In 2002, American couple Sharon Duchesneau and Candy McCullough sparked a media firestorm when, after ten years together, they decided they wanted to become parents. They asked a friend of theirs to be a sperm donor so that Sharon could conceive their child. They had already been rejected from a local sperm bank. Their reason for being rejected was the same reason they were approaching this particular friend to be their donor: Sharon and Candy—both deaf from birth—wanted to have a deaf child.
In 2008, the UK Parliament passed a piece of legislation called the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act. The act amended the 1990 law of the same name that created the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which regulates fertility clinics and embryonic research facilities across the country. Now legislators wanted new restrictions placed on its powers. Particularly, they wanted the HFEA to be legally prohibited from allowing IVF patients to select embryos likely to produce disabled children.
Duchesneau and McCullough weren’t named directly in this legislative process. But Ruth Lynn Deech, a member of the House of Lords who had been chair of the HFEA in 2002, expressed her “hope that your Lordships will be pleased that the deliberate choice of an embryo that is, for example, likely to be deaf, will be prevented” in the updated law.
