Need for fathers to be scrapped!

A government White Paper issued in the UK a few days ago has recommended the need for a child to have a father be removed from the law governing fertility treatment. The move would make it easier for single women and lesbian couples to have children using donor sperm.

With this move a large question mark hangs over important aspects of family values and also the role of the father in raising children. This situation brings to the fore the dangerous route that biotechnology can go down, particularly if it had to remain largely unregulated as it presently stands in Malta.

This fact also brings me to another point. The hullabaloo that is being raised because MPs have signed a petition calling for entrenchment of the right to life of zygotes and foetuses before birth. There are 101 excuses being bandied about, but I fail to understand why something that is protected by our Constitution already, that is the right to life, is not also specified as applying to children before they are born. One has to have a weird type of logic to argue against this.

Like the right to life, a clear entrenchment on this issue would ensure that were our descendents to change the law to allow abortion, a two-thirds majority of votes and not a simple majority would be required as is presently the case in criminal law, or, worse still, allowing vast legal interpretive loopholes.

Human life is human life and needs to be protected from its beginning, that is from conception. There are several theories when conception occurs, but the serious ones should not go beyond the process of fertilisation. The theory that a human person does not exist before 14 days (pre-embryo) is fortuitous and today largely discounted. The so-called twinning argument is a sophism. Imagine that, with cloning about, one is able to clone a twin of a fully grown 40-year-old man from his somatic cells by nuclear transfer. The resultant clone, like Dolly the sheep, would be the man's identical twin. Now I ask, does that mean that the 40-year-old man from whom the cells for twinning were taken did not previously exist as a separate ontological human being? The answer is obvious for all those who want to look for it.

These theories of so-called developmental functionalists, who argue that it is the functioning of the body in a certain way, whether it is brain or something else to define personhood, are all unrealistic. Personhood exists when personal being exists. Being is becoming. Personal being exists at fertilisation not later, and, therefore, personhood with all human rights exists from fertilisation.

Fertilisation and conception are one and the same if viewed from a passive point of view. Fertilisation is a process, and, therefore, conception is also a process. However, if viewed from the active point of view, conception is a moment which occurs not later than the end of fertilisation, a moment when the human being is in act. Therefore, it becomes logical to protect human life from this stage, that is, not later than the end stage of fertilisation.

This is not a question of fundamentals and liberals, but a question of science and philosophy. It is a question of common sense. It is a question of human rights. Not only is a law for entrenchment necessary but so is a separate law to regulate many aspects of biotechnology frequently encountered in the Maltese islands, including IVF, but for which there is no legal framework.

There is an urgent case to be made as to the necessity for drawing a line at fertilisation as the beginning of human life, whereby the Legislative Assembly sends out an important signal to all that life may not be tempered with beyond this stage!

Dr Asciak is a Nationalist MP and chairman of the Bioethics Consultative Committee.