Dialogue: Specialised, expensive reproductive technology not a universal right

BRUCE LOGAN* believes privilege is being confused with rights when it comes to in vitro fertilisation as
a means of human reproduction.

The overwhelming justification of in vitro fertilisation for infertile couples, lesbians, single women and even single men is that everyone has a right to a child.

Journalist Martin Johnson points out that until now lesbians and single women have missed out in most areas because of regionally inconsistent eligibility criteria and lack of money. The assumptions are obvious.

Ann Charlotte, of Lesbian Action for Visibility in Aotearoa, claims that taxpayer funding of open access to IVF is a "move towards equal access to health services."

One question is vital, and Sandra Coney, to her credit, draws our attention to it. Is it a human right to have a child?

Tor Sverne, who drafted Swedish legislation, says that "having children is not an unconditional human right and [these] activities should only be permitted on condition that children are able to grow up in favoured conditions."

There have also been several formal declarations of reproductive rights, although the cultural context is seldom clear.

The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (Geneva, 1948) affirmed the right of every adult individual to marry and have a family.

Other significant declarations include the Teheran Declaration of the International Conference on Human Rights (1968) and the Declaration of the World Conference on Human Rights (Vienna 1993). The International Planned Parenthood Federation (1997) listed benefits of scientific progress as one of 12 rights adapted from international treaties.

But since such benefits go only to the economically and geographically privileged, how can they be human rights? Do individual New Zealanders, because they have access to IVF, have greater rights than couples in developing countries?

Do single women, lesbian and homosexual couples in New Zealand have a right to access technology that is effectively denied to infertile married couples in most of the world?

Privilege is being confused with right.

Former Australian Governor-General Sir Zelman Cowen denied that the state had any obligation to provide the latest equipment to anyone who might seem to benefit. If such is the case with general health issues, it seems unreasonable to designate highly specialised and expensive reproductive technology as anyone's right.

If there is a right to reproduce, to whom does it apply? Is it purely a female right?

The concept of autonomy has regularly been cited by feminists as justifying a full range of reproductive rights for women. But autonomy is hardly sufficient grounds for any right.

The danger of IVF without consistent moral restraint is that it can come to be seen as the product of human ingenuity. Whatever man can create he will also feel free to manipulate.

In the end, life and personhood are in danger of being divested of their sanctity.

The original Victorian Infertility Treatment Act that the Prime Minister of Australia is trying to protect drew the line at the consistently defensible place. It denies that fertility treatment is a right for just anyone and places procreation within its traditional setting - marriage.

Where procreation is naturally impossible, or where it would contravene significant social restraints, there is reasonable moral basis to argue that IVF should not be available.

The law has always placed limitations on the rights of individuals.

Gustavo Gutiaacérrez, in his Ethic of Liberation, goes so far as to say that God "sides with the poor against every oppressor who would exploit or dehumanise them."

Who is the poor here: the mother or the child? Surely the child is the weaker.

If the poor can be extended to mean the foetus or embryo, then we have a powerful argument against, and a chilling description of, the embryo wastage that accompanies IVF.

The Vatican's insistence on the link between physical love, sexual intercourse and procreation is relevant here.

And it is worthwhile remembering that IVF techniques were developed and refined in Nazi concentration camps.

Now, whatever that might or might not mean, it should cause us to think very carefully about what we are doing when we claim that IVF is a human right, and is therefore an unconditional moral imperative.

Studies that claim to show that children raised by lesbians are not disadvantaged have been exposed as having very small sample sizes.

Most of the studies were by homosexuals who set out to prove something, rather than looking objectively at the data. There have been no studies on homosexual men as parents. By the time the data shows that these arrangements are not in the best interests of the child, the horse will have bolted.

Even if the studies are not seriously flawed, we have not had enough time to assess them.

The heart of the matter is to be found in the use of human rights as a primary moral imperative.

If we allow human rights to trump all other ethical considerations, we face an impossible situation because human rights often conflict with each other.

How will we discern? Whose rights are paramount: the rights of the lesbian to have a child or the child's right to live with both his or her mother and father? If there is no overriding ethical concern here, then it must be either money or power that will decide.

Human rights did not suddenly spring into life outside a sustaining ethical construct. And that construct, whatever secularists might like to claim, most obviously had its roots in the Jewish and Christian faiths which believe that human beings are created in the image of God. That belief remains, even in 2000, the clearest and boldest means we have to establish a potent and workable notion of human dignity.

Finally, we acknowledge copyright as legal and binding in literature and music, and patents as binding on new inventions or intellectual property.

We assiduously protect all domains of human creativity, yet, in the name of human rights, we want an open-slather approach to creating our children.

The demand is absurd. It is an exercise in selfish adult self-realisation at the expense of children.

*Bruce Logan, of Christchurch, is chief executive of the New Zealand Education Development Foundation.