Mr. Speaker, I am happy to have an opportunity to speak on a bill that matters, in a medical sense. Bill C-13 is a complex bill. It is about assisted human reproduction. The bill has actually been in the House in various iterations ever since I have been here.
I had an opportunity to deal with infertile couples in my life prior to coming to Parliament. I would like to briefly talk about what drives couples who want a natural child. This is a significant issue to these people and they will do virtually almost anything they can to have a child.
The causes of infertility are quite diverse. They range from the husband being infertile, possibly caused by a low sperm count from infection or injury to, more commonly, a wife's infertility. The wife's infertility may be caused by hormonal reasons and a reduction in the number of ova she might produce, infection, the ovary not working, tumours, and often times unknown factors in relation to infertility.
Science has mushroomed in this area. When I graduated, this was not a huge issue, even on the horizon, but we now have a host of mechanisms to help infertile couples. These range from drugs to enhance egg production, laparoscopic surgery which extracts eggs, to mechanisms which concentrate sperm.
We can now join the eggs and the sperm outside the body. These are commonly known as test tube babies. We can implant them in the mother's womb, or in fact implant them in another womb.
We have sperm donors. We have egg donors. We have instances where there are more eggs being extracted than are necessary for the couple to use. We also have the opportunity to freeze these little embryos, keep them for a fairly long period of time and reuse them.
Most of these issues are not controversial. They are widely accepted by Canadians under the broad heading of assisted human reproduction. Of course, this is a vote that involves issues of ethics. I personally support Bill C-13 as it relates to these activities and therapies.
There are, however, some controversial items in Bill C-13 that do have more ethical and significant moral components to them.
One of them is cloning. Cloning is encapsulated by this bill. Cloning is a complex issue in itself. I would have liked to have seen the bill split to actually look at assisted human reproduction in one bill and the more controversial issues to be looked at and studied in another bill. We in fact put that forward as a proposition, but it was not accepted. That would have been my preference.
Cloning involves taking the nucleus from a cell, replacing that nucleus with another nucleus, and having an identical organism formed from the new cell.
There are two types of cloning. There is cloning for reproduction, which would be someone trying to clone me, heaven forbid, in order to make an exact copy. That copy would be identical in appearance and genetic makeup. The other type of cloning is therapeutic cloning. It is not so simple, but to make it simple, it would be to have spare parts or spare individuals in case of the death or demise of an individual.
This bill would ban both types of cloning: therapeutic and reproductive. I believe that these types of cloning should be banned. However, at the present time, there is a debate going on in the UN on this very issue. There, Canada's position is not the same as the position in this bill. That troubles me because the Canadian position, which is to ban all types of cloning, should carry right through to the international experience.
I have been told that the reason this is being done is that at the UN there is very little chance of passing a total ban on cloning, and I do not buy that. I do not believe for one second that this is a legitimate or valid reason.
The second and even more controversial issue underneath the big umbrella of the bill is stem cell research. Basic cells in the body are stem cells and are capable of becoming any cell. We call it differentiation. They can become any cell. The stem cell, then, could become a nerve cell. It could become a brain cell. It could become a hair cell. It could become skin or bone. These cells, the basic cells of the process of an organism, are the building blocks, so to speak, of our bodies.
Stem cells can be sought and used from two broad sources. They can be used from the adult source or from the embryonic source. The adult source of stem cells is bone marrow and umbilical cord blood, and research on these stem cells has tremendous benefit, in my view, for therapy of some complex illnesses.
The other source is from the embryo. Let us remember that I mentioned in my comments prior to this that extra embryos can be taken from infertile couples and used in the fertility process. Extra embryos can be frozen and then used for research if in fact they are not used by the infertile couple.
A stem cell from an embryo is quite different from the stem cell of an adult. The embryo does involve some significant ethical and moral issues. There are those who debate that the embryo, even when it is outside the uterus, is the fundamental of human life. There are those who say that it is not implanted in the uterus and it is not human life at all. Then there is a third category of people who say that for the embryo, until it is a fetus and born, that is the only time we then have human life.
From my perspective, and this is a perspective of looking at this from the moral, ethical and medical viewpoints, the complexity of fetal or embryonic stem cell research is such that if we had a preference, and we actually do have a preference, we are better to look at the adult stem cells. To that end, my party, the Canadian Alliance, has asked for a moratorium on stem cell research from the embryonic source for three years, which is the initial three years that this bill would then review. To my mind, that would remove the controversy that surrounds the stem cell research.
What promise does adult stem cell research show us? The promise is really quite significant. There are some advantages in that if I had diabetes and my stem cells could produce the cells from my body which produce insulin, there would be no immune reaction. It would be taking my stem cells from my bone marrow and using them for therapy for my system. Immune rejection is a significant problem with the research in these areas. There would also be no embryonic destruction involved, which would remove the ethical and moral decision and debate there.
Are there examples of success? Just this year in June at the University of Minnesota bone marrow cells from adults have been transformed into every single other cell type. This has enormous potential.
My preference, then, and I speak on this bill not just from the party perspective but from my own preference, with a medical background, is to split the bill in half, one the human reproduction half and one the cloning/stem cell half. My preference would be a moratorium on embryonic stem cells for three years, which is actually my party's position as well.
Another preference is that children born of assisted human reproduction would have a right to know their parents and have a right to know the place where the cells came from.
I would also like to see some limitation of the eggs extracted from couples going through assisted human reproduction.
I also will say that there is strong support from me for research on adult stem cells and the exciting therapies that are potentially there.
The bill has been full of controversy. As I have said, it and its predecessors have been around for virtually 10 years. That controversy and the way this is now being brought to the House, with a side deal to allow for an agency to have gender parity, seem to me to minimize the importance and ethical component of the bill.
I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on this important bill.