This means that embryos created outside the womb can be screened to show up chromosomal disorders like Downs and Edwards Syndromes, and medical disorders like Cystic Fibrosis and Muscular Dystrophy.
The pre implantation genetic screening will cost an extra €3,000 (on top of an average cost of around €5,000 for IVF).
The pre-implantation medical diagnosis will cost an additional €6,000.
Speaking on Morning Ireland, Dr Berry Kiely, medical advisor to the Pro Life Campaign, said she was concerned about the practise because, “the purpose of that is to select out certain embryos, to give them a chance to survive, and for other embryos to be discarded. That is something I have a concern about because it is saying there are some embryos, which at the end of the day are human beings, that we don’t want to survive.”
Sandra Brett, Medical Director of the Beacon Clinic in Dublin said it would be up to the couples to decide whether to freeze the, “affected,” embryos or not. However, “no clinic would put back an affected embryo for a serious disease, but we are giving this as a choice to the couples,” she added.
Embryos deemed not to be suitable are usually destroyed, said Dr Kiely.
“That is what happened in other clinics around the world.”
She referred to two recent cases in Britain where parents sought pre-implantation diagnosis to select an embryo that did not carry a gene that would make the child more likely as an adult to develop cancer.
“This was somebody who could have had many years of good and healthy normal life,” she said.
Dr Kiely said she would be in favour of this screening if there was a possibility of treating those genetic conditions and, “actually doing something to resolve the situation, to treat it to make it better,” but as this was not possible at the moment she did not support the practice.
”We have just had the Paralympics and before that the Special Olympics,” she said. “Some of these are people who would be destroyed because of this,” she added.
Sandra Brett said the aim of the treatment was to, “create life, to create families and to reduce the misery of multiple miscarriages.”
For the two treatments, PGD (pre-implantation genetic medical diagnosis) and PGS (pre-implantation genetic screening), the embryo has to develop until day five, but Ms Brett said that a, “fair proportion,” of the embryos do not make it to day five.