Safeguarding life

The proposed Bill regulating infertility treatment has prodded public opinion to focus on a matter that has been left unregulated for too long.

Scientific advances have shown crass disregard for ethical issues- Klaus Vella Bardon

The bishops’ pastoral letter that soon followed let off the predictable overheated reaction from the usual quarters. Sadly enough, one has only to scan the media to realise that calm, measured and informed discussion on such a sensitive and fundamental subject is conspicuous by its absence.

This knee-jerk reaction is, unfortunately, a sign of the times. The prejudice and animosity towards anything the Church has to say is now well established and orchestrated and should not surprise anyone anymore. The Church is always portrayed in the worst possible light and accused of being against scientific advance.

Yet this should not detract Catholics from fulfilling their duty to make their voice heard.

Like most of the Western world, Malta is facing a worrying drop in its fertility rate. It is even lower than the EU average. The constraints and expectations of today have led to marriage being postponed to later in life, and attempts to have children occur when women’s fertility is on the wane.

Needless to say, wanting a child is the most basic instinct and childless couples will try their utmost to address their problem of infertility. As a last resort, in-vitro fertilisation has given hope where all efforts have failed. However, there are grave moral considerations in such procedures. Not least, because embryos formed outside the womb are at high risk.

The Church is rightly concerned that very often, scientific advances in every sphere have shown crass disregard for the ethical issues at stake. In reproductive technology, we live in a world where embryos are ‘produced’, used and discarded in an unbelievably callous manner to the extent that research and experimentation on embryos have been carried out for a number of years almost unhindered.

Thankfully, and as yet, unlike other countries, here in Malta, abortion is illegal and still considered morally reprehensible. In some countries, the embryos, even up to the moment of birth, are not legally protected.

Only the Church has had the courage and the consistency to defend life in all its stages from the moment of conception. Fr Emmanuel Agius eloquently makes a strong case for the position of the Church (The Times, August 14) in its pastoral letter that upholds the official teachings of the Church in its landmark document Donum Vitae.

Without doubt, Fr Agius is acutely aware of what has been going on in this field in Malta. He is an authority on bioethics and has been involved as a member of the National Bioethics Consultative Committee since its inception in the early 1990s.

It is distressing, to say the least, that the government has taken so long to regulate such procedures on assisted procreation notwith­standing the fact that IVF has been practised in Malta for over 20 years.

To say that such a Bill is long overdue would be a magnificent understatement.

The Church should have pronounced itself much earlier and the government should have regulated such procedures immediately.

Now, we expect our Catholic politicians to behave with responsi­bility and follow the advice of Fr Agius to read and heed what is written in Donum Vitae and other Church teachings so as to recognise the moral reasoning that underpins such documents.

Meanwhile, deputy Prime Minister Tonio Borg wrote a very positive exposition on the responsibility of a Catholic politician regarding IVF on the Leħen is-Sewwa of August 11. His excellent reflection on this sensitive matter deserves wider coverage.

He rightly points out that the moral risks of IVF are that the procedure can be easily abused and embryos can be frozen, gametes of third parties could be used and embryos destroyed, and so forth.

In other words, procedures of IVF, fraught with such possible unethical possibilities, require the maximum legislative safeguards to ensure that this extraordinary procedure is taken as a last resort and every effort is done to safeguard the embryo.

One hopes that common sense and goodwill prevails and we shall be spared the partisan and virulent anti-Catholic rhetoric we have to put up with whenever ethical matters are debated.