David Johnston (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I wish to say from the outset that I am speaking today in support of the Prohibition of Human Cloning for Reproduction and the Regulation of Human Embryo Research Amendment Bill 2006, and I congratulate the Prime Minister for showing considerable leadership by allowing a conscience vote on this complex issue. I thank Senator Patterson for her determination and courage in taking this bill on and for improving upon the 2002 reforms in this area. I also pause to pay a small but heartfelt tribute to my good friend and colleague Dr Mal Washer, the member for Moore, for his determination and guidance on this subject.

Twenty-eight years ago the world was in a spin over the birth of Louise Brown. Many senators know why this now adult’s name is significant. She was the world’s first baby to have been created outside her mother’s womb through in-vitro fertilisation techniques. After millions of babies have been born worldwide because of this amazing leap in medical science, it is easy to forget what a stir it caused at the time. The controversy that arose in the late 1960s and during the 1970s centred largely around the same issues we are dealing with here today—uncertainty; advances in research and science; the hopes and dreams of people with an illness; and moral, ethical and religious issues, to name but a few. Interestingly, much of the protest that was levelled at the time—particularly at Drs Steptoe and Edwards, who were responsible for the first successful IVF baby—came from the fact that people simply could not believe it could be done. Not only did some consider it unnatural but also many considered that growing a baby outside the womb was completely unimaginable—unthinkable. While the debate raged amongst scientists, doctors and legislators, I can imagine that the general public remained sceptical too. What turned the tide of opinion for IVF was a photo of a normal healthy little baby born to childless desperate parents—and her name was Louise Brown.

The procedure is so common today that nearly everyone knows somebody who has accessed IVF; I personally know more than a few. Australia has an extraordinarily proud history in the field of IVF. Twelve out of the first 15 babies ever to be born through IVF came from Australia. We achieved the first donor egg pregnancy and the first frozen embryo pregnancy. Australia was the first to successfully deliver the first IVF multiple pregnancy. Most importantly and, I believe, relevant to this debate, Australia was the first to introduce legislation protecting donor gamete pregnancies as well as to manage the IVF process through a regulatory framework, both nationally and amongst our individual states. We are considered world leaders in the inauguration of a system of registration of every IVF cycle and every baby born from IVF—and the rest of the world had to catch up with us after we instigated this system in the 1980s.

We are also leaders when it comes to public funding of IVF. I understand that our treatments are some of the most highly subsidised in the world. Couples in the United States and the United Kingdom, for example, face huge financial burdens when undergoing IVF, including taking out second mortgages to pay for cycles, waiting for years on a public clinic’s waiting list or taking the risk of having multiple embryos implanted in the one cycle, as their financial circumstances allow them only one opportunity to have a family.

Some couples in the United Kingdom are forced to donate half of their eggs collected to a private clinic, in exchange for a free cycle of IVF. The clinic then uses the donated eggs to give to another couple. This seems to me to create a two-tiered system: childless couples who have money are not required to give away their own genetic material in order to access affordable treatment; however, others who are not as financially able, in reality, have no choice but to do so.

Fortunately, IVF in Australia is accessible to the vast majority of couples, regardless of their income, who would otherwise be unable to have children—and we should be proud of this fact. I think it also reflects the widespread community acceptance of and support for the use of IVF to help infertile couples and the subsequent continuing support since 2002 in the community, particularly amongst IVF couples, for the use of excess embryos for stem cell research. In fact, more than half the couples who have finished their families and have excess embryos now donate them for stem cell research, rather than donate them to another couple or leave them to expire.

The issue of egg donation and how it will be regulated under this bill is something I will address in a moment. I believe that, if people are worried about how this parliament will handle the issues surrounding therapeutic cloning and the impact of this bill, they should consider this country’s sound and successful history in similar scientific breakthroughs as exampled with our IVF model, with its attendant ethical administration and registration management. Traditionally, this country has handled these complex issues with maturity and responsibility. We have been able in the past, to quote John Lockhart, to weigh up the social and moral ‘value that some communities attach to the human embryo against the social and moral value that others attach to the treatment of disease and to helping people have a family’.

This was typical of the late Hon. John Lockhart. The recommendations from his report were made in the full knowledge that there were starkly opposing views on this subject, just as there are in this chamber tonight. His empathy and reason is combined with decisions based on good science and not on ill-informed sensationalism. He acknowledged that, aside from religious or personal beliefs that coloured some opinions in the community, there were other legitimate concerns that could be addressed through adequate regulation and through legislation such as we are debating here this week.

