Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to support Bill C-47, the Human Reproductive and Genetic Technologies Act, which seeks to preserve the dignity and the sanctity of human reproduction, and the dignity and safety of all.
The bill seeks three objectives. Protecting the health and safety of Canadians is one of them.
I want to comment on the remarks of the hon. member for Quebec. The member spoke clearly to the fact that the whole idea of the royal commission's report was not appropriate.
The point to remember is that the commission on reproductive technologies was a federal royal commission. When it was finished and the report was made public, over 50 stakeholder groups were consulted over a long period of time to decide on some of these issues, how the public saw them and what the public's interests were in them.
I first have to address some of those issues because there is a misunderstanding or a misrepresentation of them. I also want to address some of the aspects of the issue raised earlier by the member for Drummond and to correct some of the misinterpretation of facts.
The member for Drummond claimed that in 1977 a coalition of feminist groups called for a royal commission on new reproductive technologies. The coalition was formed in 1987 and the first IVF baby was not born until 1978. The member for Drummond seems to have overlooked her party's record on the whole issue of the bill.
The member continually asked for the report to be tabled and for decisions to be made concerning the royal commission report. On May 4, 1994 she complained in the House that the government was too slow to act on the report. She said that such an action would have a major impact on ethics and research.
On October 7, 1994 her colleague from Laval Centre called for the government to table a bill to regulate practices connected with new reproductive technology.
On December 9, 1994 the member for Laval Centre said in the House that it was increasingly clear that the commercialization of human genetic material, embryos and fetal tissue was growing in Canada. She called for regulation in this area as soon as possible.
When the government placed a voluntary moratorium on some of these techniques in July 1995 there was criticism from the hon. members that the government was not going far enough, that there were no real sanctions against those who would continue with these practices.
What is more, the member for Laval Centre held a press conference on February 19, 1996 to complain that the government was not acting quickly enough on the issue. She demanded immediate action to have the more egregious of these practices inscribed in the Criminal Code.
On June 5, 1996 the member for Drummond repeated that this area was in urgent need of legislation. Now we have before us the long awaited legislation. Based on the record of the members opposite I fully anticipate their support.
The bill is about ethical considerations. All technology needs to be regulated. The good that is done by a new technology must be checked against the harm or the potential for harm that can be done by that technology. The number one ethic of physicians is to consider first the well-being of the patient and to do no harm.
The bill specifically set out to control unethical and unsafe uses of new reproductive technologies and to regulate practices that are unacceptable to ensure that they are offered to Canadians in an effective and safe way.
Many Canadians will be affected by these technologies but more especially women and children. Some prohibitions clearly address serious ethical issues the technology is forcing us as a society to consider: cloning and creating animal human hybrids, to name only two. However we cannot forget that it is women who are most deeply affected by these technologies, that they are practised almost exclusively on women's bodies.
Commercial surrogacy, for instance, the practice of bearing a child for another party in return for payment, brings forward shades of The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Commercial surrogacy violates the dignity of women by reducing procreation to a market phenomenon and parenthood to a transaction. Women's reproductive functions become commodities to be bought or sold. Women are not commodities.
Women who are surrogates tend to be younger, less educated and have lower incomes than the couples who commissioned them to bear a child. The imbalance of resources and power means that the surrogate mother is vulnerable to infringement of her autonomy. No matter how willing she is to participate she cannot negotiate on an equal footing with the other parties involved.
With regard to the commercial sale of eggs and sperm, a woman who agrees to sell her eggs takes risks with her health and her well-being. Generally this woman is perfectly healthy and she is certainly not infertile. Yet this healthy fertile woman will be prescribed fertility drugs to stimulate multiple egg production. She will undergo painful medical interventions to retrieve those eggs and in exchange she will earn $2,000 or less. The government will not permit a payment based system of egg donations to develop in Canada.
As a physician I have often seen the joy and the wonder of the birth process. In fact I have delivered over 800 babies myself. I find the idea of seeing reproduction transformed into a commercial act to be completely unacceptable. Women are deeply affected by these reproductive technologies. In many instances some are no more than experimentation on women's bodies.
What of the children born of these technologies? The greatest threat to children's emotional well-being arises out of the use of donated eggs and sperm. The elements that have characterized the sperm donation system as it developed in Canada are secrecy and anonymity.
Closely related to secrecy is the principle of anonymity where the identity of the sperm donor is kept from both the recipient and the child. The pressure of maintaining the secret of donor insemination can place tremendous strains on a family. Adult children born through donor insemination have testified to the harm that maintaining secrecy has caused them, particularly if the truth emerges in the middle of a family crisis.
Anonymity too causes great strain for children finally aware of their birth through the use of donated eggs and sperm who want information about their genetic parents, only to find that it is not available.
We know that the health status of people is dependent on their genetic and familial history. Research in adoption has revealed the importance of information about birth parents to a child's physical and emotional well-being.
