A board of experts who had been entrusted to draft a Bill on artificial fertilisation, yesterday welcomed most of the proposals made by a parliamentary committee but objected to the freezing of embryos.

“This will lead to the accumulation of hundreds of frozen embryos over time, which will have to be discarded or given up for scientific experiments,” the Bioethics Consultative Committee said.

It added that not enough importance had been given on upcoming technological developments that would allow the uncontroversial freezing of women’s ova.

A three-man parliamentary committee this month presented a number of proposals aimed at regulating IVF, suggesting it should be open to heterosexual couples “in stable relationships”.

The consultative committee unanimously agreed that IVF should be offered to heterosexual couples and, “in its majority”, agreed it should also be given to couples “registered by law as cohabiting”.

They also agreed that the service should be offered freely by the state and that no gamete donations should be accepted because this would “disintegrate the concept of family”.

The committee stressed that prospective parents should be given professional counselling during the IVF process.

Although they agreed with the adoption of frozen embryos by childless parents under proper regulation, which saved the life of the embryos, they said it was ambitious to think that all frozen embryos could be adopted, even because many of them would have genetic anomalies.

The bioethics committee also acknowledged there were “serious doubts” about whether the rise in multiple pregnancies was due to IVF only and not because of other infertility treatments. And, either way, the number of multiple pregnancies after the IVF process was relatively small and certainly did not justify the destruction of so many human lives that were frozen, it continued.

According to Nationalist MP Jean Pierre Farrugia, who chaired the select parliamentary committee, embryo freezing is medically beneficial for two reasons: It prevents the implantation of multiple embryos in the womb, which may result in higher risk multiple pregnancies, and it avoids having to repeatedly stimulate the woman’s ovaries by hormones to harvest the ova.

However, the bioethics committee said multiple pregnancies could be avoided by limiting the number of embryos implanted in the mother’s womb.

(Earlier this month, a Beverly Hills physician was summoned by the Medical Board for allegedly implanting a dozen embryos that resulted in octuplets, endangering the mother and violating national standards of care, according to a California state attorney.)

“Once human life is produced in a laboratory, it has to be protected and respected,” the committee said, pointing out that no eugenic or arbitrary choices should be made between one human life and another, even if this was at a very early developmental stage.

These latest comments by the committee echoed its recommendations in 2005 on a similar report authored by the then chairman of the Social Affairs Committee, Clyde Puli.

The committee is chaired by Michael Asciak and includes Maryanne Ciappara, Brigitte Ellul, Christian Scerri, Ray Galea, Fr Emmanuel Agius (see his Talking Point on the back page), Fr Ray Zammit, Alexandra Buttigieg, John Torpiano, Mary Anne Lauri, Nikolina Farrugia, Cedric Mifsud and Denis Soler.

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