I do not for one moment claim that the successful passage of this bill will lead to dramatic breakthroughs resulting in cures for spinal cord injuries, for Parkinson’s disease or for motor neurone disease. That is not my call. I am neither medical researcher nor qualified scientist—and, as far as I am aware, no-one in this chamber is. As legislators, I do not believe that we need to have such a background to make a judgement call on this bill. But what we do need and what I hope the majority of senators do possess is a sense of vision and a sense of hope that we have the potential and we have the tools to take on the huge challenge of giving us the very best chance of curing such dreadful conditions as I have mentioned—the very best chance of having a go at curing these terribly debilitating diseases.

Medical science does not always provide certainties, but that does not mean that we should put hurdles in front of research on the basis of that uncertainty. Time and time again we have overcome concerns—some legitimate, some that amount to downright scaremongering—to embrace medical breakthroughs. Paranoia and misinformation accompanied the introduction of treatments such as genetically engineered insulin some years ago, but they were permitted on the market because our medical regulatory systems based their decisions on good science. Without this insulin, we would not have enough human pancreata in the world to obtain the human insulin that is required to treat our diabetic population.

Vaccines also exist today because of genetic engineering—another topic that takes us into the unknown and hence causes controversy. The new genetically modified whooping cough vaccine is actually much safer than the old one as there was always a risk, apparently, of brain damage. The new genetically engineered vaccine does not contain any foreign proteins and therefore removes this risk. Hepatitis B vaccine, which is now recommended for all Australians, has been guaranteed safe because it is produced by genetic modification. Confidence in its safety was not always assured when the product was extracted from high-risk hepatitis B sufferers. Similarly, the cervical cancer vaccine has a genetic engineering genesis and history.

The subject of stem cells and what we may be able to do with them in the very near future is a very exciting prospect. When I think of the opportunity that we have here today to possibly be helping hundreds of thousands of people in Australia and millions around the world, I am acutely aware of the responsibility that is now upon our shoulders with this bill. I think it is all too easy to allow my personal religious or moral beliefs to distract or temper me on the issue of stem cell research when my family and I are all in relatively good health.

Even if I wanted to get into a debate about when human life begins or what individual rights should be bestowed upon an embryo that has been cloned for therapeutic purposes, I do not know if I personally should have that luxury to preach to families whose daughter is a quadriplegic or whose father has motor neurone disease and is slowly watching his body die around him while his mind stays perfectly alert. Those families do not want to hear about my religious convictions; they simply want my positive support, my participation and our collective help to find a cure, to give us the best chance to find a cure—if not for their loved one then for future generations, in the hope of avoiding the suffering and grief that they themselves have endured.

Having said that, this bill is not about the merits or ethical dilemmas of embryonic stem cell research. This has been legal since the 2002 legislation and, as I said earlier, widely accepted within the community. The main area of dispute now, and this was recognised in the community affairs committee report, is the use of therapeutically cloned or somatic cell nuclear transfer embryos as an additional source for research. Other countries have already begun the research on stem cells, and I have every faith in our regulators here in Australia that they will enact the provisions in this bill to the letter. These provisions are wide ranging, thoughtful and come highly recommended from a wide range of experts, many of whom have religious convictions and have weighed up all of the arguments.

This bill does not support reproductive cloning—and I do not think there is anyone in this chamber who does. There is a world of difference between therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning and, whilst I am respectful of the contrary view, I utterly reject the implication that this is the thin end of the wedge: it is simply not true. We legislated against reproductive cloning in 2002, and this bill seeks to reaffirm our stance on that issue. Creation of human embryos by fertilisation of human eggs by human sperm will remain restricted to IVF treatment for the purposes of reproduction.

Under this bill, the uses of embryos that may be authorised by a licence may only be authorised for development up to 14 days. In no circumstances can any embryo be developed outside the body of a woman beyond 14 days. Egg donors that may wish to donate eggs towards stem cell research will be donating for altruistic reasons and will not be lured by money or exploited. The NHMRC will develop guidelines for egg donation that will provide for full disclosure to a potential donor of the process involved and the risks associated with an egg donation.

I am concerned about the practical problems that we face in egg collection, because there is little point in approving stem cell research if we do not have any eggs to conduct this research with. Yes, we have excess embryos from IVF that are already available for stem cell research, but if we pave the way for additional powers for therapeutic cloning we will need the cooperation of young women around the country.