As part of its commitment to comprehensive management for new reproductive and genetic technologies, the government is examining the implications of a more open system of information both in gamete and embryo donation. It is appropriate to insist as a government that children born of these technologies be given a full disclosure of his or her history because the health and well-being of children have to be of paramount importance in the decisions we make about new reproductive and genetic technology.
The value of children in our society is self-evident but it is important to state firmly and unequivocally that children are not a means to an end. They are of value not only because of any great gifts that they possess, not because of the way in which they fulfil their parents dreams and not even because of the joy they bring to their parents. Children are of value merely because they exist, because they are.
The government values children. It believes that the hallmark by which our society can be judged is the priority placed on the interests and well-being of its children. The government has established a transparent and explicit framework for its policy on new reproductive and genetic policies.
Concern for children's interests is a vital aspect of that framework. We have approached the issue of children and new reproductive technologies from the perspective of the need to protect those who are vulnerable to adverse consequences of the technologies. Who indeed is more vulnerable than a child?
These technologies affect children in different ways apart from their emotional and physical well-being. Some practices and procedures have consequences so adverse and so easily apparent that prohibition is the only possible response. The consequences of other uses of technologies, adverse or otherwise, are less obvious or are controllable through regulation as we are trying to do.
The government is saying some practices must be regulated and some practices must be absolutely prohibited. These include the implication for the child's health and for the child's long term well-being. Serious issues about the legal status of children must be raised.
By putting forward this legislation we have said that some procedures are so abhorrent that there is no alternative but to prohibit them and to set criminal penalties for their use because they all are practices that have turned children into commodities to bought or to be sold. This is why the legislation makes it criminal to buy or sell human sperm or eggs. Sperm and eggs are the building blocks of human life. To make them into commodities subject to the conditions of the market is to commodify them, to turn them into products. This in turn is dehumanizing. It will affect in the long run the way we as a society value children and how we value human life.
Permitting payment for sperm and eggs also increases the possibilities of health problems for the children who might be born as a result. Studies have shown that when a donation is made for payment, donors have less reason to be honest about the state of their health and about their family history.
The prohibition on cloning is obvious to everyone in terms of its impact on the health of children. We simply do not know the health implications of creating large numbers of genetically identical people, either for individual children or for the population as a whole. We only have to read Boys from Brazil to know what we are talking about.
The use of fetal eggs to create a human embryo could be harmful if they are from a miscarried fetus since genetic disorders in the fetus usually are one of the major causes of miscarriage.
Children's physical health can be seriously damaged from using many of these technologies. It can be affected in the short term and in the long term. We do not know enough about the long term effects of some of these technologies on children. These children have not lived long enough in their life span for us to see some of the effects on their lives. We are taking risks in experimenting with children in Canada.
Canadian and American studies have shown that 20 per cent to 25 per cent of low birth weight babies suffer some form of serious disability and will continue to need attention and care in varying degrees for much of their lives.
Other health effects of new reproductive technologies are simply not known right now. That is why the advent of technologies such as intracytoplasmic sperm injection, or ICSI, has to be treated with a great deal of caution.
ICSI helps to overcome male infertility by selecting just one sperm, often an immature or inferior sperm, and injecting it into the centre of the eggs. The use of ICSI is spreading rapidly throughout the world, including in Canada.
We do not know until the children born through this technique reach adulthood if that sperm was a healthy sperm. If it turns out that the sperm would have been much better through natural selection not to have been fertilized at all, it is not the physicians who will suffer and not even the parents. It is the children who will bear the greatest burden of the use of this technology in the long run.
We do not know what effects fertility drugs may have on children. Yet we use these drugs now almost routinely. We do not know if there is some damage involved in being fertilized in vitro instead of in a woman's body. Gathering information about the long term outcomes of assisted reproduction for children is one of the functions the government would assign to a regulatory structure as outlined in the position paper that was released when Bill C-47 was first introduced into the House.
Physical harm is just one aspects of genetic technology. Let us talk a bit about sex selection which is prohibited in the legislation because it contravenes the government commitment to safeguarding the emotional well-being of children. A child who knows that he or she was born only because of being the right sex may not feel valued. The sibling of such a child may feel forever unworthy of their parent's love and care because of having been the wrong sex.
It is only one small step when we undertake some of these prohibitive technologies to genetic, ethnic and gender manipulation of our society as a whole.
It is clear to me, as it should be clear to members of the House, that Bill C-47 is a balanced response to the dangers posed by the unhampered proliferation of reproductive technology. It does not say that reproductive technology is inherently bad. It says that we do not know enough about some of them, and it says that some of them do not fit into our society's attitudes to human rights and to people.
It makes clear that human life and human dignity are not for sale at any price. It is the only possible way to reassure Canadians that our societal values are being respected, that we place a value on the rights of all of our people regardless of their gender or their age, and that we will allow neither to be so crassly exploited.