Would you let parents destroy ‘gay’ embryos?

Because I’d like to have a child, and I’m getting on a bit, my husband and I have spent time recently with consultants. They’re an odd breed with distinct and shared characteristics. Invariably, after we’ve all sat down, their first move is to tilt their chair back, or give it a little twirl (design permitting), just to signal how free and easy it is at the top of the medical tree. When they speak it’s with a sort of hurried condescension, as if giving career advice to a hopeless niece. And they scribble as they go, on some scrap of paper. Ovary, ovary, arrow, hieroglyph, arrow, ‘Got that? Hmmm?’ Follicle, scribble, circle, square.

It would be easy to sink into a happy torpor if it weren’t for the odd direct question, lobbed like an existential grenade into the room. ‘There is of course the risk of complications. Cretinism and so forth. What is your position in the case of cretinism?’

One minute your lids are drooping, the next you’re staring wildly at your life partner across an existential abyss. Darling? In the case of cretinism? Did we have a position?

Beneath the triangulated silence lies the uneasy truth: that we don’t quite agree about these things. So we say: yes absolutely, we’ve talked that through. And I thank God that we’re not doing all this in ten years’ time.

I’ve read a lot of bumf about breakthroughs in fertility recently, and I feel for the happy couples of the future and the moral issues they’ll face. On the one hand geneticists are pushing forward every day, deciphering the genes which give rise to human traits, good and bad: for blue eyes, for height, for alcoholism even. On the other hand, the screening of embryos is becoming ever easier.