Papa who?

London, Dec. 10: A child’s need for a father will no longer be a consideration when a woman seeks fertility treatment, British ministers will say this week.

The move — which comes despite widespread public opposition and which will give single women and lesbians the right to treatment — forms part of a shake-up of Britain’s embryology laws. One of the key proposals would allow research on test-tube embryos that were part-human, part-animal — referred to as “chimeras”.

The changes, which ministers say have “fundamental social, legal and ethical aspects”, are set out in a department of health “command paper” seen by The Sunday Telegraph.

Homosexual couples will have the same parental rights as heterosexuals and, for the first time, all parents will be banned from choosing the sex of their baby for non-medical reasons. However, embryos will be able to be screened for genetic abnormalities “which may lead to serious medical conditions, disabilities or miscarriage”.

Screening will also be expressly permitted to identify a “tissue match for a sibling suffering a life-threatening illness”, but the document rules out “family balancing” and adds that most people surveyed in a consultation exercise believed “this should not be a matter of choice open to parents”.

The creation of combined human-animal embryos under licence will be popular among stem-cell researchers, including a team from the North East England Stem Cell Institute, which has submitted plans to create a human-cow chimera embryo. However, it will be bitterly contested by reproductive ethics campaigners who brand such ideas “abhorrent”.

The aim of the shake-up is to bring the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act into line with scientific advances and to make sure the law is “fit for purpose in the early 21st century”. Caroline Flint, the health minister, claims in her foreword: “The over-arching aim is to pursue the common good through a system broadly acceptable to society.”