Mr. Speaker, thank you for allowing me to comment on Bill C-13, An Act respecting assisted human reproduction. I have a few concerns about this bill. I will read from a text that will help illustrate my concerns.
Initially, the concern was the ethics of destroying human embryos to harvest stem cells for research, but as time passed many other weaknesses of the bill were discovered. I would want the House to consider the following.
Despite the fact that Health Canada has already corrected one error in the definition of “human clone”, the bill still does not ban all known forms and techniques of human cloning.
The bill would permit the implanting of human reproductive material into non-human life forms. The biomedical definition of “chimera” involves the implantation of reproductive material from a human into an animal or from an animal into a human. However, the definition in the bill only refers to the latter.
The conflict of interest provisions are so weak that they would allow biotech and pharmaceutical companies to be represented on a board of the agency that would approve and license research projects.
Significant clauses of the bill have been qualified by phrases such as “as per the regulations”. There are 28 areas in which regulations must be developed and these will not be known until at least 18 months after the bill is passed. Effectively, MPs are being asked to vote on a bill without knowing the full intent. Furthermore, MPs will not be permitted to approve the regulations.
The Royal Commission on Reproductive Technologies and the health committee both recommended that paid surrogacy be prohibited. The bill would permit a surrogate to be reimbursed for lost employment income if that person obtained a doctor's certificate.
The bill ignores women's health issues by not establishing reasonable limits on the amount of drugs used on them or on the number of ova that can be harvested or embryos that can be implanted.
The bill would prohibit the purchase or sale of human reproductive material, but Health Canada has not explained how researchers would get embryos from for profit fertility clinics without paying compensation.
The bill would not establish uniform disclosure or informed consent practices to be used by all fertility clinics. Such disclosure would protect the interests of the infertile.
The health committee urged that the bill state what constituted necessary research. Specifically, it recommended that research on human embryos be permitted only if it could be demonstrated there was no other biological material that could be used to achieve the same research objectives. The bill rejects the recommendation and delegates the decision to the federal agency.
The health committee made 36 recommendations on the draft bill. Its report received no response and most of its key recommendations were not reflected in Bill C-13.
The health committee heard from over 200 witnesses and received over 400 written submissions. As a result of its work, the committee passed three substantive amendments to the bill. At report stage, all three amendments were reversed to the effect that the work of the health committee was virtually ignored.
There are many more deficiencies in areas such as patentability, adoption of embryos and the use of fetus parts, but the examples noted paint a clear picture of a bill that needs to be fixed or defeated.