Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill

I move, That the House take note of the report of the Health Committee on the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill. I welcome the return of my bill back to the House after 8 years. I certainly hope that no one says that this bill is being rushed through the House. It has had a very long gestation period. I think it probably nearly died of oxygen deprivation on the way. I know that there have been attempts to clone it as well with the Assisted Human Reproduction Bill, which was produced by the previous Government.

I promised in my maiden speech in 1993 that I would introduce this bill. I did so in 1996, and in 1997, the year that Dolly the sheep was created, it was unanimously referred to the Health Committee. I remember that the Speaker at the time, the Hon. Doug Kidd, was rather amazed when I said that really this was the bill to save men, because it would take only eight men with strong sperm counts to maintain the population of New Zealand with reasonable diversity.

💬 Hon Member: What?

Only eight men! Some of the members of the House at that time were unaware of the existence of human reproductive technologies, and that not only were in vitro fertilisation—which means “created in a glass dish”—techniques in use, but that genetic engineering was possible in humans, as it is in corn, cabbages, cows, or sheep. The questions that had been asked in the United Kingdom in 1990, when that country passed the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, were that if such technologies were available, how should they be used, by whom, and at what costs; and what controls, if any, needed to be put in place to prevent a modern eugenics movement, to protect women from becoming baby factories, and children and men—even dead men—from exploitation, to be cautious about genetic changes to humans, and to put in place checks and balances about who should make decisions and in whose interests? I think that the ministerial advisory committee and ethics committee may be, now in this bill as we have revised it, a little weak on catering for the interests of children.

The questions around reproductive technology are huge ethical questions, including what it means to be human, and they have ongoing and intergenerational consequences. Many of the changes made by the Health Committee to my original bill, and there have been many—it has basically been revamped, and the bill was based on the British bill—ensure that the legislation fits within New Zealand’s medical and health systems. I personally would have preferred some of the controversial matters in clauses 36 and 37 to be under a tighter regulatory framework rather than the flexibility of an advisory committee to the ministry. Examples of these are the donation of embryos, embryo splitting, which mainstream churches objected to in submissions, gametes derived from deceased persons—and the controversial United Kingdom case of Mrs Blood, who used sperm from her deceased husband, is a case in point—requirements surrounding informed consent, selection of embryos using pre-implantation and genetic analysis, and the import and export to and from New Zealand of in vitro - donated cells of embryos, which could leave us open to abuse of abortions of women from Third World countries. But the latter may receive more attention at the Committee stage of the bill.

The bill does require public consultation on these matters, but not regulation, and regulation would mean a stronger penalty regime. Guidelines, I believe, can be ignored or overridden, even though those who are professionally involved could face deregistration.

Other aspects and changes to the bill on the keeping of records, and the recognition of genetic inheritance or whakapapa, are an improvement. The bill is clear that children should know their genetic inheritance, and the New Zealand select committee was clear on this, although there is some controversy about it internationally.

While the bill covers consent for the use of human gametes and embryos for research, the use of embryonic stem cells is still in a greyish area and will be included in overlapping legislation. Some research is also under the guideline area rather than a regulatory framework, and I have some concerns about that.

Other matters in which the bill has been changed include the use of embryos and gametes for 10 years to enable the users of reproductive technologies to plan families over time, using frozen gametes from one operation, and I believe that that is an improvement. It also makes clear that sex selection for other than medical reasons is not appropriate, and that the possibility is there for regulating around consent. I admit to liking the United Kingdom consent processes as I believe that consent processes for reproductive technologies are important to ensure protection of all parties, to ensure independent counselling, and to avoid complex court cases later, which may be detrimental to the children born from these processes.

The committee was informed of United Kingdom, Canadian, and Australian laws. The Canadian legislation, I believe, spells out the intention of the law more clearly, and the Australian Commonwealth legislation is much more specific on what processes are clearly banned. No doubt there will be test cases that may require future changes to this law. I am just wary that we are dealing with human babies and irreversible technologies, and I personally, while not wanting to prevent the use of the science and the technologies, believe that we cannot be too careful. We need to use a precautionary approach, especially when we are talking about New Zealand children, in vitro fertilised babies, and as we have seen 20 years on, those who are seeking to find their genetic parents.

We have had submissions—and I know that other members of the committee will be putting forward Supplementary Order Papers—from at least one of those children calling for a voluntary registration of donors to cover this matter, and with some retrospectivity. It will be important to constantly review the legislation to ensure it meets our present needs and the future needs of human assisted reproductive technology children.

I believe this bill should proceed, and proceed with some haste at this stage now, but consider that some areas could be more specific and that we could have tighter regulatory frameworks.

I wish to thank all those who have been involved in the preparation of the bill and its revisions, and all those who made submissions—the people and the organisations. I particularly want to thank Debbie Angus, who assisted with the original draft when I came with barely an idea of what should be done and with the British legislation. I also want to thank Ian Wilmut—I did go to the trouble of going all the way to Edinburgh to meet him, and sadly Dolly the cloned sheep, who was a grandmother, has died—and all those who have been involved.

I want to thank the clerks of the Health Committee, who have been extremely patient through the elections, and then with a new select committee; the select committee staff; and the ministry staff and advisers. I want to thank people in my own electorate who have been very helpful, particularly the scientists, the medical professionals, the ethicists, and those who have kept me up to date with information, and who have done a good deal of the background reading.

I particularly want to thank the scientists at AgResearch in the Waikato for the tremendous amount of help and advice they gave initially, and for a lawyer friend, who shall not be named, who went through the original bill, saying “Well, this is all very fine scientific language, but would it stand up in court?”, and gave very practical legal advice on the original bill.

So once again I do thank everybody who, through this long 8-year period, has come through a bill that started off in an embryonic form and has been through many stages. It has not only been born, but it has crawled, walked, and now, I think, is just about to start intermediate school. But for those who have all been involved in this bill I look forward to the Committee stage and the third reading, and hopefully we will have it passed by the end of this year.

This bill has clearly been a long time coming, and Dianne Yates has shown a great degree of perseverance and indomitableness over the time from 1996 when she first introduced the bill. Subsequent to it, 2 years later, came the Assisted Human Reproduction Bill introduced by the Hon. Douglas Graham. I well remember, as a practising gynaecologist with a particular interest in infertility, reading an article by Professor Robert Janson, an in vitro fertilisation specialist. He commented on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and pointed out that Huxley in his book particularly warned of the dangers of too much central control. One thing we must remember in this rapidly changing world of technology and scientific discovery is that that message is salutary. Clearly, this legislation has been subject to large changes through a Supplementary Order Paper. Unlike reproductive technology legislation in many other countries, and I think particularly of Britain and Canada, the mechanisms in this legislation do provide clear primary legislation to prohibit procedures that are clearly unacceptable, but contain opportunities for certain secondary and tertiary legislation through Order in Council, so that the legislation does indeed have a degree of flexibility and can be relevant to the future.

