ADAM Nash, the boy bred to give his six-year-old sister life, has sparked heated debate over the moral rights and wrongs of creating 'designer babies'.

The very phrase conjures up images of rich, self-centred, narrow-minded parents paying to ensure children will be beautiful, intelligent, athletic and heterosexual.

Little Adam Nash is a designer baby, he was created to order, according to a pre-set specification. But the last thing on his parents' minds was what colour eyes or how high an IQ count he would have.

He was genetically screened as an embryo to ensure he had not inherited his sister Molly's deadly disease. He was also chosen as a good bone marrow match.

The implications, of course, are chilling. There is a danger that the technology which has made Adam's birth possible could be taken in other directions.

Jack Scarisbrick, of the anti-abortion charity Life, says choosing embryos in this way is morally repugnant: "This kind of screening belongs in the farmyard."

And Dr Paul Veys, consultant in stem cell transplants at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital, said creating children to be donors for siblings was "wrong".

But don't people often decide to have children for all sorts of dubious, and often selfish, reasons anyway? In an attempt to mend a failing marriage, or have a child of a particular sex? Adam's parents wanted another child anyway. Without the screening, there was a one in four chance their baby would be born with Molly's disease, Fanconi anaemia.

After a life of pain, children with this condition generally die from leukaemia or other complications. Few live beyond the age of seven. Thanks to the screening, baby Adam was born healthy and, following a procedure which has not hurt him, it would appear his sister Molly's life has been saved.

I can understand those who say such selection strikes out against the very sacredness of human life. But would anyone who has had to watch their child suffering as Molly has suffered do things differently?

Jack and Linda Nash are merely doing all they can to save the life of a much-loved child. Isn't this something every parent can understand? "Please do not say it is inappropriate for us," says Linda. Adam was born to help save his sister's life. But he is clearly also loved for himself. He has been born to a mother and father determined to do the best for their family. Who can blame them for pulling out all the stops?

PERHAPS some of our Yorkshire readers can help me here. At Tory conference, William Hague revealed that, when he first became an MP, a Yorkshire farmer he met told him: "If you ever see a satisfied farmer or a dead donkey, sit on it, because you'll never see another."

Everyone roared with laughter but I just didn't get the joke. Why do you never see dead donkeys? And why would you want to sit on one?

Perhaps Mr Hague was trying to warm them up for conference's star comic turn. After the dead donkey joke, even Jim Davidson would sound funny.

MY greatest objection to the film Billy Elliot was the way it bluntly and blatantly yanked at my heartstrings from beginning to end. But even through the tears, I could make out the peculiar excess of 1970s fashions.

I didn't live in the North-East in 1984, when the film is set, but even youngsters in the backward and impoverished west of Ireland, where I come from, had stopped listening to T-Rex and wearing embroidered denim shirts and tiny T-shirts with pointy collars by then. By 1984, the rest of the country had been flouncing about in New Romantic blouses, dancing to the likes of Boy George and Spandau Ballet for a few years.

How come the people of Easington managed to avoid making utter fools of themselves, unlike the rest of us?