Oh, my. The UK Daily Mail reports that a woman wants to freeze her own eggs so that her daughter Mackenzie, who is two years old and was born with Turner Syndrome and doesn’t have ovaries, can can use them one day to have babies by IVF. The Daily Mail rightly points out:

If this happened, the ethical implications would be immense.

The test-tube baby would be a half-sibling of its birth mother as well as another child of its grandmother. The baby’s father would be fertilising his mother-in-law’s egg. In addition the baby’s aunts and uncles would also be its half-brothers and sisters.

Good God. I sympathize with the fact that she wants to help her daughter, but think about the poor kid(s) that would possibly be created with this confusing family tree. It’s like some kind of technological incest. Said Josephine Quintavalle, of the pressure group Comment on Reproductive Ethics:

‘One has to think of the implications for any hypothetical child born of such inter-generational donation. The complexities of these relationships are often impossible to unravel. Psychologists are already talking about the trauma of genealogical bewilderment, as egg and sperm donation and surrogacy create more and more artificial conceptions.’

It’s not like this is the only way for Mackenzie to have children. Adoption is always an option for childless couples wishing to give love to another human being. Let’s hope, if this woman actually goes through with it, that her daughter ends up having more sense than she does.

I think the most disturbing part about this story is knowing that this would not be the first time a mother has done this. Back in 2007 I posted about a similar story out of Canada.