Just recently we heard from Lord Robert Winston, who pointed out that in his view, the British legislation needed changing already and that, in some ways, it had become obsolete. One of the great strengths of this legislation is that in many respects it looks to the future. Indeed, the legislation does cover issues that are technically complex and highly ethically complex and for that reason it has taken so long to come to fruition.

However, I must say that the select committee worked incredibly well together. I pay tribute to the many extremely thoughtful submissions from researchers, Fertility NZ, and organisations such as the Law Society. I note that the society concluded that the bifurcated model proposed in the Supplementary Order Paper, whereby the supervisory authority is divided between ethics committees and the advisory committee, is misconceived, and in the society’s view will not adequately serve the needs of regulation compliance. It believes that because of the complexity and importance of the ethical, legal, and policy issues endemic to that area of medical technology, regulation at the highest achievable level of official supervisory oversight is necessary in order to provide appropriate leadership and to control the potential for abuse.

I am very glad that the committee chose not to follow the views of the Law Society, because it has taken a much more appropriate approach to the realities of biology and technological change. However, some have asked why have any legislation at all, and the ACT party in its minority report suggested that sentiment. We do know that over the last 15 years or so in New Zealand, where we have really had no specific legislation in that area, things have run reasonably well. But clearly, there are areas and issues that in my mind do require clear legislation.

Already in the schedules we can see contentious issues like prohibiting actions that include to “Artificially form, for reproductive purposes, a cloned embryo. … Artificially form … a hybrid embryo. … Implant into a human being an animal gamete or embryo.”, and the list goes on. There is no doubt in my mind that those issues should clearly be scheduled, and indeed they are. As was mentioned by Dianne Yates, stem cell research, and issues relating to it, will be introduced at another time through the Human Tissue Act. That will be of huge importance, because of its overlapping interest with this legislation.

Indeed, the Supplementary Order Paper does provide for a ministerial advisory committee to provide advice on human assisted reproductive technology and associated research, develop guidelines, and monitor established procedures. It also provides an information-keeping scheme for the collection, retention, and access to information about donors and donor offspring, based on the model in the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill. Huge thought has been put into that area, and a publication, Navigating our Future, of some years ago was extremely helpful in bringing out the purposes and principles that underpin this bill.

I do believe that a little bit of political correctness has been added, where not only does the committee recommend that the bill is intended to protect and promote the health, safety, dignity, and rights of all individuals, but particularly women and children in the use of those procedures. Men have been intimately involved in those procedures, and if one has had a testicular biopsy, one would certainly know that. But more so is the deep emotional involvement that all people involved in those areas have, and undoubtedly it is hugely important that that is recognised.

But there is the issue of openness that is promoted in order to allow donor offspring the opportunity to meet their biological parents. Clause 4(e) states “donor offspring should be made aware of their genetic origins and be able to access information about those origins:”. Clearly, the legislation is prospective, and in future that will be quite possible. However, for those in the past, again quite properly, because of the rules of anonymity, it would be inappropriate to put in retrospective legislation to override that.

However, in Australia there is a very successful model of a voluntary register. Consequently, I have tabled a Supplementary Order Paper today that would introduce the possibility of a voluntary register. It has been well supported by groups throughout New Zealand, including donors and donor offspring. I certainly hope that it will have support from the various parties around the House.

The bill has explicitly outlawed commercial surrogacy, and that is a good thing, along with commercial dealing in embryos or gametes. The tradition of keeping a donation altruistic is hugely important. Sadly, the realities in countries like the United States is that commercial surrogacy in dealing in embryos can lead to horrific legal entanglements and human misery. However, one of the problems of openness is that it is now much harder to find sperm donors. That is the sort of balancing trick that has to be arrived at through the legislation.

The ministerial advisory committee and the ethics committee are of huge importance. I think that they are too big. Perhaps the composition is that they are too full of lay people. These are highly technical areas that do require a very well-based knowledge in terms of getting wise results. But one thing about the ethics committee that I am very pleased about is that the select committee has recommended the requirement that the ethics committee act expeditiously. There is no doubt that the biological time clock ticks on, and as a practising clinician I can say that time and time again we saw patients waiting for procedures that were held up, purely because of the time delays by the ethics committee.

I am not in the least concerned with the final words of members of the Green Party who say that they are concerned that the ministerial advisory committee may be able to issue guidelines allowing embryo selection for blue eyes, etc., and they say that that kind of eugenics is anathema to New Zealand values. I say that that sort of scaremongering is anathema to New Zealand common sense.

Finally, I strongly support this bill. It has demonstrated a great amount of evidence of how parliamentary select committees can work together.

I am delighted to rise today in support of the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill, a members’ bill in the name of Dianne Yates, MP for Hamilton East. This bill introduces long overdue, comprehensive legislation to regulate assisted human reproductive procedures and human reproductive research in our country.

I give my special thanks, and the thanks of the Government, to Dianne Yates. She first introduced the bill back in 1996, as Dr Hutchison has said, and she is to be congratulated on the considerable time and effort she has invested in bringing this legislation, about which she obviously cares very deeply, to fruition. I would like to add my appreciation also to that which Ms Yates has already passed on to Health Committee staff and their advisers, for their very detailed work and professionalism in this most complex and important area.

The bill currently before the House is an amalgamation of Ms Yates’ original bill and the Government amendments that update and build upon her earlier work. The Government amendments reflect changes in scientific knowledge and technology over the period since the development of the bill, changes in the legislative framework for the health sector generally, and overseas developments.

I would also like to acknowledge the valuable contribution made by the Health Committee to the development of this bill. The long history of the bill is testament to the complex ethical issues raised by assisted reproduction. I thank the committee for its report and recommendations, which are unanimous.

The Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill establishes a robust and flexible framework for the regulation of current and future assisted reproductive practices and research. In an area like assisted human reproduction, where science and technology are rapidly changing, it is important to establish a system that is both adaptable and rigorous, but not so overly prescriptive that it will quickly become outdated or redundant. I am confident that this bill strikes that appropriate balance.

Although other countries to whom we often look for guidance have opted for licensing regimes, I believe that the framework set out in the bill is the most appropriate regulatory approach for this country. The bill sets up a system that is compatible with the New Zealand health sector generally, and that is also appropriate for the small number of fertility service providers in New Zealand. I am confident that the regulatory framework set out in the bill is robust, and achieves a level of regulation that compares well internationally.

The bill is also appropriate for New Zealand, in that it acknowledges that there has not been a sense of discussion or debate in this country about many assisted reproduction activities, including the complex ethical issues they pose and the opportunities and risks they present. The bill requires public consultation and expert advice on matters of significant public interest, prior to decisions about the safety and acceptability of new procedures.

