Admittedly I need a child’s natural curio­sity, which starts from scratch, in tack­­ling the IVF Bill. Yet already the bishops, bloggers, politicians and the media have started positioning themselves. Not to mention medic luminaries. They are normally the paradigm of congeniality, but on this Bill resort to the mouth-shutting ‘because!’ to any query of ‘why?’

We cannot sacrifice human life for the benefit of other human life; otherwise life is no longer a sacred value- Austin Bencini

The Left-leaning Torċa newspaper accused the Bill of every form of discrimination and wholeheartedly embraced conspiracy theories involving Catholic Action and Opus Dei; Not to mention the logical impossibility of paying lip service to Labour’s no to abortion while asserting that the existence of human life from conception is not a ‘given’ but a matter of opinion.

Where does this leave the Labour Party’s intimation to Joseph Muscat to do as he pleases in forging alliances with progressives, except on abortion? Torċa says “everything hinges on the supposition that human life starts at conception, upon which there is no universal agreement in the medical, ethical or moral fields. Is a ‘yes, but’ position in the making?

In fact, the Bill purports to do none of the things it is accused of.

Even a child’s ingenuity understands that liberal, secular or theocratic forms of government invoked by Torċa have nothing to do with a Bill whose “objects and reasons” are “to regulate the procedure relating to medically assisted procreation and to protect human embryos”. It has to do with childless couples and their being assisted to procreate.

A “prospective parent”, being “either of two persons of the opposite sex who are united in marriage, or, who have attained the age of majority and are in a stable relationship”, shall have access to “medi­cally assisted procreation procedures”. Nowhere is IVF de­fined: strange but true.

As happens in the world of children, answers come more by being told what you are not allowed to do. For example, Article 6 reads: “Whosoever fertilises any egg cell for any purpose other than that of bringing about the pregnancy of the woman from whom the cell originated” or “intentionally fertilises more than two egg cells from one woman treatment cycle” is punished by a fine “not less than €5,000 and not more than €15,000”.

Fines up to €70,000 and even imprisonment are also imposed for a series of prohibited procedures. Some are cloning, artificial alteration of human germ cells, selection of sex, experimentation on embryos and wilful destruc­tion of embryos, the fertilisation of an egg cell with the sperm of an animal or the selection or discarding of an embryo for eugenic purposes.

The Bill defines an embryo as the “fertilisation of a human egg cell by a human sperm cell... that is assumed to be able to divide and to develop as a human being under the appropriate conditions”. Im­pliedly if fertilisation is assisted, IVF would have occurred.

The legislators do not create life-sensitive technology. They regulate its use and the social and moral implications deriving from it.

These sentiments are not the product of the Church. The European Court of Justice in declaring human life not ‘patentable’ on grounds of human rights and “morality” was only protecting the dignity of human life.

Am I in favour or against the Bill? I am neither. More needs to be known. I am against it being used as a pawn in the complex political chess game in post-divorce-referendum-Malta; embryos are not to be sacrificed to social controversies on the family, on abortion or worse still, on the definition of Church-State relations.

We cannot sacrifice human life for the benefit of other human life; otherwise life is no longer a sacred value. Human life is a process which if started progresses on its own steam to “a resultant human being”. This is true of natural sex, whether marital, extra-marital or casual, as much as of assisted procreation.

To spark the process of life entails a couple’s conscious responsible decision on the outcome of such an act. The Bill wants children from artificially assisted “prospective parents” to be equal to children naturally procreated by identifying people legally responsible for them from the moment their genetically procured embryo is fertilised.

While the fundamental question of ‘who made me?’ still retains important religious connotations – the bishops have said that children born as a result of IVF are “still children of God” – the Bill logically enough from the secular aspect avoids any reference to this question except by allowing the status of conscientious objectors to whom the question of ‘who made me?’ does have significance on IVF procedures.

Therefore, I genuinely cannot fault the Cabinet for wanting to regulate effectively the market on IVF in line with the certainties of our known family law and protections of the dignity of human life. It is a rationally correct approach.

It is also a democratically correct one in the light of the coming election and the expectation among the electorate that the parties will finally come clean on their social, family, genetic and pro-life projects for the coming five years, before the polling day and not after.

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