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  Conception technologies give rise to ethical concerns (Pt. 5) Nothing brought discussion of infertility treatment closer to science fiction than announcement last year that researchers in Scotland had been able to clone an adult sheep. By this January, physicist Richard Seed was telling media in Chicago he wanted to do the same thing -- for a price of up to $1 million -- to help humans unable to bear children by other means. Presidents, commissions on scientific ethics, religious groups and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine balked. Congress and the Pennsylvania Legislature have both begun discussions of bills to ban human cloning, though nothing has passed because of concerns that valuable research could be jeopardized by language in the legislation. They needn't hurry. Some scientists have estimated that if human cloning is feasible, the capability is at least 10 years away. But this very extreme form of assisted reproduction strikes a sour note, for now, with those it's intended to benefit. "Honestly, it's terrifying," said Hunte, the Presbyterian minister whose wife became pregnant on the second try with in vitro. "In vitro is helping the natural process -- it's not creating from scratch, tampering with nature," he said. "Yes, we want to help our species survive, but when we start to want to make decisions of what kind of child we want to have, and with what kind of characteristics, that's crossing the line." Researchers believe the possibility of genetic manipulation -- the ability to choose and enhance your child's traits by altering an embryo's DNA -- will come ahead of cloning and raise the same issues that concern Hunte. In a few clinics around the world, genetic testing is already in use, a sort of half-step toward manipulation. Infertility specialists in England and elsewhere use the procedure known as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to rule out specific diseases such as cystic fibrosis before transferring an embryo from in vitro. Religious leaders are among those concerned by the various genetic advances. The Catholic church has always opposed any conception outside the body, and Protestant denominations that sanctioned in vitro may be more resistant to other tampering. Christian moralists "worry about the fertility clinics of the future, which could offer photo albums of potential children," said the Rev. Ronald Cole-Turner, an associate professor of theology and ethics at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. "Cloning is just one technique in a whole group of emerging techniques that offer people the chance to select the genes of their offspring -- we will lose something, the risk, the pain, of having children." Not everyone believes such risk is worth preserving. "It's very implausible to say we should never try to make people better by genetic means if we learn how to do it," said Dan Brock, a Brown University professor of philosophy and biomedical ethics. "If we could make people immune to the AIDS virus, I don't think anyone would object morally." Such questions could become relevant debate sooner than we'd like, sooner than we're prepared for, and we could be surprised by our answers -- even to cloning. Two decades of speedy development in advanced infertility treatment bear testimony to that, from first test tube baby Louise Brown's birth forward. "Usually what happens over time is the novelty wears off as we get more used to it," Brock said. "We find, like with IVF, the technique is safe compared with most other forms of reproduction, the psychological harm feared to children turns out not to be there, and we get to accept the practice. It doesn't become an astonishing thing."
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