Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill

This part deals with information about donors of donated embryos or donated cells and donor offspring. I think, once again, that this part very much exemplifies the long genesis of this bill, and the thought that has gone into it from a whole variety of papers, with one in particular—Assisted Human Reproduction: Navigating our Future.

One of the themes that came through so strongly, based on the evidence that Professor Bill Daniels and others provided, was that the ethos of openness was extraordinarily important in this area of reproduction. Undoubtedly, children do want to know where they have come from and who their parents are, and the major focus of Part 3 is to ensure that there is appropriate information-gathering and the opportunity, prospectively, for donors and offspring to be able to find appropriate information at appropriate times—again with a degree of flexibility and according to their wants and desires. Generally, one of the things that has changed now is that donors will be required to have openness about their identifying qualities and characteristics and, eventually, to be identifiable to their offspring.

One of the things clause 42 does, however, is signal “No retroactive application”. Clearly, that is appropriate if donors in the past—and it was the situation in the 1970s and 1980s—had donated anonymously and did not expect to find offspring trying to track them down. It would be quite inappropriate to overturn that. However, due to a large variety of both donor offspring and donors around New Zealand contacting me and various others, there has been a strong call for a voluntary register. Such a register works successfully in the state of Victoria in Australia, and I have put forward Supplementary Order Paper 270 to that effect, which I understand the Government will be prepared to support. I think that it will be hugely appreciated by that large number of people who in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s were not given the opportunity to be able to trace donors.

It is remarkable to me that I had numerous emails and letters from donors, as well as from offspring, wanting this to happen. Some were extremely emotional about it, and many said: “Look, although we realise it may not be possible in every case, it is really worthwhile to us and hugely meaningful for us to at least have that possibility there.”

So I would exhort the Committee to support that Supplementary Order Paper. I added a further amendment to it that deals with half-siblings as well as full offspring. That would mean that brothers and sisters who may not have the same donor could contact each other on a voluntary basis. Again, I am hopeful that the Committee will support that aspect.

Another area that is worthwhile pointing out is clause 51, “Providers must keep track of donor offspring births”. The clinics have just recently approached me about this issue. Of course, it is ideal and optimal that all births are clearly traced and recorded, and that there is an excellent system. However, in the reality of this world where people change their names, miscarriages occur, people go overseas, and all sorts of extraordinary things happen in that biological bell-curve spectrum we have to deal with in this area, it would be impossible in practical terms for all providers to be able to track down donor offspring births. Consequently, I have tabled a further amendment, whereby best endeavours are to be made to track donor offspring births. It is a purely practical, technical amendment that, again, I urge the Committee to support.

I seek leave of the Committee to correct the vote of the ACT party on the last part. I inadvertently voted the wrong way.

The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley): Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There is not.

I voted eight opposed to Part 2. It should have been six opposed and two in favour.

The corrected vote for Part 2 as amended is 102 for, and 18 against.

Part 3, “Information about donors of donated embryos or donated cells and donor offspring” concerns an area that many people in New Zealand feel very strongly about, because they are donor offspring or they have donated. I totally support Dr Paul Hutchison’s amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 270 to have a voluntary register established before the date provided in this bill—that is, before clinics started recording names. We have had a lot of emails from people contacting us about how they feel when they cannot get access to information on their genetic inheritance.

All of us want to know where we came from, if at all possible. I remember a constituent who came to me early in my time as an MP. She had just had a little boy who had a genetic defect, and she never knew that she had been adopted. Right up to after the birth of the baby, she never knew, and the trauma she faced when she found out was enormous. It made so much of her past life a lie.

Through this bill there is encouragement for those people who have a child via donated sperm or embryo to be honest and upfront right from the beginning, and to let that child know. Up to the age of 16, the child will have access to information on the donor’s genetic make-up. After the age of 18, the child can get the name and, also, a great deal more information about the donor. Between the ages of 16 and 18, a court order can be made if there are special circumstances when a child needs to know.

I remember watching a movie, and I think it was based on real life, where a US doctor had been the donor for many, many children within a town. The reason donors have to be willing to have their names made available to children is to stop something like that happening. If people can think of doing something, often it will happen. We need legislation to provide a way to prevent those sorts of very unfortunate circumstances from happening. In this bill there is no retroactive application about being able to know about donors, but Dr Hutchison’s voluntary register will certainly go some way to helping those people born prior to the introduction of this bill.

In the 1990s clinics started recording the names of donors, so donors had to be prepared to give their names. Often people may want to be donors because they want to be able to help, but often a donor may be known to the family. Donors may be, in some way, involved in the situation. They know the distress that is being caused by the infertility, so they are prepared to be donors.

In the select committee we heard from one person who was a donor offspring—and some submitters wanted the name changed from “donor offspring” to “donor child”. That person talked about the painful experience of closed adoption in the past, when children could not find out anything about the genetic inheritance of either their mother or their father, and how that had affected them. It is rather unfortunate today that the option of adoption has reduced so much, because many adoptions were extremely successful. It is sad to see that that has become much less of an option.

Part 3 does give pretty clear directions about the age at which someone can find out about the donor, and what information can be given out. We had a lot of debate about the age, and about whether people who were not yet 18 years old could find out who the donor was. In the end we decided that although genetic information could be obtained, donor offspring had to be of a certain maturity before they could handle information about the actual name of the donor.

As the debate has shown, aspects of this bill are highly contentious, so it is pleasing that one part, I think, has the support of all parties in this House. I think that all of us support this provision and all of us, I believe, will also be supporting Dr Hutchison’s amendment to establish a voluntary register for people who have already been born from assisted human reproductive technology.