I am aware that this is not like going to your local Red Cross for an hour to give blood, and it is hard enough to even find donors to do that. Egg donation involves around a month of hormone injections, tracking and internal ultrasounds—which are quite invasive and time intensive—concluding in another invasive procedure involving twilight anaesthetic to collect the harvested eggs. By and large the donor is required to take at least a day off work and for some it can be several days, depending on how quickly they recover from the procedure.

After all this there is no guarantee of how many eggs will be collected from this one donor—it could be one; it could be 10. Any more and you risk some form of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, which can result in hospitalisation, organ failure and, in very rare cases, even death. More minor side effects of the hormone injections include soreness, bloating, weight gain and emotional distress. Women currently go through this process regularly and in a committed way time and time again in IVF, but they are doing it in the knowledge that, hopefully, it will one day allow them to have a baby.

I am struggling to be convinced that, once they know all of this and all of the facts, we will find as many women as we might anticipate prepared to do this purely for egg donation for therapeutic cloning research. As I said, we struggle to find people to take an hour out of their lives to give blood. Egg harvesting is far more time consuming, invasive and, indeed, risky. I am not sure if the Lockhart review fully appreciated this, although it did mention egg collection via other means, such as cadaveric donation not unlike other organ donation and donation from women who are having their ovaries removed for medical reasons. The Senate committee also heard evidence that a stem cell bank could be created which could store stem cells that could be propagated indefinitely without the need for continually sourcing out new ova. That certainly helps to allay many of my concerns.

Embryonic stem cells are immortal, which means that they can be multiplied in the lab to produce large numbers of cells. Once the required number of cells has been obtained, they can be directed to form particular types of specialised cells, such as heart muscle, nerve, insulin-producing pancreatic cells et cetera. Yes, it is true that adult stem cells are beneficial in medical advancement; however, stem cells derived from adult tissues appear to have a more limited potential, as they are not able to differentiate as widely and are often confined to reproducing cells identical to those found in the tissue from which they were harvested. Furthermore, as the Community Affairs Committee heard, research using therapeutically cloned embryos will actually assist in our understanding of cell biology and provide greater potential in the use of adult stem cell treatments.

I know that any kind of breakthrough in stem cell research is probably some years away, but I believe the vast majority of the Australian community will welcome the advances that this has the potential to deliver. Like the controversy surrounding IVF 30-odd years ago, once benefits are gained from therapeutic cloning and applied to effective medical treatment, this cautious welcome will turn into a confident acceptance and, indeed, a demand to have the right to access such treatments through Medicare.

Maybe one day when we are all in our retirement homes another senator in this chamber will look back at this time and wonder what all the fuss was about. Perhaps this senator will use this debate as an example when speaking on a bill that approves some new or wonderful type of research we are yet to even comprehend, in the way that the IVF debate occurred 30 years ago. I still have faith that this chamber does accurately reflect wider community standards and aspirations and I am hoping that it does with the successful passage of this bill.

I want to briefly touch on the issue of surveys and polls of community opinion on this issue. I am always reticent in quoting a result from a poll in this chamber that would back up my particular argument, because, as we all know, polls can be worded to get the result that you actually desire—it is notoriously easy to do that. When we are dealing with an issue that is not comprehensively understood by many, it is even more difficult. I also know that terms such as ‘cloning’ provoke a certain emotive response from many of us, particularly those prone to watching the odd science fiction movie. I note the Community Affairs Committee majority report also considered the issue of community standards and surveys and the difficulties in gauging public opinion on such a complex issue. They acknowledged not all of the polling done on this matter was completely independent, but what stood out was that overall there was a consistent and strong support for stem cell research amongst both men and women in the community.

As the value of an embryo created through an egg and sperm can be considered either greater to or of equal value to the value of an embryo created through therapeutic cloning, it is therefore reasonable to conclude that community support would continue for the measures contained within this bill. As a community we are prepared to accept the use of excess embryos from IVF for stem cell research—we have been doing so now for four years—and we are equally comfortable with using embryos created through somatic cell nuclear transfer or therapeutic cloning.

The measures proposed in this bill are supported by the Lockhart review and its members and my Senate colleagues from the Community Affairs Committee in its majority report. This support has been borne out of careful and considered research into all sides of the argument. I appreciate the considerable and valuable work that they have done and the written material they have produced so I could base my decision on the objective and balanced research therein contained. I commend this bill to the Senate. I wish its successful passage through this chamber and also the one below.