Keeping tabs on the actual facts regarding the newly proposed IVF law is proving to be harder than anticipated. After days spent reading the myriad news reports and opinion pieces that have been reproduced on various media, many of them contradicting each other, there is only one observation that I feel 100% confident in making: once again, Malta is trying its hardest to re-invent the wheel when the rest of the civilised world has been benefitting from more realistic IVF regulations for this past decade.

I am not going to go into the merits of egg versus embryo freezing. My first instinct is to be very suspicious of the fact that we are choosing an experimental technique over a proven one. However, I am not a medical professional and (again) the experts contradicting each other are certainly not helping.

My heart goes out to those who are considering the treatment but who have no clue who to believe and whether it’s worth their while to have the procedure carried out in Malta or whether they should take out a second mortgage on their house and take their chances at a foreign clinic. The decision must be a heart-wrenching one.

Equally heart-wrenching must be the reactions of same-sex couples who were hoping that the new law would open the gate to parenthood. I confess that the blanket ban on homosexuals benefitting from the treatment shocked me.

Again, I thought that this was a case of “only in Malta”. Turns out I was extremely wrong; the majority of European countries have implemented this same ban. This discovery shocked me considerably more.

If even in countries like Italy and France this discrimination is still present – IVF treatment can only be offered to “stable heterosexual couples who live together and are of childbearing age” - what hope is there for Malta, which let’s face it lags far behind when it comes to promoting equal rights?

Considering that the European Union is supposed to be a bastion for human rights, I find it very worrying that no-one has as yet woken up to just how discriminatory IVF regulations throughout most of the member states are.

Eurocrats are typically very keen on using up their time on pointless, pedantic regulations, but does anyone pipe up when there’s genuine and widespread discrimination going on with government blessing? Of course not. EU officials have much more important things to deal with, such as regulating the exact gradient of a cucumber’s curve (I kid you not).

The biggest culprits in the IVF saga appear to be Italy and France and their laws are touted as being “the most restrictive”. Malta will soon topple them off that particular pedestal.

Yet another title that we could really do without.