Ethics Newsline®

MONTREAL
A Canadian woman is using a pioneering medical procedure to freeze her eggs for future use by her seven-year-old daughter, who has a medical condition that will make her infertile, provoking fierce opposition by medical ethicists.

The CBC reports that Melanie Boivin’s daughter has a condition that will probably cause her to enter menopause at an abnormally early age and lose her ability to bear children. Boivin, a 32-year-old resident of Montreal, told the CBC that she took a year to ponder the ethical issues involved, but eventually decided that motherhood depends not only on genetics but on who takes care of the child.

“It is the same as if she would have needed any other kind of organ, for example a kidney,” said Boivin. “I would have given it to her without any kind of hesitation,” Boivin told the CBC.

Freezing eggs for future fertilization is possible with a technique developed recently at McGill University. According to reports from the Globe & Mail and the Hamilton Spectator, the procedure has been used for women who are about to experience medical conditions or procedures that will render them infertile, but this is the first time eggs have been frozen for use by another woman.

McGill ethicist Margaret Somerville says a mother freezing eggs for her daughter’s use raises some troubling issues.

“What are the rights of a child not to be brought into existence in this way?” Somerville asked, according to a report from the Toronto Star. “I think here there was a lot of good intentions … but we also have to ask about that future child.”

Somerville said there is a growing body of literature suggesting that many donor-conceived, test-tube children resent decisions that led to their creation. “Can we reasonably anticipate that a child would consent to having its sister be its gestational mother, and to be a sister to the woman who gives birth to it?”