The bill also prohibits outright a number of activities that are deemed to be unacceptable in this country. Most countries that have legislation in this area have a similar list of prohibited activities. The bill bans activities such as human cloning for reproductive purposes, the implantation of a human embryo into an animal and vice versa, and the genetic modification of embryos. Most people would agree that those are at the extreme end of the spectrum of assisted reproductive technology, and would support banning such activities. After hearing submissions, the Health Committee considered there was also a broad level of support for adding further prohibitions on activities such as sex selection for social reasons, and the use of gametes and foetuses for reproductive purposes.

The bill makes an important distinction between the use of techniques for reproductive purposes—that is, for the purpose of forming a child—and for research purposes. Certain techniques, like cloning for example, are prohibited for reproductive purposes, but their potential use for research purposes is preserved. This reflects the general approach of the bill, which is to be cautious but to preserve the potential benefits and opportunities of reproductive technology. It also reflects the Government’s overall approach to biotechnology policy, which is development—but with care.

The bill establishes a new ministerial advisory committee. This committee will consist of experts from a range of different disciplines, and half its members will be lay people. It will provide policy advice to the Minister on new and established procedures, and monitor developments in assisted human reproduction. It will also issue guidelines for permitted activities, which will be used by ethics committees to consider individual applications. The bill also provides for regulations to be made for any assisted reproductive procedure or research.

An important part of the advisory committee’s role will be to consult with the public on assisted reproductive technology. In response to concerns from submitters, the Health Committee has added a number of provisions that clarify how public input and consultation will be achieved, and the transparency of the working of the advisory committee enhanced. The bill separates responsibility for developing policy from the consideration of individual applications.

The advisory committee will develop policy advice, and the bill requires that an ethics committee be designated to consider individual applications. That will be a significant improvement on the current situation, where the National Ethics Committee on Assisted Human Reproduction is in the unsatisfactory and often difficult position of having both to set policy and to consider individual applications. Ethics committees are widely used in the health and research sectors to consider individual applications within the parameters of guidelines. Under this bill, ethical approval will be mandatory for all non-established procedures and all human reproductive research. The ethics committee to be designated under this bill will consider individual applications in accordance with guidelines laid down by the ministerial advisory committee.

A significant feature of the bill, of which New Zealand can be particularly proud, is the comprehensive information-keeping scheme. It is important that this part of the bill is acknowledged, because it is an area in which I believe we lead the world. As the experience of closed adoption has shown, secrecy around issues of identity, family, and genetic heritage can have devastating consequences for individuals and families. The information-keeping provisions in this bill give legislative recognition to the importance of openness and knowledge about one’s genetic heritage.

The bill establishes an information-keeping scheme that enables people born as a result of donated eggs or sperm to access information about their genetic origins. Fertility service providers will be required to collect, retain, and pass on certain information about donors and donor-offspring to the Registrar-General of Births, Deaths and Marriages. The Registrar-General will administer a new information register that will be able to be accessed by donor-offspring, guardians of donor-offspring, and donors. Donor-offspring will be able to access identifying information about their donor from age 16, and non-identifying information if they are under 16.

The bill also acknowledges that donors have an interest in children conceived from their donation. Donors will be able to find out whether a donation resulted in the birth of a child, and access identifying information about any donor-offspring, with the offspring’s consent once 18 or older. The bill even contains provisions for information sharing about siblings who have the same donor.

This bill before the House today will provide important new safeguards around assisted human reproduction. It prohibits practices that many people find ethically unacceptable, and establishes processes for ethical decision-making that will serve us well in the future as science and technology continue to develop apace. The bill secures the benefits of assisted reproductive technology and research for individuals and society, while taking appropriate measures to protect human health, safety, and dignity.

Again, I extend my thanks to all of those involved in the development of this important legislation. I commend the bill to the House.

On behalf of New Zealand First, I rise to speak to the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill. New Zealand First supports this legislation. Right at the outset we must acknowledge the tireless work of all the Health Committee advisers who assisted with the many amendments. They helped us to make those amendments, and then ensured that their implications were made very clear to us.

I must acknowledge, too, the work done in the select committee by the promoter of the bill, Dianne Yates, to ensure that all aspects of this legislation were as good as they could possibly be. I also thank Dr Paul Hutchison, who is the only member of the select committee with practical working expertise in this area.

We know that until now legislation has been totally non-existent for human reproductive technology, and that it has been governed by regulation only. In the past, regulation has been sufficient, thanks to the responsible attitudes and practices that fertility service providers have undertaken. There has never been any evidence of any harm. However, that does not mean that there will never be any such incidents.

This bill is very complex and very technical, which is perhaps one of the reasons it has been on the Order Paper for so long. Dianne Yates said that it had been there for 8 years. The bill, however, will form the basis for any amendments that need to be made at some later date, when technology and scientific knowledge develop further in this field.

We are all aware, too, that fertility is a very personal issue and can be very stressful for all of those involved, so it is pleasing to see that this legislation is very balanced. It provides a very consistent regulatory environment as well as a very cautious approach. After all, we are dealing with humans, and legislation must be as sound as we can possibly make it, for today and for the future.

It is pleasing to see in this bill that any reproductive research that is not an established procedure, and all research applications, are subject to mandatory ethical review by an ethics committee. That is exactly how it should be. The fact that the designation, functions, and duties of the ethics committee are very clearly prescribed in the legislation should ensure that everyone is aware of what is happening, and also of what is to happen. Like Dr Hutchison, we were also pleased about the time limits imposed on the ethics committee; we do know that everyone’s biological clock is of a limited time-span.

We are pleased as well about the advisory committee that is to be established by the Minister. The members making up the advisory committee, and all their qualifications, are very clearly set out and specified, and that committee will be working in conjunction with the public and hearing submissions as appropriate, which is exactly how it should be. So we welcome these strengthened requirements for public involvement, particularly any new procedures or the giving of advice to the Minister.

I was very interested to read recently in the newspaper—this week, actually—about the shortage of sperm donors. I would like to caution all those men who are thinking about assisting with the problem of that particular shortage that one of the requirements of this bill is that donors, at some later time in their lives, may be contacted by offspring. One of the features of the bill is that offspring, 18 years or older, will be able to access identifying information, as will guardians of donor-offspring under 18 years of age. I would like to say that responsibility is now a big part of this donor process—it is definitely not a small responsibility—and I think the honourable Minister, David Benson-Pope, outlined that requirement in his speech, prior to mine.

We are only too aware of the health risks to children born as a result of assisted reproduction technology procedures, as they are generally higher than for children who are conceived naturally. So we were very pleased earlier in the year that common sense finally prevailed with in vitro fertilisation funding. The Government announced in July that it will increase funds for in vitro fertilisation, and also provide a second cycle to people who meet certain criteria.

