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Recently, in the middle of a debate about the proposed new IVF law, the government waved a shiny object at its critics. And it has managed to distract them.

The shiny object: the views of the late philosopher Fr Peter Serracino-Inglott, first expressed in 2005, on whether embryo freezing was immoral. He couldn’t see anything immoral about it, and continued to express that view publicly as late as 2011, shortly before he died.

It is with triumph that Labour has mentioned Fr Peter but it’s also a brazen risk. The proposed amendments’ critics could have looked at what else Fr Peter said about IVF. They would have found plenty of evidence that he would have been appalled by the government’s proposals (even if not by the freezing of embryos).

The critics could have used Fr Peter’s reasoning to show up the government’s cynicism. His views were cited incompletely. He expressed serious reservations about egg and sperm donation, particularly anonymous donation.

He believed every person had the right to know his parents and origins. He was afraid of the destabilising impact, on someone’s sense of identity, of IVF procedures that involved donors, not just a married couple.

He did also say that he was naturally open to what experience showed. He was ready to revise his views in the light of the evidence.

But I think I knew him enough to be able to say he’d have rejected the assertion, by Health Minister Chris Fearne and others, that there is “ample evidence” that IVF through egg or sperm donation makes no difference to a child’s identity formation.

First, being evidence-driven, he’d have pointed out how donor anonymity has caused problems and distress in various jurisdictions, leading to some laws being changed in the name of children’s rights.

Fr Peter’s views are worth getting right, whether or not we agree with them

Next, he’d have said that while it’s true there is a striking absence of evidence that any immediate harm is done (if donations are not anonymous), there have been too few cases, over too short a time, to say there is “ample evidence” of no harm done.

He was never asked about what he thought of couples being obliged to give up any non-implanted embryos for adoption. But my guess is that he’d have considered it unjust.

He’d have pointed out that, just as our parents are central to our identity, so are our children. To become a parent, without knowing where or who your child is, has to be as emotionally destabilising for most adults as it is for children not to be able to know who their parents are.

Instead of looking at these views of Fr Peter, available on record, the government’s critics have let it off the hook. They have either replied with silence – as though conceding that Fr Peter would be wholeheartedly on the government side. Or else they have dedicated some time to trying to show that Fr Peter’s ideas about embryo freezing were based on bad science.

But all they’ve done is misrepresent his views.

Yes, Fr Peter was of the view that a human embryo cannot be considered a person as long as the possibility existed that twins could still develop (up to circa 14 days after fertilisation).

But he was emphatically not subscribing to the absurd view that Pierre Schembri-Wismayer (May 7) attributes to him: that two individuals could be hidden in a single embryo.

On the contrary, Fr Peter was saying that, at that point, you couldn’t even speak of a single individual (let alone two) being present. If the embryo is still a ‘dividual’, capable of dividing, then logically it cannot be an ‘in-dividual’. It’s human life but not an individual (even if later the individual can be traced back to the moment of conception).

Fr Peter was not straying into science but discussing how best to interpret it. Science explains the natural laws at work but it is philosophy that explores their significance for human identity.

He was, basically, addressing anyone who believes that personhood and a unique ‘soul’ go together. He couldn’t see how a unique soul was present at conception, because it makes no sense to say that, some days later, you could get two souls out of one.

As for the implications of Fr Peter’s views, he never said that an embryo had no right to life. But he didn’t think freezing in itself infringed that right. He drew distinctions between the right to life and the obligation to preserve life.

I suspect he would have thought there is no solid rational basis for saying that a frozen embryo has a ‘right to be born’. (An embryo in the womb is different, since to stop it being born you need to kill it.) However, he did say that it was wrong to freeze embryos with the ulterior motive of killing them later.

Moreover, I’m sure Fr Peter would have thought it dangerous nonsense for anti-abortion politicians, like Godfrey Farrugia (May 6) to appear to endorse the view that, if the embryo is not a person from conception, then it does not have a right to life until it is deemed a person.

It’s nonsense because the conclusion is not logical. It is dangerous because it risks giving some people a false choice: either to endorse a view of personhood that is, frankly, implausible, or else push them towards thinking the embryo has no right to life.

And that’s another reason why, in 2018, Fr Peter’s views are worth getting right, whether or not we agree with them. He shows how it’s possible to subscribe to the dominant contemporary European view of embryo freezing and still feel reverence for human life and political commitment to its inalienable rights.

ranierfsadni@europe.com