Newsday recently featured a series of articles about one family’s experience in trying to treat and cure their young daughter’s deadly disease. Their quest leads them to create another child who has a specific DNA sequence that is a perfect genetic match for their sick daughter, in order to perform a bone marrow transplant using the new child’s tissue. Such children are now commonly referred to as “savior siblings.” The first savior sibling was Adam Nash, born in 2000. Since then, approximately one to two hundred such children have been brought into the world.

I’ve made the point before (here and here) that the age of embryo-based biomedicine is here. Creating “savior siblings” is one of the most vivid expressions of that fact. In order to have a savior sibling, parents use in vitro fertilization (IVF) to create multiple embryos, each of which is genetically screened using Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) to determine if it has the correct gene sequence needed for the sick child. Once there is a genetic match, the matching embryo is transferred to the mother’s womb and brought to term.

In the case of the Trebing family featured in the Newsday series, the couple’s daughter had a rare disease called Diamond Blackfan Anemia, a condition where there are not enough red blood cells to carry oxygen to the body. It can be treated with steroids or—in the case of Trebing’s baby daughter—monthly blood transfusions. The human and economic toll of these treatments and their side effects is admittedly a tremendous burden. The anemia can be cured with a bone marrow or stem cell transplant from a donor who is a genetic match.

The Trebings—lacking another child or relative as such a genetic match—opted for an extreme: they chose to create multiple embryos (eventually 32 in total) in the process of trying to have a child that had the right genetic match for their daughter. All but one of these embryos – the one that was implanted and brought to term – was discarded or donated to research. The new child, a boy, eventually provided a bone marrow transplant to his older sister as treatment for her disease.

The creation of savior siblings is gravely disordered option. First of all, it would commonly entail recourse to IVF though couples are known to have conceived a savior child naturally prior to the advent of PGD for screening embryos. As I’ve noted before, IVF is immoral because through it, a child is manufactured as the result of a technician’s hand, rather than being generated through the unitive love of the child’s parents.

A second element of the moral disorder here is that this process requires the manufacture of multiple embryos. All the embryos are screened using PGD – a process which exposes the developing embryos to some risk – by removing one or two cells from each embryo in order to conduct the genetic testing necessary to determine whether the embryo is a match. When a genetic match is found, there remain multiple developing embryos – all of them genetic siblings to the first child – who are either frozen, destroyed in research, or simply “discarded.” In the Trebing situation, 31 such embryos were discarded or destroyed in research.

A third element of the moral disorder is the way it reduces newly conceived human life to the level of an object. The mere fact that a child’s very existence is solely due to his or her ability to cure an older sibling is stunningly utilitarian. Parents of savior children reassure critics that they love the specially-created child as much as any. Nonetheless, the child is brought to term on the calculated determination of his or her usefulness in curing an older sibling. But for that, the child would not exist.

Today, in no uncertain terms, biotechnology and biomedical research are the engines behind an ever more pervasive object-ification, commoditization, and exploitation of embryonic human life. I would only note in conclusion that it will take creative, out-of-the-box thinking from the pro-life community to engage a culture which by and large welcomes embryo-based biomedical research and treatment—of which the therapeutic perk of savior siblings is just one manifestation. In this new age, hoisting pictures of aborted fetuses and over-hyping the case for adult stem cell research are sorely inadequate tactics.

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