Single embryo transfer is now to become standard practice in most cases, and fertility treatment is one of the issues for which New Zealand First has called on the Government to revise its funding policy as a matter of urgency. It has been fairly obvious for some time that funding the implantation of multiple embryos in one cycle only to maximise the chances of success, was increasing the adverse affects on the health of many of the children who were born as a result of that procedure. All members know that care for premature babies is costly and intensive. We want to see healthy children, and that is the outcome that parents want in particular for their children.

New Zealand First was especially pleased with the provisions that prohibit the genetic engineering of humans—I think every party has acknowledged that. The bill also prohibits the sex selection of embryos for any reason other than the treating or prevention of genetic disease. The last thing we want to see is the growth of a designer baby industry. That is not something we want to see in New Zealand at all, and this legislation clearly outlines that that cannot happen here. Schedule 1 clearly outlines the prohibited actions and the penalties that will be imposed on people if they transgress what is outlawed by the schedule. We have always believed that cloning should be banned, and that ban is clearly outlined in the bill.

We know that human-assisted reproductive technology is a challenging issue, and we are pleased that this legislation will give some very clear direction to those involved in that area. We did want to see some legislation there, as previously there was only regulation. New Zealand First supports this legislation.

The Green Party will be supporting this bill because it prohibits the worst excesses of artificial reproduction—namely, the genetic engineering and cloning of human beings, and sex selection for social reasons—and because the regime it sets in place is better than the totally unregulated, free-market approach to assisted human technology that we have at present.

Having said that, I tell members that we are bitterly disappointed the Government refused to follow the approach set out in Dianne Yates’ original bill, which would have set up an independent statutory authority to regulate fertility clinics and researchers, similar to those in existence in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, and which would have required researchers and fertility clinics to get licences to carry out research into assisted human technology.

While we are delighted that we have managed to strengthen the public consultation requirements of the bill, we are also extremely disappointed that Government and most Opposition parties would not support our amendments to strengthen the bill, and instead opted to set up one of the weakest, most permissive regimes for assisted human reproductive technologies in the Western World.

This regime relies on guidelines that do not even have the force of regulation, that are likely to be pragmatic rather than based on fundamental ethical issues, and that are so vaguely worded they will be difficult if not impossible to enforce. It is a regime that allows the ministerial advisory committee to approve controversial technologies without any parliamentary scrutiny. That is extraordinary! It is a regime that delegates unprecedented and virtually unlimited powers to an unelected and unaccountable committee, to determine policies about reproductive technologies that could literally change the future of the human race.

By setting up a framework for policy to be made in a committee that is not directly accountable to Parliament, the bill breaches the well-established parliamentary principle that matters of policy and substance should be dealt with by Parliament, and that only technical issues should be delegated to other committees outside Parliament or even to committees in Parliament. In our view, at the very least, guidelines issued by the ministerial advisory committee should have the force of regulation and should require approval from Parliament before they become policy, and we will be moving amendments to that effect. One submitter summed up his frustrations about the weak regulatory regime in this bill by saying: “Dr Frankenstein would have found in the regulatory regime proposed in this bill ample opportunity to argue for the creation of his monster.”

We are frustrated, too, by the fact that spending more and more money on assisted human reproductive technologies is being touted as the solution to growing fertility problems in Western societies, when no resources are being allocated to research into the underlying environmental and other factors that have caused a dramatic drop-off in human fertility over the past 20 years. Declining sperm counts in men and an epidemic of endometriosis in women have been linked to environmental factors such as the dioxins, hormone-mimicking pesticides, and chemicals that are widely ingested in our food, our water, our homes, and our soil. But instead of tackling these environmental causes of infertility, we would rather focus on high-tech, magic bullet technologies that are scientifically exciting. Proponents of these technologies paint a rosy picture of a future where they can be used to overcome the limitations of the human body, but these same technologies can equally be used to create a horrific future—a future where more and more conception takes place in the laboratory, and where we are constantly engineering humans in a quest to eliminate imperfections, create the perfect person, and improve the human race genetically, just as one might a specialised breed of horse or dog.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

As I was saying, these same technologies, which can have such a power for good, can also be used to create a horrific future—a world where those who can afford it can take evolution into their own hands, redesign the genetic information of their children’s cells, and ultimately create a master race of human beings, while those who cannot afford to do that are left behind in the race. Already we have scientists like Lee Silver openly espousing the use of reproductive technologies for eugenic purposes, for the creation of what he calls a post-human master race. He looks forward to a future divided between the “GenRich”, who have been enhanced by having synthetic genes for healthy bodies, increased creativity, and so forth, and what he calls the “naturals,” who will be left behind still plagued with obesity, heart disease, alcoholism, and mental illness. Another scientist, Professor Joseph Fletcher, proposes creating a hybrid species by mating apes and humans so that they can form an underclass in society that would be prepared to carry out the menial tasks that he believes humans deeply resent doing.

Those scientists may seem way out on a limb at this point in our history, but a recent survey of leading British researchers found that almost all the scientists were convinced that genetic engineering and the cloning of humans would soon be under way. Already our scientists are routinely cloning and genetically engineering animals with no questions asked or without any debate about it, and many scientists eagerly anticipate a world where we have become essentially artefacts of technological creation, and where we select our children’s genes literally from a catalogue.

Officials rationalised the weak and permissive framework this bill sets up, by insisting we had to put in place a flexible regime that could allow for changing social values and rapidly changing technologies. But the danger is that without a strong regulatory regime or parliamentary scrutiny, this bill will permit medical technology to continue to race way ahead of the rest of us into uncharted and ethically troubling territories.

One example of that is that the bill sets no limits on pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, other than for sex selection. This technology, of course, allows fertility clinics to select embryos for specific disorders, and only implant embryos without genetic fault. As such, it offers hope to thousands of families affected by conditions like cystic fibrosis, haemophilia, and muscular dystrophy, and we welcome its use in that way to prevent serious genetic disorders or diseases.

But this technology also allows scientists to select embryos with “desirable” genes and eliminate embryos with “undesirable” ones, for social rather than medical reasons. An amendment we put to try to change that was unfortunately defeated. By refusing to prohibit this technology for social reasons other than sex selection, and by failing to draw a line between what is an acceptable and an unacceptable use of pre-birth selection, the bill opens the way for this technology to be used for essentially eugenic purposes—to select embryos for athleticism or other characteristics that may become diagnosable by genetic pre-implantation technology in the future.

That leaves the way open for an advisory committee to decide what genetic defects would be eliminated from the human population by embryo selection, and what would not. That is why we are proposing an amendment that would provide clear guidance as to where that line would be drawn. We propose that the use of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis should be allowed only in order to select against severe genetic diseases.

