KEY POINTS:
One of the issues the new Government has found hidden in Labour's too-hard basket raises a familiar ethical dilemma: what rights reside in a human embryo? For more than a year, it seems, the previous Government sat on a suggestion that unused embryos created by in-vitro fertilisation be released for medical research.
IVF frequently produces more viable embryos than are needed, and the parents are generally said to support the suggestion that the surplus be available for research. They are less attracted to the option the law offers them - donation to infertile couples - because that will cause a full sibling to be born in another family. In any case, donation requires the parents' consent and fertility clinics have lost contact with parents of many of the embryos that clinics can keep frozen for 10 years.
It is these products of untraced couples that present the immediate ethical dilemma. Nearly 18 months ago, the Advisory Committee of Assisted Reproductive Technology recommended that the orphan embryos be made available for research. It had conducted a public consultation exercise that attracted 345 written submissions, more than half of which held that human life began at conception. Others supported use of the embryos for beneficial health research but only with parental consent.
It is extraordinary that the advisory committee's conclusion has only now come to light. The past two Health Ministers, Pete Hodgson and David Cunliffe, obviously did not relish a public debate on the issue. Papers obtained by the Herald suggest Mr Cunliffe initially supported the committee's advice but by March he had thought better of adopting it, probably because it was election year.
National is left holding the baby, so to speak. Its Health Minister, Tony Ryall, proposes to consider the recommendation early in the new year. Concern has already been heard from predictable quarters since the Herald revealed the committee's advice last week. The Right to Life movement declared itself totally opposed, and the Catholic Church's bioethics centre said an embryo must be accorded the respect due all human life.
The church is at least consistent. It opposes IVF, considers the creation of spare embryos "intolerable" and believes the only dignified thing to do is to let them die naturally. But to those who recognise the good that IVF has done for couples unable to conceive naturally, and the benefits that embryonic cells can provide, the issue is not nearly so clear-cut.
It begins, though, with the old dilemma of the definition of human life. If life does not begin at conception, then when? At what point in the development of a fetus does it acquire rights denied to an embryo, and why then? Thirty years after the great abortion debate, these questions remain because they can never be resolved by arguments of convenience.
Life begins at fertilisation, there is no way around the fact. When we deny rights to embryonic human beings under certain conditions we should not deny what we are doing. The aim must be to ensure that human life is not devalued when other considerations come into force. If embryos are to be used for the immense benefits of stem cell transplants and other medical advances, the terms of their use must express respect for them as human life.
Parental consent is a common proxy for the rights of those incapable of knowing or expressing their own rights. Parental consent should be required for any use of an embryo. Those whose parents cannot be traced should respectfully be allowed to die. They may owe their existence to medical science but so do many others. They are not its property.
