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Designer baby fears as NHS sperm bank opens for business (4 August 2014)

Date: 04/08/2014
Duncan Lewis, Legal News Solicitors, Designer baby fears as NHS sperm bank opens for business

An NHS sperm bank is to launch in October to enable single women and lesbian couples become mothers.

The Mail on Sunday reports that women – who are called customers rather than patients – will pay around £300 to access a database of sperm donors, which will give them details about the donor. Once they have made their selection, a sperm sample from the anonymous donor will be sent to a clinic of the woman’s choosing for artificial insemination.

The UK is currently experiencing a shortage in sperm supplies, with stocks from overseas sperm donors being sourced. Critics of the NHS sperm bank – which will be based in Birmingham – have said the move could lead to thousands of “designer families” without fathers, and some have called the project a “dangerous social experiment”.

The facility will also be available to heterosexual couples and gay couples who experience fertility problems, but the Department of Health-funded enterprise is a response to the legalisation of same sex marriage and partnerships – and an increasing number of single women who do not want to wait for the right partner before having a baby.

Clerics who have criticised the NHS sperm bank include the former Bishop of Rochester, Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali – who has written in The Mail that the bank raises important questions “about the future of our children and the role of men in our families and communities”.

“The bank will allow women to choose from profiles of donors, which will include educational attainment and ‘attractiveness’ criteria, raising the spectre of ‘designer babies’, born to the parents’ specifications.

“What if the process of pregnancy and birth ‘interferes’ with the desired outcomes? Will such babies then be rejected?”

Bishop Michael points out that the Human Embryology Act removes the need for a child to have a father, which he says is disastrous for children, impacts on the self-worth of men and is also disastrous for society.

The sperm bank will be based at Birmingham Women’s NHS Foundation Trust, which currently runs a fertility clinic – but it will be run by the National Gamete Donation Trust (NGDT) and paid for with a £77,000 grant from the government.

The NGDT received and additional £120,000 this year to help with the organisation of egg and sperm donors.

The chief executive of NGDT Laura Witjens said that the demand from same sex couples and single women for sperm donors has grown “exponentially”.

“The aim is that we will have enough surplus sperm so that we will be able to set up a service for people like single women and same-sex couples.

“There is no evidence to suggest that children are better off with or without a father,” she added.

The announcement about the NHS sperm bank coincides with a childcare case reported in the media, involving a couple from Australia who paid a surrogate mother in Thailand to carry twins for them.

The couple then rejected the male twin because he was born with Down’s syndrome, leaving his surrogate mother Pattaramon Chanbua to care for him in Thailand while they took his healthy twin sister back home with them to Australia.

The baby boy has a congenital heart condition and needs urgent medical treatment – a public appeal has so far raised more than £70,000 for his care.

Ms Chanbua says she was paid $15,000 dollars (£9,000) to be a surrogate mother for the unnamed couple.

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