There are many other contentious issues that this bill fails to deal with, such as genetic tourism—the importation and exportation of embryos—embryo-splitting, and the derivation of gametes from dead persons. Under this legislation, all of these intensely ethical and controversial issues will be left to an advisory committee, and will not even be required to be scrutinised or debated in our Parliament. We find that absolutely incredible. It will all be left to an unaccountable and unelected committee of so-called experts.

The other threat, of course, is that as we remove disease and genetic disorders through these technologies, there is the potential for the erosion of human rights and, in particular, the rights of persons with disabilities. If we allow the technology to advance slowly but surely to the point where parents are allowed to design their children’s genetic inheritance, we threaten those with disabilities and we threaten their right to be born in the future—as several impassioned submissions from the disabilities sector pointed out to us.

We are pleased that the bill bans commercial surrogacies, and that it stipulates that offspring of new reproductive technologies should be made aware of their genetic origins. We will be pleased to support the new amendment proposed by the National Party.

Finally, we would like to congratulate Dianne Yates for her vision and her foresight in getting this bill to the Health Committee. It is not her fault that the bill has been watered down to the extent that it has.

I rise on behalf of ACT New Zealand to speak to the second reading of the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill. The proposer of this bill, Dianne Yates, must be very pleased to see this day here at last, after the very long and sometimes tortuous route this bill has taken to get back to the House. It does, in fact, cover many moral and ethical issues and the submissions reflected this. For this very reason, ACT is considering this as a conscience issue and we will be voting accordingly.

The submissions were very passionate, interesting, and informative. We saw at select committee the full spectrum of issues arising from that, whereby some submitters felt that absolutely no legislation was necessary, particularly in relation to the reproductive technology component of the bill, right through to the very strict control in legislation that some people wanted to see imposed. Some wanted heavy regulation and the bill to be extremely prescriptive.

The bill does cover both reproductive technology and research, and that in itself presents some problems. Many of the issues are in common with both parts of the bill but there are some that I think are very specific to the individual areas. For this reason I think there would have been some merit in perhaps dividing the bill into two separate pieces of legislation—one to cover the reproductive technology and the other to cover the research. However, that is not how the legislation has come before the House, so we have what we see in front of us. Most of the publicity concerning the bill has been around the area of infertility. Again, coming back to the reasoning I have just proposed, perhaps it would have been wise to separate the reproductive technology from the research component.

One particular part of the bill that ACT took issue with was the outrageous suggestion that parents of children born with the assistance of reproductive technology will be legally obliged to tell their children how they were conceived. This was well documented in newspapers around the country when the bill was reported back to the House. I will quote from one newspaper clipping where a man whose wife had had two children conceived thanks to a sperm donor said that this new clause in the bill would unfairly discriminate against infertile people. He said: “There’s so many naturally conceived children who don’t know about their dad, because their mum can’t or won’t tell them, but the Government isn’t saying it wants to look at that”. This is something that ACT is very concerned about and we will be putting forward an amendment to rectify it.

It is also very instructive to look at what the experts in the field have to say. Richard Fisher, the director of New Zealand’s biggest fertility clinic, Fertility Associates, said that the bill “generally struck a good balance”. I would agree with him there. But he went on to say that he was also concerned at the unfair targeting of infertile couples. He said: “Aside from being totally unenforceable, I get agitated at a law that says one thing for infertile couples and another for fertile couples.” Again, I agree with him there.

Good law should be enforceable and routinely enforced, and I think that this component of the bill is totally unenforceable. I will explain why. Firstly, it is true that for many children in this country the father they have grown up with to know as their biological father is not their biological father, at all. It has been unethical to research that fact, so we do not know how many children grow up in those circumstances. The reading I have done suggests that the lowest figure is perhaps around 4 percent of children who grow up in that situation, but it may be that there are as many as 10 percent. In practical terms, that is not of any importance; what is important is that children have parents who love and care for them.

But this legislation is saying that those people who have children with the assistance of reproductive technology are legally obliged to tell them so, when the onus to do that is not on parents who have children naturally but who know that the biological father is not their children’s known father. This law is not enforceable at all, so what will the punishment be and how will it be enforced? Do we anticipate people turning up at somebody’s home, expecting a DNA test to be done? Will somebody go around and police whether a child has been told at the age of 18 that he or she was conceived by artificial means? That, of course, would be totally impossible to do, and for that reason we take exception.

Another issue arises, too, and it is a social welfare issue. Around 33,000 children in this country do not have a father named on their birth certificate, but before us we have legislation saying that sperm donors must be named. The anomaly that exists in this case must be recognised.

I want to move just briefly to the research component of the bill. Many speakers before me have gone into this in a good deal of detail, and I do not have a great deal more to offer. But as somebody who has been involved in research in a previous life, I have come to know ethics committees well. In fact, there are about 13 or 14—I cannot remember the exact number—such committees in the country, and if one wants to conduct a nationwide trial at the moment, one must apply to each ethics committee individually for permission to do the research. That really puts terrible time constraints on the research, and it is a terribly time-consuming and cumbersome process. That is what we have in place at the moment. But in relation to this reproductive technology and research, we will now have one ethics committee—which is a vast improvement on what exists currently. It is hoped that the process will be very timely, and certainly a great deal less cumbersome—and less costly, I should say—to all those wanting to make new advances in reproductive technology and undertake new research.

We will also see a ministerial advisory committee put in place in order, obviously, to advise the Minister. This committee will have a balance of experts and laypeople. Personally, I would like to have seen the balance tilted slightly towards having more experts, but what we will have is a vast improvement on what we have now. I agree with Dr Paul Hutchison from the National Party, who said he felt that both the ethics committee and the ministerial advisory committee are probably too big, and therefore will be slightly cumbersome. I agree with him; I think that smaller committees usually achieve a lot more in a more timely fashion and in a more efficient manner. I, too, would like to see those committees not quite as big as they will be, but again, they will be a vast improvement on what we have at the present time.

The thing I am most pleased with is that guidelines will be determined by the ministerial advisory committee, for the ethics committee to work with. There was a good deal of talk during the select committee process about regulation, and I have to say that I personally, as well as several others in the medical field who are on the Health Committee, were adamant that we should have guidelines, as opposed to regulations.

Flexibility is the key to the success of this legislation. We have a very fast-changing area, and there are so many advances in science and technology that it is difficult to keep up with them. What we do not want is prescriptive legislation made for today that does not take account of the future. The flexibility that can be maintained under guidelines is very, very important for both components of the bill.

