THE prospect of creating children whose biological mothers have never been born has been raised for the first time by scientists.

In a study fraught with ethical and medical controversy, researchers from Israel and the Netherlands have taken tissue from the ovaries of aborted foetuses and grown it in the laboratory for a month.

They found that immature egg follicles, which would not normally become active until puberty, started to develop when bathed in a cocktail of female hormones. This raises the possibility of producing eggs from the foetuses’ ovaries, which could be fertilised with sperm.

Once implanted into a womb, the embryo, whose mother had never been born, could develop into a baby. The process has been successfully carried out in mice.

The study suggests that eggs could be harvested from an unborn child and matured in culture for eventual donation to infertile women or for use in medical experiments.

As there is a serious shortage of donated eggs both for fertility treatment and medical research, scientists have long been intrigued by the possibility of exploiting the millions of immature eggs that exist in every aborted foetus. Follicles could be “rescued” and matured artificially in the lab, to produce eggs that could be fertilised by IVF.

The procedure has never been attempted on human foetuses because of ethical objections and technical difficulties, but a team led by Tal Biron-Shental, of Meir Hospital in Kfar Saba, Israel, has now taken ovarian tissue from seven aborted foetuses aged between 22 and 33 weeks, frozen it, thawed it and kept it alive for four weeks in a bath of hormones.

The eggs started releasing increasing amounts of oestradiol “a female hormone”, showing that they were starting to mature. They did not progress to the stage of fertility, but the work marks an important step towards that.

The study was intended primarily to evaluate the best conditions in which to mature human eggs, for eventual use on those taken from adult patients. Even so, Dr Biron-Shental said that if ethical and safety issues were resolved, foetal eggs could be donated to infertile women. “If you could mature them you could use them for IVF donations, because there is a shortage,” she told the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Madrid.

“I’m fully aware of the controversy about this, but probably, in some place, it will be ethically acceptable. There is a shortage of donated oocytes for IVF. Oocytes from aborted foetuses might provide a new source for these. There are a huge amount of follicles in the foetal ovary.”

It is also extremely difficult to find viable ovarian tissue in foetuses aborted before 24 weeks, the legal limit in Britain. Later abortions tend to be done only in cases of serious abnormality or risk to the mother, and eggs harvested from such foetuses are likely to carry genetic defects.

Six of the seven foetuses in the Israeli study had been aborted because of abnormalities, and the other came from a mother with a psychiatric illness. The parents all gave their consent for the tissue to be used in the experiments.

Experts said that the technique could also cause genetic abnormalities. Although a female foetus starts with about seven million follicles, this number has fallen to 250,000 by puberty and continues to fall during adulthood.

Professor Roger Gosden, of the Jones Institute for Reproductive Health in Virginia, one of the world’s leading ovary experts, said: “This is not research that we’re doing, or that we particularly want to do, because I don’t think it’s necessary, quite apart from ethical considerations.

“Most of the eggs present in the foetus disappear, and though we don’t know why there may be a selective process. They may be abnormal, and you might be increasing the risk of producing some sort of abnormality by using eggs that may have been destined to be eliminated.”

Francoise Shenfield, co-ordinator of the European society’s ethical committee, said: “I would be very troubled by this, not only for ethical reasons but for psychological reasons, because what is the public going to think about where these eggs have come from? You can imagine what the anti-abortion lobby will think of that. Society is not ready for this. We don’t work in a vacuum. We have to be extremely careful before we even do research.”

Nuala Scarisbrick, of the anti-abortion group Life, said: “It is sickening and disgusting. Adults who give their eggs presumably know what they are doing. A dead baby who is aborted obviously cannot give its consent. Just because there may be a demand for this from desperate people doesn’t make it right. Who would want to know that their mother was an aborted baby?”

A spokesperson for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority said: “After a public consultation in 1994 the HFEA decided that it would be difficult for any child to come to terms with being created using aborted foetal material because of prevailing social attitudes. The authority does not consider the use of tissue from this source to be suitable for fertility treatment.”

Another potential use of foetal eggs is to produce embryonic stem cells for use in medical therapies, which hold great promise for treating conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, heart disease and paralysis. Professor Gosden said, however, that this too would raise safety issues, if the eggs were not of good genetic quality.

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