The outgoing Commissioner for Children in a position paper today said embryo freezing should continue to be banned in Malta. 

The ban on surrogacy should also remain in place, the Commissioner said.

The Office noted that the UN Convention on the Rights of the laid down  that “States Parties shall respect and ensure the rights set forth in the present Convention to each child within their jurisdiction without discrimination of any kind...”.

“The possibility afforded by artificial procreation to select which of the fertilised eggs are to immediately proceed to gestation through immediate implantation in the mother’s womb and which embryos should be frozen in view of future implantations is fertile ground for the discrimination which the Convention so clearly prohibits in the aforementioned article,” the Office said.

“This is the case because the process of embryo freezing or vitrification carries a real risk, however low it may be, of spontaneous death of frozen embryos. Hence, in selecting which embryos should be immediately implanted in the mother’s womb and which embryos should be frozen, one is granting the right to life to one embryo to a higher degree of certainty than to another embryo. This tends to make it more likely that the embryos that are selected for immediate implantation will be those that are preferred over other embryos on the basis of some favoured characteristic of a genetic kind.”

Such a stalemate in the life of the frozen embryo may result from the biological parents refusing to free the embryo for adoption even when they do not intend to proceed with the embryo’s gestation

It added that frozen embryos face another risk other than the risk of dying before they get a chance of being implanted, namely a potential risk of neither their biological parents nor any prospective adoptive or foster parents wanting to take custody of them, thus denying them both the right to life and to a harmonious upbringing and development.

“Such a stalemate in the life of the frozen embryo may result from the biological parents refusing to free the embryo for adoption even when they do not intend to proceed with the embryo’s gestation.

“Also, since the embryos that are selected for freezing tend to be the least healthy of all the embryos produced through a treatment cycle, the chances of such embryos being adopted are slimmer. In view of the risks carried by embryo freezing, it is important to pre-empt the need to freeze embryos by ensuring that the number of eggs that are fertilized is not in excess of the number of embryos that a woman can sustain in her womb without an increased risk of multiple pregnancies, that are dangerous to both the unborn children and the mother.”

The Office also pointed out that while the idea of freezing embryos may be a chilling one to entertain, one cannot completely rule out this medical technique since it may be necessary to resort to in an emergency when the woman is unable, on medical grounds, to undergo implantation of embryos immediately after fertilisation.”

See the position paper in full on pdf below.