Sometimes it seems that the anti-IVF brigade in Malta doesn’t spare a thought for the people they hurt when they write. In their desire to convince people they lash out, and in so doing they strike adoptive parents, single parents and those people who married someone with children and care for them as if they were their own.

There have been writers implying that adoptive parents and single parents are inhumane, that women who offer to be surrogate mothers were compared to someone renting out a garage and children born through IVF were described as commodities.

Can we take a step back, set aside the hyperbole and consider what it is that we’re talking about here?

Since the procedure to extract eggs from a woman’s ovaries is somewhat difficult and risky, all clinics try to avoid performing this procedure more than once.

Two techniques are used to ensure that, if the first attempt fails, there can be other attempts without undergoing that procedure again.

These are the freezing of either the unfertilised egg, or of the embryo a few days after fertilisation.

When one looks at clinics that offer both options, the success rate associated with embryo freezing is around twice that with egg freezing.

It’s worth considering the embryo here. From the moment the DNA from egg and sperm merges, the fertilised egg is called an embryo until around eight weeks of pregnancy - so as one can imagine, there’s a very big difference between an embryo at its earliest stages and two months later.

Human reproduction is a somewhat hit-and miss affair

Freezing can only occur during the very early stage, at which point it consists of around 8 to 16 cells, five to six days after fertilisation.

These have not yet turned into nerve cells, skin cells or muscle cells. In fact, some of the cells will never form part of the embryo at all - they will become the placenta.

So, at the stage that an embryo can be frozen and thawed again, it’s a microscopic dot containing of about a dozen plain stem cells.

Human reproduction is a somewhat hit-and-miss affair. It is estimated that, without any human intervention in the form of contraception and so on, only around 30 per cent of all fertilised eggs will go on to be born as a baby.

Around half of all embryos will simply fail to implant in the uterus and get discarded from the body when the woman has her next period.

These embryos are at a significantly more advanced stage (12 days) than when they are typically frozen.

When we put women through greater difficulties and reduce their chances of a successful pregnancy by prohibiting embryo freezing we should keep in mind why we’re doing this.

It’s to prevent a small number of embryos, each comprising around a dozen undifferentiated cells, from being frozen and potentially discarded, when many thousands of even more developed embryos are discarded annually in this country alone, as part of the natural processes of procreation.

If half of all babies that are born died soon after birth there would be shock, however, these are not babies or children, as the anti-IVF lobby keeps calling them. They are embryos, and nobody makes a big deal out of these thousands of discarded embryos.

Another wave of insults is levelled at women who offer to be surrogate mothers, with words that are dismissive and demeaning.

Many of the women who do this, do it for a member of their own family - there are beautiful accounts of women who offer to act as surrogate mothers for their own daughter or daughter-in-law, or a woman who bears her own sister’s baby.

Even if we go to the other extreme - the case of poor women in impoverished countries who act as surrogate mothers to rich, western couples - consider what this means

For these women who would be raising her own children in poverty.

By providing such a service, they will be paid the equivalent of 10 years’ full-time wages.

Think of what that will mean to them and their own children, to be able to break out of the cycle of poverty while simultaneously helping a childless couple achieve their dream of having a child.

A lot of emphasis has been placed on the need of children being raised by their “biological parents”.

Between someone who contributed 23 chromosomes, and someone who actually raises a child with love and caring, where these are not the same person, it’s the latter who is the real parent.

The love for their children is far more important than whether the child contains their DNA, more important than whether the womb belonged to them, more important than whether they are both male or both female.

It’s important to keep a level head, stick to the facts and make decisions in a rational manner.

We need an IVF law, not an Embryo Protection Act.

Ramon Casha is chairman of the Malta Humanist Association.