The Strange New World of Three-Parent Children
Leading bioethicists and family advocates are criticizing the British government's decision to allow a controversial fertility treatment yielding "three-parent children," arguing the practice exploits women's bodies and turns kids into commodities.
As the Guardian reported Thursday, fertility regulators in England have officially approved clinics to apply for licenses to conduct mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT). This experimental treatment is for "women whose faulty DNA puts them at risk of passing on devastating genetic diseases to their children." The nucleus is extracted from an egg of a mother with such faulty DNA and placed in a donor's egg that has healthy mitochondria — the energy sources within the egg cell. The egg is then fertilized with the father's sperm. Other methods of this treatment modify the mitochondria in already fertilized embryos.
