I thought I’d attend the Life Network press conference to see what the fuss over embryo freezing was all about. Miriam Sciberras was extremely clear, had all the facts on her nicely manicured fingertips, as did Mary Gaerty of the Council of Women.

I didn’t manage to take any notes but I thought I’d be able to get the gist from the papers.

How wrong I was because Lawrence Gonzi was there too you see, and a couple of journalists sprinted after him on the way out and asked him whathe thought, and that was where, if you’ll excuse the expression, the real story was aborted.  Because then we had mislead-ing headlines like Malta Today’s ‘Gonzi weighs in on embryo freezing debate’.

Hardly. It was more like ‘Gonzi waylaid after embryo freezing debate’. And why? Perhaps so that this issue, which both sides recognise as highly sensitive, can be reduced to a simple traditional vs liberal one.

Gonzi has been labelled traditional because he espouses Catholic beliefs, and therefore those of us who consider ourselves ‘liberal’ will quite possibly support the freezing of embryos without knowing why, because it seems so much nicer to say ‘yes’ to anything than ‘no’.

It seems the laboratory is exempt from principles governing the behaviour of one human being towards another. Is that what donning a white coat does to you?

The only problem is that human rights are at stake here.  The president of the National Council of Women, no less, declared herself emphatically against the freezing of embryos, but this apparently wasn’t worth reporting.  Anyone who read the reports now knows what Gonzi thinks about what was said, but not what was actually said.

The one single argument which should clinch everything is the sanctity of human life.  This is acknowledged by the pro-freezing lobby as well, by the very fact that the embryos, once defrosted, can develop into human beings.  Otherwise why freeze them?

Abroad they can be used at a later date by their own parents, left frozen and then adopted by others, or eventually discarded.  Eugenics are employed if the more viable samples are selected at the expense of others, as acknowledged by our Parliamentary Secretary for Health.  All these practices have the most horrific implications.

It seems the laboratory is exempt from principles governing the behaviour of one human being towards another. Is that what donning a white coat does to you?

As I understood, the recent law on protection of embryos takes into account the anguish of parents who are unable to have children and therefore endorses the freezing of oocytes, an ethically sound IVF practice with a very good success rate compared with IVF using frozen embryos.  To attempt to dismember this fledgling legislation, arrogantly ignoring years of work by the experts who prepared it, betrays a recklessness which bodes ill for us all.

This is a human life and a human rights issue, and the most basic rights of three parties - father, mother and child - are at stake.  It is hard to envisage the full extent to which people will be hurt by liberalisation of the current legislation but some questions one is prompted to ask include:

What would happen to those embryos not re-adopted at a later date by their own parents?  Would they be adopted by someone else or destroyed?   What if embryos were to be adopted by third parties?

Would they be told who their biological parents were? What about the gene pool?  How would this be affected? Would there be a limit to how many embryos a couple could donate?

What if the couple who conceived eventually separated?  Who would ‘own’ the embryo - the father or the mother?   Can a human being be owned?  Isn’t that a form of slavery?

Is the problem of infertility being addressed in any other way apart from this?  For example, have there been any educational campaigns highlighting thepossible consequences of delaying conception?

Oscar-winning Philomena dramatised the tragic quest of the eponymous, real-life heroine for her son Michael, whom she was forced to give up for adoption when he was two years old. With these painful stories within living memory are we pre-pared to go down the same road again, in different guise?

So that it can be said of us that we went from fundamentalism (to rephrase Oscar Wilde) to depravity without an intervening period of civilisation?

I hope and pray God that it won’t be.

Mary Camilleri is a former teacher.