When science plays parent

Biotechnology has now delivered what was once the plot of dystopian fiction: children created from three genetic parents. But we should not celebrate scientific novelty, but learn from the enduring truths of creation.

With this news, the term “polyparental hybrid” enters our cultural lexicon. The term means what its prefix suggests—children with three parents, or to be more scientific, children created outside the (apparently) antiquated method of a single male gamete (sperm) and female gamete (egg).

L.S. Dugdale, a physician and ethicist at Columbia University, provided a helpful explanation in the Free Press about the background that led to this new development. Researchers from the United Kingdom announced on July 16 that eight babies were born, each conceived from one sperm and two eggs. This means, for clarity’s sake, that two genetic females made biological contributions to the children.

The intention behind the procedure was not to create children with “three parents.” The genesis of this experiment was a procedure aimed at reducing the transmission of mitochondrial disease through a process called “mitochondrial donation.” To prevent mitochondrial disease, the goal is to take the DNA from both the mother and father—after fertilization has occurred—and move it into a donor egg that has healthy mitochondria but has had its own DNA removed.

Think of it as a kind of genetic shell game. The nuclear DNA of the biological parents is transferred into a third party’s egg—one stripped of its own nuclear DNA but carrying healthy mitochondria. Even though the donor contributes less than 1% of the child’s DNA, it’s enough to introduce a third genetic parent into the equation.

So, where does this leave Christian ethics? Admittedly, we’re at a new frontier of considerations that would have been simply unimaginable to Christians in previous generations.

But in another sense, we’re at the very basic level of Christian ethics, which holds that regardless of good intentions, how we pursue them matters. That is the issue of means. What trade-offs should we accept? A long and storied tradition of Christian ethics, known as the “Principle of Double Effect,” helps us navigate these questions, although it does not provide clear answers itself. The Principle of Double Effect helps us understand that there can be situations where we accept less-than-ideal moral outcomes if no direct harm is intended and some higher proportionate good results. The unquestionably positive outcome of reducing disease must be weighed against the use of technology that disrupts the organic boundaries of reproduction, and, as this situation most certainly presses, whether the technology can lead to even greater concerns elsewhere.

It is the moral boundary we already have, namely, that reproduction is biblically prescribed as the natural outcome of a husband and wife’s embodied love, that is weighed against the proliferating growth of technologies that may take us where we eventually don’t want to go.

The technology we are pursuing in this situation is leading us to an outcome that Christians cannot endorse.

As a fundamental moral reality, this episode raises a question of creation order to which both Scripture and natural law inform our thinking. The simplicity of Genesis is also its beauty, as it provides a moral framework and, in turn, moral boundaries. The command to be “fruitful and multiply” is embedded within a marital context. Marriage is a complementary, permanent, and crucially, exclusive union. The issue of “polyparental” children is a clear violation of the exclusivity principle.

The major problem presented in this situation is that children have a right to be conceived through the loving union of their mother and father. The introduction of third-party genetic material fractures this unity, severing the child’s biological identity from the conjugal act and tethering it instead to an external donor—disrupting the natural and moral order of parenthood. For the children conceived from this technology, they will be justified to grow up asking questions about their identity and relationship to their parents. Is it fair to children to ask them to bear the burden of our technological prowess?

Other moral considerations arise. First, the embryo is treated not as a person with inherent dignity, but as a subject of experimental manipulation. Second, as it is manifestly evident in this situation, our willingness to live with imperfection is yielding to perfectionism and technocratic mastery. Third, we must ask: What other mechanisms are we willing to pursue to prevent disease? Are there any self-policing limits on the methods of technology we pursue?

My concern is that procedures like this one are being implemented more rapidly than our ethical considerations allow, and without a clear understanding of their safety or moral boundaries. Fourth, in addition to the question of creating children with three genetic parents, the technology in question opens the gate even wider to broader genetic interventions, further normalizing the path to designer children.

Procreation, according to Scripture and natural law, is not merely the production of genetic material—it is the fruit of a one-flesh union. By re-engineering reproduction into a laboratory process of parts selection and quality control, we exchange the child as a gift for the child as a product.

Christians must not simply be reactive in the face of such developments. We must be prepared to speak with conviction, to defend the dignity of the child, the integrity of the family, and the moral structure of creation. As is the case with evangelicalism’s all-too-casual attitude toward in vitro fertilization, our silence today could become complicity tomorrow.