As someone who has worked in the area of research, as I said previously, I am very pleased with most of the provisions of this bill. I felt that the select committee worked very constructively and very hard to get to this point, and I am satisfied that we have reached a flexible framework with which we can move forward into the future. Because of the moral and ethical issues arising from this legislation, ACT members will vote on the bill according to their own consciences.

I am not sure what the record is for a bill that has had the longest passage through the House, but this Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill must be a high contender for gold for that particular record. It started out as a member’s bill, based largely on legislation in Britain and Canada. It has passed through the hands of several Governments, it has been changed and rearranged considerably, and it arrives in the House today markedly different from the original proposal in Dianne Yates’ name.

I would like at this point to commend Dianne Yates for her thoroughness and commitment to this whole bioethics issue. I want to express my own personal disappointment that the bill, as it has now arrived in the House, largely overturns Ms Yates’ efforts. Dianne Yates’ bill covered a licensing regime that meant policy development remained firmly in the hands of Parliament. I believe that when issues under consideration are purely medical, then medical experts are best left to get on with the job. However, when issues being considered have major social implications, then Parliament should be setting the policy platform.

The system proposed by Ms Yates also made very clear distinctions between situations when someone was breaching the law, as opposed to situations when that person was breaching professional standards. My belief is that regulations are clear and a lot less ambiguous. My other concern is that with the system this bill puts in place, the exceptional circumstance ends up setting policy perimeters. That really is a concern. Most significant is the fact that the ongoing development of birth technology has been so substantial during the same time period this bill has been in process, and that the very scope of the bill has ended up being far more extensive than first envisaged—to the point where the very title of the bill is now questionable. In vitro fertilisation accounts now for only a fraction of the procedures involving embryos that will be covered by this bill, and the conditions under which embryos can be used for purposes other than reproductive purposes are included. Suffice to say, this bill is aimed at covering the handling and treatment of embryos outside the body. Other Acts cover the treatment and health of embryos inside the womb.

All activities that fall within the parameters of this bill fit into one of three categories: permitted activities, prohibited activities, and those activities that require case by case approval. It is that third category that is of greatest concern to me. United Future has made it very clear, in our minority report in the commentary on the bill, that we are not wanting to hamper the progress of medical science to develop new ways of alleviating suffering. The concern is that we have to be very clear that the means by which we achieve our medical breakthroughs are as ethical and desirable as the intended outcomes themselves. That means that the policy base underpinning regulations should not be handed over to experts, but remain in the control of society’s elected representatives. The licensing regimes that operate in other jurisdictions are based on clear regulations that are prescriptive. Exceptional circumstances can be considered case by case, but exceptional circumstances do not set the bottom line or precedent, and are not used to benchmark standard practice. The progress of medical technology has not been hampered in those countries that use such an approach.

New Zealand, along with other Western societies, is very consumer-driven. We have an existing track record for taking medical advances and applying them to non-medical priorities. Let me give members an example. In the 1980s two drug companies were awarded patents to market human growth hormones to a few thousand American children suffering from dwarfism. The market was considered small, so the Food and Drug Administration gave that human growth hormone drug orphan-drug status. Within a few years though, human growth hormones became one of the largest-selling drugs—not because there was an increase in dwarfism, but because of the increase in numbers of parents who wanted their short children to be taller.

The argument that science and, in this case, medical science should not be micromanaged by politicians is used to justify establishing special advisory groups to reduce the active scrutiny of the laity, which in this case is elected members of Parliament. What concerns me is that the focus of bioethics rarely addresses the larger issues about the impact of such procedures on society as a whole; the attention is usually directed to questions about the individuals involved instead; for instance, did this person sign a consent form, is this procedure safe, or is the information recorded and stored appropriately?

In this bill, we would manage the use of developing technology through a ministerial advisory committee that makes recommendations to the Minister and then, with ministerial approval, would set guidelines for ethics committees to use when approving individual applications. However, in New Zealand to date, that kind of process has already had some questionable practices. For instance, on 15 November last year the Dominion Post ran an article headed “Designer babies for $16,000”. The article went on to talk about pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, which is a process whereby a woman’s eggs are harvested, fertilised outside her body, and two cells are removed from each embryo, tested, and analysed for chromosomal abnormalities and for gender. When abnormalities are discovered, those embryos are discarded, and then one or two of the other embryos are implanted and the rest are frozen for future use. New Zealand fertility clinics admit that they have regular queries from patients wanting that service and that many of those queries are for social reasons, for instance, sex selection. Six days after that article appeared, the Minister sent a reply to a member of the public stating that she had already given approval in principle to the use of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and had asked the National Ethics Committee on Assisted Human Reproduction to draft ethical guidelines. The concern that I have is that while the bill has been strengthened by requiring the ministerial advisory committee to consult, the policy is no longer truly determined by Parliament.

The decision to overturn Dianne Yates’ member’s bill is on one hand understandable, considering the immense development in technology that has happened in the last 8 years, but on the other hand, I am saddened that the Government has moved towards a system that focuses more solidly on medical safety and individual consent processes at the expense, I believe, of the many social concerns that that technology presents. It is of interest that in the last week, the New Zealand media has recorded the fact that current in vitro fertilisation figures show that about half the clients using this service are women who have no apparent intention of giving the resulting children fathers. I suspect that this social trend was never a consideration of those who, 20 years ago, set out to help infertile couples have children.

United Future, like other parties, has a variety of opinions on this issue. By the third reading, we will probably be treating this as a conscience vote. At this stage, we have real concerns about the system that is being put in place. I understand Ms Yates’ concern that something is better than nothing, but we are not so sure that this something is good enough, so we will be opposing the second reading.

I am delighted to speak on the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill today. As the member in whose name this bill is has said, it has had a long gestation. But I believe that good, robust legislation always finds its time and place. I think in the years since 1996, when the bill was first introduced, until our consideration and hearing of submissions, we put this bill in the framework of a health environment that is now far better placed to manage the huge issues that this bill proposes.

We also looked at Doug Graham’s bill, which was submitted and first introduced in 1998, and in the first term of this Labour Government we had to consider the very difficult technical issues of what we would do with two bills, how we would put them together, whether we would drop one, and which one would we drop. We eventually agreed, with the support of a Labour women’s caucus supported by the Ministers Margaret Wilson, the Hon Lianne Dalziel, and Annette King, that we should advance this bill and get it to the House.

The bill was introduced in a framework in which there were no legislative protections at all for the ever-rapidly advancing field of assisted reproduction technology. I used to be in charge of a women’s health service, and we used to collect specimens of sperm from men whom we would phone up and ask: “Would you give us a specimen? We need it today.” They would bring it into the clinic in a jar, and we used to inseminate in the clinic. We kept no details. We had absolutely no protections for the donor, and we had no protections at all for the women receiving the sperm—there was nothing. In that void, women in this country became quite concerned about the need for legislation and a legislative framework.

