Bishop Mario Grech’s controversial comparison between IVF and abortion has left doctors and parents stunned while a top bioethics expert explained the Church’s official position.
The process is not as invasive and exaggerated as the Bishop is putting it with all this talk of manufactured babies
Rev. Prof. Emmanuel Agius said a distinction must be made between abortion and IVF, even if this included embryo freezing.
“If you remove an embryo from a uterus it’s considered an abortion. If you are talking about a human being in a Petri dish, it’s not an abortion,” he said, stressing, however, that both entailed “the wilful destruction of an innocent and vulnerable human being”.
“It’s a matter of language really. We need to know what we are talking about. But morally, and from an ethical viewpoint, one is no less than the other,” the dean of the University’s Theology Faculty said, assuming Mgr Grech was referring to the destruction of embryos when he labelled the entire IVF process as “highly abortive”.
Rev. Agius said Malta needed a law that respected human beings from conception and which also cherished the institution of the family.
As a matter of justice, he said, infertile couples should have the option to be helped by the State. However, this must exclude freezing and experimentation on embryos, as well as the fertilisation of more embryos than required for transfer.
The law must also ensure proper counselling for couples who have the right to proper information about the success rates of the treatment and about higher risks for assisted fertility babies as many scientific reports showed.
Although the Catholic Church found IVF treatment morally objectionable, Rev. Agius said it also believed legislation permitting reproductive technologies could be tolerated for the sake of public order and to avoid a greater evil: the unregulated practice of assisted procreation.
“It’s better to have a law than not to have a law,” he added.
In a homily last week, Mgr Grech said the State could not ignore the needs of infertile couples and must provide “ethically correct” services.
But, he stressed, IVF was “unacceptable” and conducive to creating a “culture of death”.
His comments were supported by theologian Fr Rene Camilleri who praised the Bishop for giving a relevant homily on Our Lady of Sorrows.
Fr Camilleri also criticised IVF practitioners, saying the process had become “exploitative”.
Parents were being given high expectations and charged thousands of euros early on in the process, only to have these hopes dashed later on, he claimed.
“This is causing enormous pain,” he said, adding that politicians were “irresponsible” because they had spoken about IVF since 2005 without taking concrete steps to regulate the sector, which he likened to a jungle.
Contacted yesterday, IVF practitioner and Saint James Hospital director Josie Muscat was so hurt by these comments that he initially refused to comment, saying: “I’m not getting into it. They can do what they want. Now I’m just fed up.”
“What they said – all of them – is an insult to our integrity and honesty,” he added, making particular reference to the jungle comparison.
“If these people think the medical profession is at such a low state it is a problem across the board, not just IVF,” he said.
Meanwhile, a mother who conceived through IVF told The Times she also felt that Maltese practitioners cared too much about the money and did not provide enough support structures for parents.
But she said legislation could facilitate this, putting the process in the hands of the State rather than private clinics.
“If it were not for IVF we would not have our daughter. Our consciences are clear because there was a solution for our unexplained infertility and we opted for it,” she said, adding that she and her husband were lucky enough not to require more than two embryos to be fertilised, but others may not be so lucky so embryo freezing should be an option.
“I don’t agree that it is abortive,” she said, stressing that she stood firmly against abortion.
“The process is not as invasive and exaggerated as the Bishop is putting it with all this talk of manufactured babies.”
She said religious leaders and politicians were always quick to talk but slow to take action. No one helped to make adoption processes any easier, for example, which would possibly reduce the need for IVF.
Even priests could not agree among themselves whether IVF was acceptable, so parents should not hold back simply because the Bishops tell them to, she said.
“We feel we did nothing against God. The Church can have its rules but I choose to live my life as I feel right. In a way these comments are hurtful, but I can disregard them,” she said, describing herself as a Catholic who learnt to abide by her own set of morals.
She asked to be unnamed due to the taboo associated with the treatment.