Saviour siblings and organ transplantation

Abstract

In Spring 2008, three elements of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill received considerable public attention. This was in part due to pronouncements by leading figures in the Roman Catholic Church, and in part because several Labour members of parliament requested a free vote on these matters. The three aspects of the legislation heavily reported in the news media were: the use of hybrid or chimera embryos for research purposes; removing the requirement for licensed clinics to consider the child’s ‘need for a father’ before providing infertility treatment services; and the use of preimplantation genetic diagnosis and tissue typing to create saviour siblings (children whose umbilical cord cells, or other tissue, could be used to treat an existing sibling with a serious medical condition). Each of these is ethically interesting in its own way but, in this piece, I shall look only at the third: saviour siblings. There are many complex arguments against embryo selection in general and saviour sibling selection in particular. Here, however, I will focus on just one: that the selected child might have its organs ‘harvested’ or be treated as an ‘organ farm’ for another person. I shall argue that this is a misplaced worry, as long as we are generally satisfied with the existing safeguards for tissue donation between living relatives. Those of us who think that the present arrangements for allowing tissue to be taken from an ‘ordinary’ child for the purposes of saving its brother or sister are satisfactory have no reason to be concerned about allowing tissue to be taken from a child created or selected for that purpose. For the arrangements are the same in both cases. Hence, if there is a genuine worry it ought to be about the law governing sibling donation in general – in which case this should be the object of criticism, rather than the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. Clearly, the prospect of permitting saviour sibling selection (which already happens, albeit rarely, within the existing regulatory framework) is something that certain people do find abhorrent. For instance, in his Easter Sunday Homily, Cardinal Keith O’Brien accused the Prime Minister of ‘promoting a bill allowing scientists to create babies whose sole purpose will be to provide, without the consent of anyone, parts of their organs or tissues’. Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe went further, speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Embryo Wars: