Rosemary McLeod: So what's new in multiple parents?

Science is working on how to exclude genes that can cause serious ill health. Photo / SHUTTERSTOCK

So scientists have worked out how to give babies three parents. I wouldn't have minded a third one myself, preferably rich and indulgent.

My scant two parents left me varicose veins, a tendency to depression, odd, squashed-looking toes, a complete inability to dance, and a larger bosom than I would like. My mother flaunted hers merrily, but those were simpler times.

What's left of my parents' possessions tells me that on a deeper level my father cared for traction engines, wildlife, especially birds, World War II histories, World War I flying aces, and photography magazines of the kind that featured naked women sprawled on sand dunes, or fetchingly climbing trees. This was the soft porn of the time under the guise of respectability, a mild enough vice. Whiskey was another matter, but at least he never turned nasty.

My mother's relics speak of flower arranging, embroidery, knitting, crochet, and china ducks and pigs. I have her carved Chinese jewellery box smelling of camphor inside, some of her more outrageous earrings, a cameo ring she never wore because she thought her hands were small and unattractive, and an embarrassingly detailed record of my early life in Box Brownie photographs, professional photographs, and baby books. I was to be their only child. Maybe she sensed that.

In the wings, as it were, was my godfather, Jared Robert Kelly, a United States marine from Los Angeles who my mother befriended during World War II, when marines were in camp near her home. He was a serious religious type, who survived the Pacific war to send me a flash white Bible for my christening, with fuzzy coloured pictures, and an inscription in what I guess was his professional script. He was a sign writer.

Maybe I'd have picked up his neat writing, and probably I'd have had a double dose of religion, his and my mother's bleak Presbyterianism, expressed in phrases like "Be sure your sins will find you out".

No thanks. I'll stick with the flawed gene pool I've got.

What's new, anyway, in children having multiple parents?

Divorces bring a series of fathers and mothers, of various kinds of inventive sexual orientation. Fathers and mothers come out as gay, and an extra mother or father will invariably join families that can include new children as well. Then there are the "uncles" who pass through many mothers' beds, the temporary boyfriends who, in worst-case scenarios, get charged with violence against women and children.

I used to dread my mother re-marrying and presenting me with a live-in stepfather. I didn't much admire her taste in men, though it was adventurous, and remember few of her men friends with any warmth, but there were exceptions.

I liked her Vietnamese boyfriend, who had to return home. The paper kites he made from waxed florist's paper were lovely things.

I liked the Afghan man who gallantly read us love poetry in Persian. I liked a Hungarian who appeared on the scene. He laughed a lot, and was already married, a recurring pattern. And an Austrian man cooked a fantastic noodle dish for us once, which makes me remember him fondly. But as a stepfather? The Vietnamese would be my choice. He was gentle and sensitive, she adored him, and anyway I left home about the time he arrived on the scene.

Senior international scientists are warning of the dangers of creating "three-parent embryos" as it looks as if Britain could go ahead.

The intention is to exclude unwanted genes that can cause serious ill health in children, but the scientists who disagree say too little is known about how the process might really work.

The issue will be discussed with a parliamentary committee later this month.

Watch those Poms. Before you know it they'll delete age-old traits like the builder's crack, and the bad teeth and chinless mark of aristocracy, plastic surgery, in effect, before conception.

As for my godfather the marine, it's sad to think they may pull down Titahi Bay's relic of the American presence here during the last war, before they set out for the slaughter in the Pacific that would kill many of them.

Some people like to erase history. I call that stupid.