioethics Centre, an Oxford-based institute serving the Catholic Church in the UK and Ireland, said that the babies in Newcastle were created by pronuclear transfer, a process in which two embryos were functionally destroyed by the removal of their pronuclei and parts of both used to create a third embryonic human.
Professor David Albert Jones, director of Anscombe, said: “Every child newly conceived is to be welcomed and we hope this new human life brings joy to his or her parents, but some way of conceiving children involve risks or harms to the child.
“This is a new and unnecessary technique that does not add to the safety of IVF involving an egg donor, but adds further risks.
“As with all IVF involving egg or sperm donors, this fractures parenthood and it is essential that the child is at least given identifying information about his or her egg donor parent. It is a fundamental human right to know about our biological origins”.
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