Britain’s first gay couple to father children through surrogacy have sparked heated debate over their plans to have have triplet daughters via a sex-selection process that is illegal in the UK.
Barrie and Tony Drewitt-Barlow want three girls to add to their four sons and a daughter. They plan to conceive the triplets through embryo sex selection, and will do so in the US, where the practice is legal.
The couple’s youngest children, six-year-old twins Jasper and Dallas, were conceived thanks to a batch of embryos, of which there are still ten remaining in a Californian fertility clinic.
The embryos were created using the couple’s sperm and the eggs of a Brazilian model. She was paid £50,000 by the couple for her eggs after they spotted her on a catwalk.
Barrie outlined the couple’s plan to pick the female embryos from those ten. They will then be implanted in the womb of a surrogate mother.
“This is baby trafficking, a skewing of the natural order,†said a spokeswoman for Christian Concern. “Children are a blessing and a gift, not objects that we select from a showroom.â€
Lisa Ann Magerman, an obstetrics blogger and nurse, raised safety concerns. “Triplet pregnancies are very high-risk to begin with,†she said “Sex selection signals they care more about balanced numbers than four lives.â€
But not all observers are against the practice of sex selection. In a report into the ethics of gender preference, Stephen Wilkinson, a professor of bioethics at Lancaster, said: “We didn't find any ethical arguments sufficient to justify a blanket ban on these people seeking sex selection.â€
There is “too much testosterone†in the Drewitt-Barlow household, said Barrie, adding that he was not too old to be a father again. “I need to have another princess in my life â€" or two or three,†he told newspapers.
The Drewitt-Barlows, who live in Essex, Â first became fathers in 1999. Each of them fertilised an egg from the same woman, resulting in the birth, thanks to a surrogate mother, of Saffron and Aspen, half-siblings who are both now 17.
They were followed by Orlando, 13, and then Jasper and Dallas. Saffron told newspapers that her fathers are “way too old†for more children.
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