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Who is the real ‘father of IVF’?
Yesterday Donald Trump called himself “the father of IVF”. Mercator has rigorously fact-checked this claim and has declared it FALSE.
Why Trump would say something so ridiculous is anyone’s guess. It may be a case of someone with chronic foot-in-mouth disease shooting himself in the foot, to mangle our metaphors. He seems to be trying to win American women’s votes by promising to support IVF despite bad press over his opposition to abortion.
However, IVF is (or ought to be) even more controversial than abortion. It creates more ethical problems with every passing year: millions of frozen embryos, surrogacy, sex-selective abortion, gay dad families, eugenics, financial exploitation, egg freezing, elevated risks of birth defects, laboratory errors, and on and on.
We thought that readers would appreciate reading a profile of the real father of IVF, Robert Edwards, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology in 2010. This was originally published in Mercator shortly after Edwards’s death in 2013. If Trump read it, he would not be so eager to pose as “the father of IVF”.
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The creator of the first IVF baby, 2010 Nobel Laureate Robert Edwards, died on April 10, 2013. Obituaries and eulogies by colleagues, friends and admirers spoke of a passionate man with boundless energy, driven by a desire to bring happiness to infertile couples. Since he is directly responsible for the birth of some five million children since the first IVF baby in 1978, his legacy is worth pondering. (The figure is now about 12 million.)
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Like Margaret Thatcher, who was born in the same year and died two days before him, Edwards reshaped the world we live in. And as with Thatcher, we ought to ask whether it has been for the better.
Edwards was born in 1925 in Yorkshire. After a slow start in his research career, he began working in human reproduction in the mid-1950s.
He teamed up with Dr Patrick Steptoe, an expert in the novel field of laparoscopy, in 1968. By 1969 they had provided the first compelling evidence that fertilisation could take place outside the human body. Characteristically, this development was announced on Valentine’s Day.
At the time, the scientific establishment – to say nothing of the churches -- was strongly opposed. The reaction of the British Medical Association was so extreme that Edwards twice sued it for defamation. Eminent scientists described his work as immoral and criticised him as a self-publicist. James Watson, the Nobel laureate who discovered how DNA works, sneered at him. He lost government funding for his project.
Even the leading journal Nature, which backed his work, expressed some reservations. What was the point of bringing new children into an already over-populated world?
Fully aware that he was smashing as many idols as Thatcher did in political life, Edwards started to cobble together an ethical justification for his controversial research. In 1971 he wrote a paper (in conjunction with an American lawyer) for Nature on the ethics of IVF which anticipated many later developments.
Edwards was extremely adept at public relations. He knew exactly what would happen once human reproduction became possible in laboratories and he tried to smooth a path for it. On the medical side he predicted sex selection, embryonic stem cell research, children for lesbians and single women, posthumous reproduction and genetic engineering. On the legal side he foresaw debates about over-population, gender imbalance, the personal identity of clones, and the need for government regulation.
When Louise Brown, a healthy 5 pounds, 12 ounces baby, was born on July 25, 1978, criticism stopped. As Edwards triumphantly put it, “Most ethical disagreements have been vaporized” by the existence of millions of IVF babies.
What were the ethical principles which inspired him?
First, there should be no limits on scientific research as long as it does no harm. Science could not and should not be limited by ethics. As he told a journalist for the magazine Living Marxism, “I cannot accept this hyper-emotional stuff that says that some areas are out of bounds and cannot be touched.”
In his hands, science was an attack upon the Christian world view. In 2003 he told the London Times: "[IVF] was a fantastic achievement, but it was about more than infertility. It was also about issues like stem cells and the ethics of human conception. I wanted to find out exactly who was in charge, whether it was God himself or whether it was scientists in the laboratory."
And what he discovered was that "It was us."
In principle nothing was out of bounds for scientists, Edwards believed. His 1999 remarks backing eugenics are widely quoted: “Soon it will be a sin for parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.”
Edwards was actually in favour of human reproductive cloning, provided that the procedure was safe.
Second, the ethical norm for medicine (he was not a medical doctor) was the “clinical imperative”. Whatever satisfies a patient’s desires must be done. In 2004 he wrote: “Clinical imperative is a powerful doctrine, immediately accepted by many patients and professionals alike. A strong argument offered by many clinicians insists that any unwarranted restriction of scientific and clinical research must be rejected if it restricts the access of their patients to the most recent scientific advances.”
This, obviously, can justify almost any medical procedure.
Third, human identity is proportionate to consciousness – which means that embryos, which have none, are just disposable organic material.
Edwards was a fan of “practical ethics” – pragmatic justifications for his research. He wasted little time in debating issues like personhood. Why should he? They might have hampered his research.
