Mr. Speaker, I was speaking with regard to motions that have been made in this group which try to ensure that the biological parent remains the one who makes all the decisions about a child born of a gamete or sperm or egg donation. The point we are trying to make in this piece of legislation is to ensure that the person who receives that gamete, when that child is born, will be building a family with that new family. We cannot have another donor or somebody else make decisions for what happens to the child within this new family.
We have heard members across the way speak about building families. If a new family is built, then that new family becomes the child's family. There cannot be decisions about what happens to a child made by the person who donated what at the end of the day turned out to be a donation of reproductive material that they no longer have any sort of control over because it has become a child in a new family.
We want to be very careful that we do not take away the rights of parents who now have children as a result of reproductive technology, because they are going to be parents and they need to be able to live like parents, to bring up their children, to care for those children and to form a family. That is the slippery slope that we are worried about with some of these motions.
The other point is that some of the motions also seek to stop research. This is an extraordinary piece of legislation. It is the first time that we are setting guidelines and regulations for very important and ground-breaking research. We do not want to inhibit research, yet we certainly do not want to allow research to carry on galloping at a pace without any regulations and without any way of defining the guidelines within which that research will take place. We must have research. Research will allow us to look at assistance for people with Parkinson's, for people with congenital abnormalities that are coming about in the future, for a whole host of things that we now deal with as diseases which create mortality and cost human life.
We have to continue to do research. Research is important if we are to move the agenda forward. How we set ethical regulations and guidelines that would frame that research is what the bill is seeking to do, not to throw research out the door and stop us from moving forward. I want to speak against some motions that will do that, because I think what we are in danger of doing is being extremely retrogressive and not allowing for any movement forward with regard to good science.