LONDON, December 20, 2002 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The British High Court today ruled in favour of a pro-life person who challenged the country’s artificial reproduction authority for granting permission for clinics to selectively screen embryos to find a tissue match for treatment of born siblings. The High Court ruled that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) operated beyond its jurisdiction in allowing the controversial procedures which have been described as designer baby selection. Josephine Quintavalle, of Comment on Reproductive Ethics (CORE), was congratulated on her high court victory over the embryology authority today by the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children. Paul Tully of SPUC said: “Josephine Quintavalle, on behalf of CORE, has taken a most courageous stand on this critically important issue, and is to be congratulated on the success of her case.” The case was a difficult one since the circumstances which led to the challenge involve a young boy with a blood disorder who could be helped by umbilical-cord blood cells from a tissue-matched donor. Tully said, “SPUC has great sympathy for the Hashmis and other families carrying potentially harmful genetic conditions” and said priority needs to be given to ethically acceptable treatments.
“At the same time, we regard it as deplorable to use the suffering of families and children as a means of emotional blackmail to demand that human embryos in the test-tube can be chopped up, tested and discarded as if they were inert samples from an industrial chemical process,” Tully concluded. See the BBC coverage: https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2593663.stm