Council guide for moral maze

Date: 16/01/1997

By Simon Coss

ETHICAL guidelines to help steer doctors and national administrations through the moral minefield created by cutting-edge fertility treatment and research on human embryos are to be drawn up by the Council of Europe.

The Strasbourg-based organisation, which comprises 40 European countries including the 15 EU member states, is set to include the rules in a wider Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine recently adopted by ministers.

The move follows a three-day Council-sponsored symposium on the issue late last year which brought together 400 medical experts, lawyers and religious and ethical groups.

As with all conventions and declarations drawn up by the Council of Europe, the new rules will not be binding the Council is totally separate from the EU and plays no role in the Union's legislative process.

Officials say it is highly unlikely that there will be an EU-wide directive on medical ethics and biotechnology as the issue falls under the umbrella of justice and home affairs which, under the Maastricht Treaty, is the explicit domain of national governments.

But many medical experts have nevertheless welcomed the Council of Europe's attempts to clarify such a murky subject.

“Clearly we will not be able to agree on certain areas abortion, for example which some countries ban completely and others allow almost on demand. However, I think there is actually quite a degree of common ground on some very important points,” said Dr Michael Abrams, the former British deputy chief medical officer who chaired the committee which drafted the Council's Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine.

The ethical dilemmas thrown up by medical advances have recently been in the headlines again after a UK woman, Diane Blood, was denied permission to be artificially inseminated with frozen sperm from her dead husband.

Blood was prepared to travel to Belgium to have the treatment, but the British Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority refused to release the sperm. It said Blood's husband had not given specific permission before he died for his semen to be used. Blood is appealing against the decision in the UK courts and has said that she is prepared to pursue her case in the European Courts if necessary.

Other recent controversial examples include the case of an Italian doctor who offered fertility treatment to post-menopausal women. On one occasion, he enabled a 62-year-old woman to become pregnant.

'Surrogate motherhood' where one woman agrees to have the embryo of another couple implanted in her womb is another practice currently attracting heated debate.

The success of in vitro fertilisation techniques, producing so-called 'test-tube' babies, has opened up a fresh can of moral worms over what should be done with 'spare embryos' which are not implanted in the mother.

Rules on this sensitive issue vary between EU member states. In the UK, for example, frozen embryos can be stored for up to five years before being destroyed. Meanwhile, in France, a court of appeal in Toulouse ruled recently that unused embryos should be destroyed if the father dies.