The loss of a core principle

I was recently invited to a discussion programme on IVF on One TV. The idea was to discuss the government’s Legal Notice giving a number of days’ leave to couples wanting to have IVF abroad and the changes being envisaged to the Embryo Protection Act.

The first issue might seem innocuous at first. I mean, there seems no great issue with the fact that the government is to provide a number of days’ leave to individuals undergoing treatment for IVF abroad. Our own IVF law sought to establish that gamete donation (sperm and eggs) would be illegal whatever the sexual orientation of the couple, due to the fact that children brought into the world also have rights. One of the rights enshrined in the UN Convention for the Rights of the Child is the right to a personal identity (Article 7). What greater personal identity can one have than the genetic identity from the genetic parents which, ideally, should therefore be the ones who raise the child – barring certain contingencies that might occur such as the need for adoption.

To send couples abroad to have IVF blindly across the board, partly financed by the state – which disregards these same principles on our statute books, is disregarding the law and human rectitude. To add to this, since couples can be both straight and gay, it also means that the state is going to part finance both sperm donation for lesbian/straight couples and surrogacy for gay/straight couples. A male gay couple, in fact, has no other way to have children except by egg donation and surrogacy – both illegal under our law. Adrian Delia was therefore right in presenting this Parliamentary motion to cross-examine this legal notice which, at face value, seems innocuous but which, when examined and considered in depth, shows up serious flaws, as even the government states (tongue in cheek) that surrogacy is not on its agenda!

However, what really upset the apple cart was that, during the debate, Dr Mark Sant, the physician who seems to be one of the people overseeing the redrafting of the Embryo Protection Act now to be renamed ‘Law on IVF’, publicly stated that he does not believe that human life begins at fertilisation – better known as conception! This has been the final aim of this government’s gradual whittling down of natural laws and rights, because if this final principle – that human life starts at fertilisation – is discarded and abandoned, then the way is open not only for abortion, but for a plethora of other laws that completely disregard the dignity of human life from the very beginning.

This would open the way for rampant genetic testing, with the resultant discarding of embryos or foetuses that would be considered substandard or defective – conveniently forgetting that all of us have a defective genome to one extent or another. That human life begins at conception is not a Church dogma, as some like to state as a good excuse for rejecting this theory, but a fact of embryological science! In this respect, the Church follows science, but the government intends rather to follow its own whims in order to supposedly make a category of people happy, as if one’s happiness could ever be attained at the expense of the life and dignity of another human being!

It is easy to state one thing and then let everyone do whatever one wants. This seems to be this government’s maxim. That is the easy part. The function of the state is to see that actions of some do not impinge on the rights and dignity of others, and in this respect the government has failed abysmally. It has slowly gnawed at the inner substance of human dignity so that what remains is just an outer shell of semblance so that the whole house of cards will eventually collapse.

All members of Parliament and of civil society who constantly vote in favour of, or support, or even stay silent in the face of this dismantling of natural human rights based on natural law, have only themselves to blame for the final outcome incorporating the loss of human dignity. This culture of death is only the top of the pyramid because a wanton destruction of human life is a precursor to the wanton destruction of all life around us – animals, nature and the environment – until we have nobody left to destroy except ourselves!

This reminds me of the story of the Maccabees in which King Antiochus forced the Jews to abandon their time-proven precepts of the law and dignity, which precepts had conserved their existence and culture as a people, and invited them instead to ‘happiness’ and debauchery. Many being hedonists capitulated easily; only some stood up to be counted and they were put to death. The fact is that the time of King Antiochus passed away and he is not remembered for good things!

It is said, however, that God watches this wanton destruction of human life and dignity from a distance and what God observes he thinks about and what God thinks about, being a simple being, happens whether we accept the existence of God or not. God does not take kindly to our destruction of his gifts of human life and dignity, nor of the physical and social environment he has given us. He will demand from each one of us a statement, the content of which is the central core of our very existence and hope – a statement that none of us can ever escape making, ever!