GERMANY’S FEDERAL court has cleared the way for genetic pre-screening of embryos, reviving a heated ethical discussion still burdened by the memory of the Nazi-era eugenics programme.
The ruling by the federal court in Leipzig allows in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) specialists to conduct pre-implantation diagnostic (PID) tests on a woman’s fertilised eggs to identify possible genetic disorders.
IVF specialists have welcomed the ruling, but criticism has come from Germany’s Catholic leaders and organisations representing the disabled.
More significantly, the ruling has divided Germany’s ruling coalition, which is now under pressure to legislate on foot of the ruling.
While the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) have welcomed the ruling, leading members of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) oppose PID treatment.
“It’s the job of politics to expose euphemistic circumlocutions for the selection and rejection of embryos,” said Dorothee Bär, family spokeswoman for the CSU, the CDU’s Bavarian sister party. “Saying that PID may help affected parents to have a healthy baby factors out the fact that other embryos are discarded, which means killed.”
The case arose from a Berlin IVF specialist who treated three couples worried that their children would have genetic defects. After testing for and implanting only healthy embryos, he left the other embryos to die.
Aware that he was operating in a legal grey area, he went to the local authorities and forced yesterday’s case.
IVF experts welcomed the Leipzig ruling, saying it permitted only a conservative use of PID techniques to test for a specific genetic disorder present in the family history of one of the prospective parents.
They expect to use PID to treat annually up to 200 German couples with specific cases of conditions such as muscular dystrophy.
“The court has forbidden unlimited selection criteria for embryos and made clear that PID in no way permits the creation of so-called designer babies,” said Prof Jörg-Dietrich Hoppe of the Federation of German Doctors.
Proponents of PID say it closes a gap between pre-implantation and prenatal tests which, in the latter case, allowed abortion beyond the 12th week if tests turned up a serious disease.
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference attacked the ruling for “denying the embryo recognition as a stage in human development”.
“There is no convincing argument that decides one embryo is more human and the other less so,” said German bishops in a statement, expressing concern that the ruling would “increase the pressure on disabled persons and their parents to justify themselves”.
The moral questions thrown up by the ruling have an added complexity in Germany, where an estimated 70,000 people were killed and 400,000 forcibly sterilised during the Nazi-era eugenics programmes, which were concerned with “racial hygiene”.
“From our history, we have to deal with this issue sensitively and responsibly and not pursue anything that smacks of eugenics,” said Dr Thomas Schalk, gynaecologist at the “Kinderwunsch” fertility clinic in Mönchengladbach.
“That’s why we need an ethical commission of doctors, philosophers and theologists to define limits for this treatment.”