Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the member's comments on what is certainly a very important report. This report showed how committee members in fact can work together in a non-partisan way. It deals with some very sensitive issues and I would like to make a statement. I hope that the member will be able to comment on some of the thinking of the committee as I know he is a member of that committee.
Dr. Françoise Baylis was on the dais with the president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to announce the guidelines on stem cell research. I would like to quote from a statement she made to the health committee. She stated:
The first thing to recognize in the legislation and in all your conversations is that embryos are human beings. That is an uncontested biological fact. They are a member of the human species.
This really focuses the issue to the fact that we are talking about the disposition of a human being, the human embryo. In fact most discussions start off with people saying that we have in vitro fertilization, there are these unwanted fertilized eggs, the embryos, and therefore rather than simply discard them, let us use them.
I wonder if the member would comment on the logistics here. It appears to me that the in vitro process generates more eggs for fertilization than are normally necessary. In fact they drug women to super-ovulate and they harvest perhaps 25 eggs. Then they might implant two or three eggs. If more than one takes, they do a fetal reduction. It seems to me that the solution to this problem or this ethical dilemma is to perfect the process of freezing women's eggs and simply thaw them when they are needed for the in vitro process. In that case there would be no surplus embryos and that would deal with the ethical problem.