I want to point out the difficulties that the Health Committee had to face concerning carrying over the old licensing provision approach first proposed in Dianne Yates’ bill into the context of the framework in which the health system works today—that is, the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Act and the Health and Disability Services (Safety) Act, which looks at the regulation of clinics and providers. The licensing model simply did not fit comfortably with the legislative framework that we had moved the health sector into when we first got into Government in 1999. It was also very important to consider other legislation surrounding the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill—bills like the Medicines Act and the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act. It was very, very important for us to look at that legislation and how it would impact on the technologies, the research, and the licensing of providers in this field.

We looked at the Canadian and the UK models, and we were very aware of international legislation that was developing around the world. After looking at those overseas approaches, I do believe we now have the best approach, which covers new technologies and gives us flexibility, as Heather Roy suggested, as to how we manage the new technologies that are occurring every day out there in the world of science. New research is coming into being, and we knew that, with issues like pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, surrogacy, and infertility services, we had to consider this bill in the context of a very complex field.

I want to thank those on the committee who worked so well on this bill, and I particularly want to acknowledge the input of the two doctors, Dr Lynda Scott and Dr Paul Hutchison, and that of Heather Roy, with her research background. I believe that is where the tension in this bill really began. Some of us understood comprehensively the health context in which this bill was being proposed. We understood the research. Dr Hutchison and Dr Scott understood how the current fertility clinics are run. They understood informed consent and the development of new technologies, and, quite frankly, without that expertise on the committee, I would have worried about the robustness of the legislation and about what sort of bill would arise.

I really want to acknowledge that, of all the bills that have been before the Health Committee since we came into Government in 1999, this was by far the most technical. We had to have help with it, and I think we have to remember that, as a committee, we had advisers on science, health, and law—it was very, very complex. Not many committees have to have three different ministries come in and give them advice. We also had to have several briefings. We had to have briefings on the science behind this bill, and a lot of us still scratched our heads and had to go back for more briefings. We needed briefings on the genetics in this bill, and on the technologies that are used, and then we needed legal briefings on how they fit into the legal framework. I think that is where the tension of the Green Party’s minority report came from, and that simply causes me great concern.

These are not simple matters that need to come back for parliamentary scrutiny; these are matters that one leaves to the experts in the field. The bill sets up a ministerial advisory committee and an ethics committee to look at consumer input and the development of guidelines, which are very complex to develop. Quite frankly, if we brought a guideline to the House for parliamentary scrutiny, I would hate to have to instruct and inform 119 colleagues about what was behind it. If we as politicians needed that amount of detail to get our head around the technologies and science in this bill, we should not expect politicians ever to understand what is behind the making of guidelines that will guide this whole industry and the whole sector. I think that is where the tension really arose.

This issue is hugely complex, and we needed to set up two different committees. The ministerial advisory committee can have eight to twelve members—it is a big committee. We have split it down the middle; half will be lay people, and I am very pleased with that involvement. I hope the lay people representatives will be advocates for the donor child and also for the consumers going through the service. One lay member must also have a legal perspective, and I think that is very important. On the other hand, the ethics committee will consider individual applications for every non-established procedure. It will work only within the guideline constraints set by the ministerial advisory committee.

We have set up a very robust model. I reaffirm that we need to trust the experts in the health field. With consumers beside them and legal advice, I have every confidence in them. I find it rather sad that the conspiracy theorists would come into the House and talk about an horrific future of unbridled management of human-assisted reproduction technologies. We do not want to worry the community. We want to give people confidence that this bill sets up a robust legal framework that is flexible and meets the demands of New Zealand society. I think this is a wonderful bill, and I thank the members of the committee for their hard work on it.

I too want to give credit to Steve Chadwick, who chaired the Health Committee. This is a comprehensive and difficult bill that has been in the select committee process since 1996. It is a hybrid of two bills: Dianne Yates’ Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill and Doug Graham’s Assisted Human Reproduction Bill. A Supplementary Order Paper based on Australian, Canadian, and UK legislation was introduced to give a real update to this bill.

Some of the heat has been taken out of this debate because we have followed other parts of the world in what we have been doing. We certainly need this legislation. In science fiction, if one can think it up, then generally man can turn round and do it. When Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1997, scientific cloning became a reality. There was then a huge push for legislation, because the ability to clone human beings became reality at that point.

I want anybody listening to this debate tonight to know that schedule 1 of this bill has very clear prohibited actions. The first of those is to “Artificially form, for reproductive purposes, a cloned embryo.” Cloning is totally and utterly outlawed in this bill. Artificially forming, for reproductive purposes, a hybrid embryo is banned. The implantation into a human being of a cloned embryo is banned. The implantation into a human being of an animal gamete or embryo is banned. There is a list of nine things that are banned.

A system has been set up whereby this country can move forward the ability to have assisted reproductive technology. For those people in this country who suffer infertility, it is a huge burden. Nobody who has not been in that position will know what it is like to want a child and not be able to have one. For 35 percent of infertile couples the problem is with the male, for 25 to 35 percent it is due to tubal damage or to the gametes not being able to get up the tubes, for 20 percent it is due to the woman’s ovulation problems, and for 15 percent the cause is unknown. For those men and women who really desperately want to have a child and cannot do so, being denied that right is a huge tragedy in their lives. This bill allows for things like surrogacy—but not commercial surrogacy. It allows for non-commercial surrogacy, in vitro fertilisation, and some research that allows men and women who wish to have a family to be able to proceed to do so. In this country over the last 15 years there have been huge advances and developments in our ability to help infertile couples become pregnant.

It is unfortunate that in this country at the moment we fund only one cycle of in vitro fertilisation. That is being increased to two, but many countries have more cycles available than that. Those women who suffer infertility suffer a huge cost. This bill will help enormously in that regard. There are five or six clinics at the moment in New Zealand that do this work. Initially, the first bill that Dianne Yates introduced looked at a licensing regime based on the UK model. It was superseded by the Health and Disability Services (Safety) Act in New Zealand. The clinics no longer need specific licensing as a hospital, because that is all taken care of.

So the main debate, in terms of this bill, came to be how we would make decisions about what was happening in the field of cloning, and how we would decide on sex selection, embryo splitting, experimentation, and stem cell research, rather than how to license clinics. That was an extremely interesting debate, and I really enjoyed my time in the select committee looking at that.

There has been evolutionary growth in the technology of in vitro fertilisation and the gamete intrafallopian transfer programme. Donors in New Zealand for the last 10 years, I think, have always been named. When they have donated an egg or a sperm they have had to be prepared to give their name and all their genetic details to the clinic.

