Women Do Not Want Test-Tube Babies

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30975, 3 February 1966, Page 2

Women Do Not Want Test-Tube Babies

The idea of producing “test-tube” babies and babies by proxy through the use of “incubator” mothers does not appeal to Christchurch women and doctors who were asked to comment.

A British reproductive physiologist, Dr. Robert Edwards, reported late last year that the discovery of a technique for producing test-tube babies was imminent.

He also said that the production of the human embryo in the laboratory could also mean that women could have babies by proxy. The testtube foetus obtained from the egg of a woman without a uterus, fertilised by sperm from her husband, could be nurtured in the body of another woman until the birth of the child.

This idea does not appeal to Christchurch women and doctors who were asked to comment.

Women asked to comment said that Dr. Edwards and his associates would be better etnployed in finding more

efficient methods of bringing the world's population under control.

Others who had not been able to have children of their own said they would prefer to adopt children. “When you become pregnant you have a feeling of contentment which nature gives you. It is the most wonderful experience when you first feel your baby move inside you. “I think it would be terrible for another woman to go through all the physical and emotional preparation of having a baby and then have to give it back to its parents after its birth. I do not think the real parents would feel very happy either,” said one woman.

Doctors agreed that the physical and mental reaction of the three people concerned would not be good for them or the child. The incubator mother could well feel that the child

she was carrying was her own. It would be very hard for her to give it up, said one doctor. The effect on the child who found out that some other woman had borne it could well be harmful, especially if it discovered the full circumstances and the real mother felt guilty she had not been responsible for the process of conception through to birth, said a second doctor.

Even now, children born as the result of artificial insemination are legally illegitimate. And it is expected that children born of an incubator mother would be in the same situation. Problems Raised

None of the persons interviewed felt that the Edwards’s report raised any moral problems but rather social, legal, and emotional problems.

Another doctor said the whole ideal was a pipe dream. He could not see it happening in New Zealand or anywhere else except in carefully considered individual circumstances which had the approval of both the medical ! and legal professions. In any case few people would be able to afford the cost involved, even if it were possible. Dr. Edwards also said that these experiments were bringing nearer the day when doctors may decide the sex of a child in advance and give parents a boy or girl as desired.

They could help to ensure that women who have a predisposition to produce haemophilic sons—haemophilia is an incurable hereditary disease in males characterised by persisent bleeding—had only girls. Girls do not suffer from haemophilia but they are carriers of the disease.

It might also be possible to prevent disorders such as mongolism, he said. The women agreed that it did not matter what sex a baby was just so long as it was healthy. “You love your baby and that is all that matters. Why upset the balance of the boygirl ratio. You could end up with too many of one sex and not enough of the other if you start messing around with nature.” said one motheri

Others said that it was high time science found ways of curing these hereditary diseases without resorting to the ways in Huxley’s “Brave New World.”

“Scientists seem to forget people are not machines. Women do not want testtube babies or other women to act as incubators. No matter how emancipated women become, we shall still want to have our own children in the normal way because that is part of being a woman. “This idea is all right for breeding pedigree animals, women are people not pedigree breeding stock to be manipulated for racial improvements,” said another mother.