Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise and speak to the bill and these motions.
I wish to congratulate my colleague from Mississauga South for the motions he has brought forward, the passion he has brought to the debate, and his analysis of the issues. He has done a tremendous amount of work on all of this and he deserves to be recognized for it.
I wish to acknowledge my friend from Calgary Southeast who is very interested in the bill. He has done a tremendous amount of work on this issue and has done his best to draw public attention to the bill. I also wish to acknowledge the member for Yellowhead, the Canadian Alliance critic for health. They have all done a lot of work on the bill. I appreciate their efforts to draw attention to some of these issues.
When we talk about these issues we should talk about them in a tone of humility. We are talking about the essence of human life here. Sometimes we are completely cavalier in how we approach this whole subject.
In the group of amendments that we have before us right now there is talk about paying people to be surrogate mothers. In the previous group of motions my friend from Calgary Southeast was seeking to prohibit the use of embryos for research and the commodification of human embryos for research. The member who spoke a moment ago was talking about those sorts of things.
When we see where Bill C-13 is going, and how the government is specifying particular ways for industry and in some cases individuals are specifying particular ways for private industry to come and commodify human life, we should be concerned. We should approach this with some reverence and some awe, and appreciate that there is a mystery at the centre of human life and science will never plumb the depth of it.
I am concerned when I see people acting in such a cavalier manner about these things that are greater and above individual people. There is something that springs from something greater and above this. Coming from a Christian perspective I would argue that it comes from God and I caution people to be mindful of this.
As I mentioned before, and I do not know if I said it very well, if a lab technician were asked to dispose of a human embryo would there not be a twinge of conscience there? Would there not be some apprehension about doing that? Would there not be a momentary pause wondering whether or not it was correct to dispose of a human embryo?
Even in the legislation the government says that these embryos may be disposed of up to 14 days. This suggests or implies that after 14 days all of a sudden there is some human dignity involved here.
Why is it 14 days? Why is there that cut-off? It seems rather arbitrary. I wonder if perhaps it does not suggest that the government on the one hand is troubled by the fact that it knows at some point that this thing, a human embryo, has some dignity. The government is afraid to say that it starts when that egg is fertilized. We should be cautious in how we approach this. We should approach it with some reverence and I do not think that we do that.
The member for Mississauga South made some excellent points when he spoke a moment ago. One of the things he has pointed to and it deserves the attention of the House and the public almost as much as anything else in this legislation is his reference to the fact that the bill does not ban human cloning. He has laid out all kinds of examples.
I submit that when the Raelians had a press conference not very long ago, just at the beginning of the year, where they were claiming that they cloned a human person, people were horrified around the country and around the world that this could happen.
We need to move with tremendous speed to ban all kinds of human cloning, to close off all opportunities for human cloning. My friend from Calgary Southeast talked about this as well. We must ensure that any legislation that comes forward does not leave a loophole for this to happen because the nature of science is that if it is possible to do it, scientists will do it. To be fair to scientists, science is about finding the limits of human knowledge. It is about exploring things to the limits of human knowledge. That is what scientists do today and it is what they have always done. They do not always think about the ethical and moral considerations, so if there is any kind of a loophole it will absolutely be found.
The members for Mississauga South, Calgary Southeast and others have pointed to some of these problems. We should be extraordinarily careful about proceeding while we have these kinds of clouds of uncertainty hanging over our heads as parliamentarians. I would hate to say that I had participated in the crafting of a bill that allowed human cloning and I am just worried that perhaps that is where we are headed.
I want to address some of the specific motions in Group No. 3. There are things that my friend from Mississauga has proposed, for instance, that there be no buying or selling of human reproductive materials. Let me clarify that Motion No. 32 would add a prohibition on the purchase of fetuses and fetal tissue.
As I mentioned at the outset, I am concerned again that what this bill would do is allow the commodification, the industrialization, of human life. Some people seem to be okay with that. We have some people who are arguing that it is not a problem to pay surrogate mothers all kinds of money to go out and have children. I personally am deeply concerned about that. Motion No. 32 seeks to stop the selling of fetuses or fetal tissue. Any kind of extra protection we can give to that is very important.
Another thing that the member for Mississauga South is proposing to do is to block the transfer of the ownership of a human embryo from the parents to, for instance, a fertility clinic. The member for Mississauga South gave a very specific example of that. When talking about something as precious to people as their children, or a potential child--depending upon how we look at it, I think of a human fetus as an actual life--members can imagine the potential for lawsuits and disputes if this is not made clear in the legislation. The member for Mississauga South has made it very clear that there is a huge loophole and that we need to find ways to close that up. He has pointed to other problems as well.
In closing, members of Parliament should approach this issue with a little humility, a little awe, and a little reverence for the dignity of human life. We should ensure that all possible prohibitions are in place to ensure that cloning is not permitted in any way, shape or form. We should not allow some of the nightmare scenarios about which many people have already talked about. We should take into account some of the common sense proposals from different members around the House who are speaking on this and advocating particular points of view to ensure that human dignity is respected. That is what we are asking.