There’s a lobbying push on right now to repeal the criminal sanctions of our already stripped down Assisted Human Reproduction Act. Years ago, Canada was declared as having the gold standard of legislation on reproductive technologies. Our Act was stripped down in 2010 with the Reference to the Assisted Human Reproduction Act at the Supreme Court. No more bragging rights.

There are many ethical considerations involved with assisted reproduction that deserve careful consideration. When I see private corporations lobbying for the purpose of commercialization, I get nervous. Even an ethicist at Dalhousie is clarifying that the lobbying campaign may be misleading in its advocacy efforts:

Françoise Baylis, a bioethicist at Dalhousie University, agrees that the lack of clarity is a huge concern. But she argues the law can be clarified without getting rid of the criminal sanctions, and Health Canada is conducting consultations to do exactly that. Baylis thinks the real issue for the protesters, despite what they say, is that there is a prohibition on payment, which they want overturned. “They use catchy phrases, but if you unpack them, they are not based in reality,” she says. She is referring to one of the campaign’s slogans — “surrogacy is not a crime” —  pointing out that it isn’t.

And the MP  spearheading these efforts leaves us with this quote:

Anthony Housefather, Liberal MP for the riding of Mount Royal, who supports the lobbying, has made no secret of his desire to see assisted reproduction decriminalized and even commercialized. […] And he isn’t troubled by the prospect of the law being lost altogether. “The abortion law was struck down and not replaced,” he says. “It was no tragedy.”

He should conceded that our status quo has in fact led to tragedy. Due our lack of legislation, in Canada, we know that coerced abortions, sex-selection abortions, and late term abortions, have taken place.  These occurrences should make even the most ardent pro-choicer pause and consider whether being the only Western nation in the world without abortion legislation is “no tragedy.” We aren’t exactly skipping, carefree, through sunny fields on this topic. There are real and life-ending consequences as a result of our legislative void.

I hope Housefather’s position for supporting the decriminalization of AHRA sanctions is more carefully considered.

All that to say, if a private members bill is introduced to address the AHRA, as Housefather suggests, I hope we seize that opportunity to have a careful and nuanced discussion about the ethical considerations engaged.

It’s another round of “We can, but should we?” According to this article, a leading bioethicist believes that new research will  lead to people having children via DNA sample, like a skin scraping, which will then be transformed into eggs and/or sperm.

Further, we’ll do this rather than have children via sex altogether, as it will permit us to have control over the process of procreation. Within 20-40 years, the genetic selection process will be quite advanced, permitting parents to screen the embryos and decide which one is the best fit based on traits and characteristics.

Yes, I think we will see an increased and broad use of embryo selection. I would be careful to set the time frame at 20-40 years. I think we’ll actually see a world where most babies born to people with good health coverage will be conceived in the lab. People will make about a hundred embryos, each will have its whole genome tested, and the parents will be [asked … “Tell] us what you want to know and then tell us what embryo you want.”

There are economic arguments for this approach too:

I think it should bring down health care costs, and, in fact, one of the advantages to it is that it would be so beneficial for public health care costs that I think it would be provided for free. If it costs say, $10,000 to start a baby this way, 100 babies is a million dollars. If you avoid the birth of one baby with a serious genetic disease, you’ve saved $3 [million to] $5 million.  […]

The concern about the state or the insurance company or someone else, forcing you to pick particular babies, worries me a lot more than having parents make choices, though that raises its own set of questions.

A few considerations of course. For those of us that agree with science that life begins at conception, the hypothetical 99 embryos that would be rejected would actually mean that 99 human lives are ended. In one fell swoop. (Unless of course they’re donated for parts and research which is another nauseating issue.) And of course we’re now dealing will full-blown consumer eugenics.

As the bioethicist also notes, it’s possible that this process wouldn’t be covered by insurance in all jurisdictions, so a type of two-tier human caste system would exist: those children whose parents had means and/or insurance to ensure their genetic superiority…and the rest.

I recently read a fiction series that dealt with this issue. The books were set in 2060 and predicted that parents who chose to have children the old fashion way were treated as second class citizens, and had a hard time finding doctors willing to treat their families since they brought on their children’s health problems themselves. They should have done IVF and chosen a healthy embryo instead of the child they had through sex.

Further, if their children were born with certain conditions, there was no one to treat them as money for research dried up as these conditions could be screened out in the IVF process.  If the children were treated, they were considered an unnecessary drain on the crippled healthcare system (the book also predicted that the American economy would be in rough shape 40 years from now.)

The series was written a few years ago, but what the author envisioned lines up with what this bioethicist predicts. I can’t help but wonder if the author will be right about the attitudes towards those of us who would not take this approach to family planning.

And I understand part of the appeal – no parent wants to see their child suffer. My 5 month old daughter was born with two heart defects. There was one dark night when my midwife held me in my dark bedroom as we watched my daughter sleeping. I was crying and she promised we’d work through it if she needed heart surgery as a newborn.

But what’s the cost? What’s the impact on the children born and for society as a whole? How are we going to change when we decide that “imperfect” humans are a drain (or at least could have been selectively avoided), rather than co-citizens that we’re called to love and care for?

There was an interesting article in the National Post this week by Michelle Hauser. Hauser explored medical advances that will make it difficult to blindly accept our abortion status quo. Here’s a taste:

And perhaps the most fundamental question of all: when common medical practice establishes that a 13-week-old fetus is worth saving through surgery, will it not also be worth protecting through the law?

It’s a fantastic piece and I tip my hat to Hauser for all the research she did to pull together such an informative piece. I plan to circulate it to the Physicians for Life’s membership this week.

While I try to remain hopeful, I’m not sure that these advances will change Canadians’ behaviour when it comes to abortion, and I don’t think they’ll influence our legislative stance on the issue. Rather, I think these advances will lead to the “designer babies”(eugenics) that the WHO is concerned about and greater rates of abortion.

We already have a consumer mindset about most things, including life, why would this be any different?

What we need is a change in our conception of human life – and a belief that it is unique and valuable.

We’ve dehumanized the unborn or flat out stated that our lifestyles/circumstances are more important than the actual life of our unborn children – I don’t think medical advances will change this.

We have graphic images, incredible ultrasound technology, life-size medical models of the fetus, and prenatal information from every imaginable source (from National Geographic to Pampers). And yet we continue to abort. And American research shows that the vast majority of abortions are for “lifestyle” (such a “bad timing”) reasons. We’re not talking about cases where the mother’s life is at risk, for example. And we’re not talking about the humanity and the human rights of the unborn child. Science has long established that (of course) a human fetus is, in fact, human.

Perhaps if this information is folded into existing and successful apologetics programs and educational resources – perhaps then it’ll play a role in changing hearts and minds.

But right now I think many hearts are hard or afraid, and many minds choose to be willfully closed.

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