As I said, in schedule 1 there is a list of prohibited activities. The debate then raged around those activities that have become common, those that are developmental, and those that occur when one person presents a very unusual situation. A young woman who has cancer of the ovary might be under what was previously the consent age, but may still want to harvest cells from her ovaries to be able, at some time in the future, to have the potential to have a child of her own. That is something that can occur now, but in the past it could not. If that young lady had to wait a year or two to go through an ethics committee, what would happen? The harvesting could not occur because her cancer would have needed to be treated. That is an example of some of the cases that have come before ethics committees. There needs to be a really timely response.

We have set up a system whereby there is only one ethics committee—that was the recommendation from the select committee—and also a ministerial advisory group that can advise the Minister on new technology. As I said, there has not been as much heat in this debate in New Zealand as there has been in other countries, because basically we have followed those countries, and that has led to a real understanding. Although it has taken since 1996 to get this bill to this point today, it has probably been a good process, because other countries have moved ahead of us and had the debates, and we have been able to learn from their examples how to deliver good legislation.

We actually have three bills that all overlap. They are this bill, which is the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill, plus the hazardous substances and new organisms legislation, plus the medicines legislation. The lines of somatic cell gene therapy, germ-line genetic modification, and embryonic stem cell therapies using genetic modification all overlap between these three bills. It will be interesting to see how they are dealt with.

I mentioned surrogacy before. In the United States one can have commercial surrogacy, but in the New Zealand bill it has been decided that that will not be the case. The fees for having a child, plus the cost of having time off work, can be met by the couple who want the child, but commercial surrogacy will not be allowed.

The age of consent for obtaining information about a donor sperm or egg was of great debate. In the end we decided that at 16 years and below one could get information on genetic heritage but not the name of the donor, and that from 18 years one could have the name of the donor. Donors often are known to the family, and a child needs the maturity to be able to handle that information, when it is given. But the genetic information is essential. All of us want to know where we came from. People say that maternity is never in doubt but paternity always is. Most children in this country do know who their parents are, and it is a very sad situation if they do not. We have encouraged, and we would like to see, great openness and transparency in the system when a child is born as a result of a donor egg or donor sperm, and we would like the family to tell the child right from the beginning—to have total openness about that process. So the age of consent was the cause of great discussion.

There has been debate about the expert advisory committee and the ethics committee taking away—and Steve Chadwick talked about this—some of the parliamentary scrutiny. That will, I think, be a continued area of debate in the Committee stage. The Health Committee, as Steve Chadwick said, had two doctors on it and a nurse, and someone experienced in research, but it still had difficulty with this bill, given its highly technical nature. There was a lot of debate and there were a lot of briefings, but the committee felt that to actually bring back to Parliament some of the decisions that would need to be made would slow the process too much.

So I will be supporting this bill at this point.

One of the points I want to talk about tonight on the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill is the Supplementary Order Paper that my colleague Dr Paul Hutchison has very kindly put together for the benefit of the House, and for the benefit of people who are born as a result of the technology that this bill seeks to regulate.

One of the issues that Paul Hutchison has correctly noted is that the bill does not have a retrospective action in relation to children who were born before this bill. He wants to set up a voluntary register for the donors of sperm, for instance, so that their biological children can find out their whakapapa.

Before I came to this House, one of the things that I was involved with at one stage was in relation to adoption, and particularly those adoptions that did not go so well. What this brought home to me was the absolute need that most people have to know where they come from. They want to know enough about their biological start in life so that they can look at something in themselves, or at some part of their personalities or features, and say: “Well, I know where that came from.” Certainly, for those of us who were brought up by our biological parents, it is a great privilege that we do pretty much know our whakapapa, and that is very important to us.

A continuing theme that I constantly go on about is fatherless children, and the fact that children need to know where they come from, and they also need to know this as adults. They need to know it, whether they are 40 or whether they are 50, because all of us are our parents’ children, and in that sense we all need to know where we come from.

I commend the Supplementary Order Paper to the House. I am hopeful that there will be sufficient support from the Government and other parties to be able to allow this very, very good amendment to be part of the bill and to form part of the legislation.

Certainly, I have been contacted by people who have been born as a result of the donor sperm procedures that have happened over the years in a very unregulated environment, who say they desperately wanted to have something so that, should the donors or biological fathers wish to be made known to them, they could contact their biological fathers. When the first donor sperm systems were set up it was all very, very secretive and the approach was: “We don’t need to know anything about you because you are not the father.” Those donors were not the father in terms of bringing up the children, but they were certainly the biological fathers.

Certainly, with the technology that we have today, we understand just how genetics play such an important part in people’s health issues, and it is extremely important that, wherever possible, people have the ability to know their genetic make-up. For those people it is very, very important not only in terms of whom their own spouse should be, but also in terms of what diseases they may have, or assistance they need for their own health care in taking steps to minimise any genetic issues they might have or could have inherited.

But apart from the health side, people do need to know. It is for their own well-being. It is for their mental health issues as well as their physical health issues that I commend Dr Paul Hutchison’s Supplementary Order Paper to the House. I hope that the Supplementary Order Paper can get the support of all of the House, because it is a generous and kind move that is brought about by the very real needs experienced by people born under the programme. It takes into account not only the needs of those people, but also the needs of the donors. If the donors wish to remain private, they can, but it allows a system of knowing where their sperm ended up, which is something that as they grow older—as we all do—they probably would like to know. It is something I would like the House to support, and I hope the Minister can see her way free to doing so.

The Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill was greatly enhanced by the fact that Dr Paul Hutchison was able to be on the select committee at various stages and was able to assist, given his background in this area. It was also one of those bills where there was broad cross-party support for its mechanisms, although with a couple of exclusions.

There was general acceptance of the need for these procedures to have some form of regulation. Over the years they have grown up willy-nilly, one could say, without any great regulation and often as a result of patients’ needs. Certainly with the advent of cloning and such procedures, we need to have some mechanism to deal with those issues. I think that most people would find the concept of cloning humans to be somewhat bizarre. We are told of instances of this happening in the world today, and it has certainly happened with sheep.

I have looked at the minority reports and I see that not all parties agree. The ACT party thinks that some of these provisions do not need to be regulated for, but I think that, overall, we do occasionally have to not only embrace new technology, but also be aware that it does set up whole new systems within our society, and we need to address some of the issues those new technologies set up.

I commend the bill to the House. I was able to be on the Health Committee for a little part of its deliberations and I was very impressed by the degree of technical expertise brought to bear and the assistance given to the committee. As a result of the very good work of the committee and its chairperson, we were able to work on the bill in a very positive manner for the benefit of the people of New Zealand and those yet to come, particularly under these provisions.

The debate having concluded, the motion lapsed.

I seek leave for a party to cast votes on the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill for the Ayes and the Noes and to record abstentions, notwithstanding Standing Order 144(1)(b).

Leave has been sought for that process to be followed. Is there any objection? There is none.