In vitro, no one can hear you scream...

Daily Telegraph: Babies 'designed' to be free of disease

Two babies have become the first in the world to be born after their mother underwent a screening process pioneered in Britain to ensure that they were clear of an inherited disease.

Freddie and Thomas Greenstreet's parents both carry genes that made it likely that their children would be born with a rare form of cystic fibrosis, a debilitating, inherited condition from which their first daughter suffers.

But the new technique allows embryos to be screened and only the healthy ones used for IVF. Screening has been used regularly in the past for people having IVF but doctors at Guy's Hospital, London, have refined the procedure so that a much wider number of inherited diseases can be detected.

Using the technique — known as pre-implantation genetic haplotyping (PGH) — doctors can develop tests for up to 6,000 conditions.

Catherine Greenstreet, 38, a physiotherapist from Chiswick, west London, said: "The whole family is very excited about the arrival of Freddie and Thomas. The odds of getting pregnant were lower having had the PGH than with standard IVF but I didn't want to have normal IVF and then find I was carrying a child with cystic fibrosis.

"It was so reassuring to know that we would not have to deal with it."

To you, perhaps. Certainly not to your children whose murder you sanctioned, madam.

Mrs Greenstreet defended her decision to reject the imperfect embryos and criticism that the technique would lead to "designer babies".

She said she and husband Jim, 41, did not want to repeat the experience of caring for a seriously ill child.

"Unless you have lived with a child that has a terrible disability or disease then you can't speak about it," she said. "Who can criticise you for trying to get rid of horrible diseases? Why would you want to see people suffer?
When you have got these lovely healthy babies in your arms it dampens all the pain we went through. They are designer babies but they are designed for the good of mankind."

Ah, yes...The Unmarried Marriage Counselor argument. Quite silly, that. But it does seem to silence the squishy soft among us. Perhaps if Dr. Mengele had used it, he would have won the Nobel Prize...

Mrs Greenstreet and her husband, who works in corporate finance, already have five-year-old twins, William and Lizzie.