A couple’s marital status will have no bearing on its eligibility to assisted procreation, under proposals being made by a special parliamentary committee set up to draw up regulation.
A report on assisted procreation, expected to be tabled in Parliament tomorrow, will recommend allowing the freezing of embryos under strict protocols but will also be suggesting that in-vitro fertilisation should be available for all women in stable relationships.
The stability of the relationship, however, will not be gauged by the marital status or other similar benchmarks but by medical records, which, in themselves, give an indication of a couple’s endurance, according to the chairman of the parliamentary select committee presenting the report, Jean Pierre Farrugia.
“In case of infertility, a couple would have gone through a series of tests that linger for a period of time, meaning nobody goes into assisted fertilisation capriciously,” he said.
There would have already been a history documented in medical files, Dr Farrugia, a medical doctor, said, meaning that a stable relationship would not be hard to establish in this case, even though the law did not provide for recognition of a stable relationship.
Dr Farrugia said the situation would be similar to that of the Employment and Training Corporation, which uses bank accounts to establish the couple’s status.
He would not go into the merits of who would make the assessment based on medical records, saying he was uncomfortable delving into too much detail before the report’s presentation tomorrow.
The committee, made up of three doctors, including Dr Farrugia, Nationalist MP Frans Agius and Labour MP Michael Farrugia, referred to Italian legislation for guidance.
The matter of making the technology available to unmarried couples could prove to be a thorny one among some ethicists.
Medical bioethicist Pierre Mallia, who had been consulted by the committee, argued that the technology should be available to married couples and people in a long term relationship who could not get married just yet because they were waiting for annulment procedures, for instance.
Failing a law on divorce, there would be many couples who would have separated and started a new life with a new partner whose “biological time clock is ticking away” while waiting for an annulment, Prof. Mallia added.
The main point of consideration should not be the rights of the couples but the rights of the child to be born in a family ambience, he pointed out.
The report is also expected to recommend allowing the adoption of embryos.
On this point, Prof. Mallia said he had no moral objection to it because it would be better to have couples adopt embryos than have them terminated, pointing out, however, that there was a big difference between embryo adoption and surrogacy, which deliberately fertilises an egg to sell it or to implant it in a different women.
“It is not the concept of donating a fertilised egg that is good but the concept of saving an embryo that is frozen,” he said.
The select committee was set up last February to draw up a report on three specific issues left pending by the Puli Report in 2005.
Its brief was to concentrate on the eligibility of couples for treatment, the freezing of embryos, as well as sperm and egg donation, all issues that were left open in the wide-ranging report authored by the then chairman of the social affairs committee Clyde Puli, five years ago.