As long as it undermined the humanity of the embryo, any reason, however specious, seems to have been good enough. One of his papers contains a bizarre passage drawn from evolutionary pantheism. “The broad evolutionary outlook [is] that life began only once and is continued as its spark is transmitted through successive generations via the gametes. Any decisions about the beginnings of human life will therefore be arbitrary and involve selecting a point where human life and dignity become paramount.”
This is so silly that only an intellectual who has lost all faculty for self-criticism could propose it. If the beginning of human life is arbitrary, why not the end? Could we decree that life should end at 30, as in the film Logan’s Run?
As with Mrs Thatcher – who, by the way, presided over the passage of the world’s most liberal embryo experimentation law in 1990 -- the fulsome praise heaped upon Edwards skips over some sticky questions, even for those who are not opposed to IVF.
Edwards’s patients were not properly informed about the dangers of the procedure. (There were no animal trials for IVF (or for its successor, ICSI). Edwards did not seem to worry about the higher rate of birth defects among IVF children. They were just collateral damage of the “clinical imperative”.
Feminists criticised Edwards for commodifying the female body. The magazine Living Marxism reminded Edwards of objections by the Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering. These women were arguing that IVF was “not invented to serve women’s interests, but the needs and desires of medical scientists, and the state, to further technological progress and to aid population-control aims”.
Edwards’s response was apoplectic. “Look at the happiness of those women [his patients],” he said. “They wanted this treatment. I am fighting for these women. Feminists should be arguing for more of this kind of help for women, not less of it.”
Similarly, there is little discussion in Edwards’s papers about the psychological welfare of the children created through IVF. What about the genetic orphans created through anonymous sperm donation? What about children of gay parents who will grow up without a mother or a father? More sad, but necessary, collateral damage.
The artificial reproduction created and defended by Edwards may someday be viewed as a technology more powerful than the atomic bomb.
And perhaps like Edward Teller, the father of the bomb, another scientist untroubled by self-doubt, he believed that “There is no case where ignorance should be preferred to knowledge — especially if the knowledge is terrible”. His blithe indifference to the social consequences of IVF is staggering.
In 2013 an Australian bioethicist, Robert Sparrow, set out a blueprint for “in vitro eugenics” in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
Generations of people can be created in Petri dishes, eliminating unsatisfactory genes in the quest for better human beings. Dr Sparrow calculated that two to three generations of human beings could be produced in a single year – rather than the 60 or so years that the pace of natural reproduction requires. “In effect,” he writes, “scientists will be able to breed human beings with the same (or greater) degree of sophistication with which we currently breed plants and animals.”
Is this chilling scenario the fault of the genial, baby-kissing professor who was Robert G. Edwards? It certainly is. There have been few scientists who envisaged the future more clearly and worked harder for it. "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?"
What do you think of IVF? Is it a boon to society in an era of demographic decline?
Michael Cook is editor of Mercator
Image credit: Pexels
Have your say!
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Julian Cheslow commented 2024-10-23 06:07:59 +1100I think there is room for more stringent regulation of JVF at least in certain circumstances(such as the amount of kids one donor can have) without banning it entirely.
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Juan Llor Baños commented 2024-10-20 20:11:10 +1100Exceptional article!! It is a tribute to truth in the face of sophistry and scientific fallacy!! It deserves to be widely disseminated for a long time!!
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Susan Rohrbach commented 2024-10-18 23:36:23 +1100Remember how the same DJT claimed to be father of warp speed?
And it is true, in the same way.
For the abortion tainted shot, Trump loaded gun while Biden pulled trigger
For the IVF (figurative) shot, trump was the first presidential level to claim he would force insurers to cover it . -
mrscracker commented 2024-10-18 22:16:04 +1100None of us being Mr. Biden’s physician, we can’t know the causes of his decline nor the severity. But health care professionals knew and it’s probable his vice president and cabinet were aware also for the last four years.
Either scenario is troubling: the inability to detect the president’s decline or hiding it from the public until it suited them not to. -
Emberson Fedders commented 2024-10-18 15:06:20 +1100The difference being, of course, is that the Democrats WERE able to see it, and Biden had the good grace to see it too. The Republican party is too frightened of Trump to make the obvious call that he is an old man who clearly does not have the cognitive abilities to give a speech on policy, let alone lead the country.
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mrscracker commented 2024-10-18 11:35:33 +1100It’s amazing how the same party that was unable to detect their own candidate’s obvious decline over the past four years can now diagnosis that in Donald Trump.
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Emberson Fedders commented 2024-10-18 10:59:56 +1100Trump’s mental decline is certainly worrying.
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mrscracker commented 2024-10-17 14:55:05 +1100Mr Trump is notorious for saying ridiculous things. It’s a part of his shtick.
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