Washington Post Examines Ethical Issues Of Company That Allows Parents To Select Embryo Characteristics

The Washington Post on Saturday examined the ethical issues of San Antonio, Texas-based Abraham Center of Life, which creates embryos and allows parents to select embryos after reviewing donor characteristics, such as race, education, appearance and personality. According to Post, the company enrolls egg donors who are in their 20s and have some college education and sperm donors who have advanced education. Abraham Center founder Jennalee Ryan said all donors undergo health tests and screenings to determine background and family history of mental illness, as well as answer questionnaires about their childhood temperaments, favorite books, adult hobbies and family histories. "If I do discriminate [among donors], it's that I only want healthy, intelligent people," Ryan said. According to the Post, some fertility experts and bioethicists have called the company's process a "disturbing step toward commercialization of human reproduction and 'designer babies.'" Steven Ory, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, said, "This is essentially making embryos a commodity and using technology to breed them ... for certain traits." Other fertility experts have said the company's process is not much different than parents separately choosing sperm or egg donors. "Combining them doesn't pose any new major ethical problems," John Robertson of the University of Texas-Austin said. Some experts also have questioned the ethics of creating embryos when there are about 400,000 embryos at fertility clinics. Ryan said that embryos from the company are better because the donors are young and fertile, whereas embryos from fertility clinics often are from older women who have had fertility problems. Ryan said, "People will say, 'You're trying to create the perfect human race.' But we've always done gene selection just by who women choose as their husbands and men choose as their wives. This is no different." According to Ryan, each embryo at the center costs $2,500, and the total cost of each pregnancy attempt is less than $10,000, lower than the cost of adoption or in vitro fertilization (Stein, Washington Post, 1/6).

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