Like others, I have been contacted by people who are offspring from human-assisted reproductive technologies and are utterly dismayed that they cannot find out who their parents are. This is what is called an unintended consequence. When people began using this new technology, obviously there was no thought that the offspring would be as desperate as anyone else to know who their parents were. So it is interesting that this aspect was ignored by the legislators of the day, but now we are trying to rectify it. For many of those people who cannot find out about their parents, it is a source of great heartache and distress, just as it was in an earlier period for adoptees who were not able to find out about their parents.

The only other thing I would say is that some people have said that if donors cannot be anonymous, then there may be a significant fall-off in donor numbers, and I think that that has happened overseas. In fact, I heard an interview where the participants said that in Holland there had been a significant decrease in the number of donors once they were no longer able to be anonymous. But the regulators over there said that despite the fall-off in donor numbers, they still felt that they had made the right decision in requiring donors to be identified and not be anonymous, because, ultimately, the interests of the child should prevail.

However, there also have been some rare but high profile cases in which, for instance, someone who ran a clinic had been anonymously donating sperm to literally hundreds and thousands of people. People had not realised this, and there were neighbours down the road not realising—

💬 Dr Lynda Scott: There were children who looked alike.

Yes, the children looked alike, and they all came from the same sperm donor. We have had cases of this even in New Zealand, where people have found that in various communities children all have the same father, as they have come from the same sperm donor. Indeed, they could be marrying each other, because the sperm donation was all anonymous. There are very, very good reasons why we cannot allow donors to hide behind anonymity. This move may result in a fall-off in the number of donors, but we will have to live with that, because ultimately—as the bill states—the rights of a child to know his or her parents must prevail in this instance.

Many people have been talking about how sad it is that adoption rates are falling off and infertility rates are increasing. We all tend to look at adoption and technology as being the solutions, but in fact we really ought to be looking at why we have such declining rates of fertility in this country and around the world, and why sperm counts are estimated to have declined by up to 50 percent. For those reasons, we ought to be looking at environmental causes, in particular such things as the estrogenic environment that we are creating. Ultimately, it is only when we look at the environmental causes behind the decline of fertility that we will find a solution to it. All the technology and techniques are expensive and invasive, and they will not provide a solution to the seriously declining fertility that we have in New Zealand.

However, I digress. The Green Party is very, very pleased to support Part 3 and to support Paul Hutchison’s amendments to this particular section.

I will take a reasonably brief call on this part, mainly because, as somebody who has to date been very critical of the first two parts of the bill, I would like to make a positive contribution on this part, which I believe has great merit. While we obviously cannot force parents to disclose to a donor offspring his or her origin, I think it will be very important—and I am sure it already happens—that recipients are given very good counselling about the importance of letting children know their genetic background. Historically, when sperm donations started, we did not anticipate the interest that offspring would have in that further down the track, so it is great to now take this opportunity to address that problem. I think that the moment we start to underestimate the huge importance to children of having those important pieces of the jigsaw in place that help them with their identity and sense of who they are, we really will have lost our way. Of course, this issue is particularly important when we consider that at present in New Zealand nearly 50 percent of in vitro fertilisation procedures are offered to single women and to lesbian women. That fact alone makes it extremely clear why the issue of children being able to access in later years that important information about the identity of their father will become even more substantial.

Another thing that I think is interesting is a story I heard recently. Apparently if a New Zealander who is overseas bumps into another New Zealander and the two talk together for less than 10 minutes, they are more than likely to discover somebody whom they know in common. That means that we are a bit of a village here in New Zealand, because of our population base, so the chances of accidental incest are increased. Therefore, good recording of information and the availability of that information to the people concerned are more crucial for New Zealand children than perhaps for the children of other, larger nations. We need to be very aware of that.

We had a previous speaker talk about a concern that has been expressed about a fall-off in donors. However, I really do believe that even at the level of being a donor it is irresponsible in this day and age, and with what we understand now to be the case, to allow somebody to be a donor who is unwilling to allow the offspring who arise as a consequence of that donation to go without the all-important information about their identity.

The other thing that struck me, based on the experiences of people whom I have spoken to, is the number of people who have discovered in their later years a latent, genetically inheritable disease that they wanted to then notify offspring of, so that their offspring could make lifestyle choices that would lengthen their lives. It will be particularly important that donors are able to track back in order to let that important information be passed on to the appropriate offspring. We are supportive of that.

We will support Dr Paul Hutchison’s amendment to have a voluntary register. I do, though, have some concerns that his other amendment would let clinics off the hook a little with regard to their responsibility for maintaining good information. I realise that there will be some difficulties, but I think that we need to keep that as tight as possible and put a huge onus on fertility clinics to keep, and to strive to keep, the very best information possible for the future use of offspring.

I rise to take a call in this debate on Part 3 of the bill. In particular, the debate has been discussing the importance of a child knowing the identity of his or her donor parent and of the details being recorded. Clause 46 states that the following details of each donor should be recorded: the donor’s name, gender, and address, the donor’s date, place, and country of birth, the donor’s height, the colour of the donor’s eyes and hair, and the donor’s ethnicity and any relevant cultural affiliation. In the case of a Māori donor, his or her whānau, hapū, and iwi should be recorded, to the extent to which the donor is aware of those affiliations. Finally, anything to do with the medical history of the donor or the donor’s parents, grandparents, children, and siblings is required.

The interesting point that I will make is that the Health Committee has obviously gone into a lot of detail about the right of children to understand their heritage, culture, lineage, and place in the world. I totally agree with that concept, but I ask the Committee why there is not the same enthusiasm to provide children with that information about their father if they happen to be born to a mother who decides not to name the father of her child on the birth certificate for some other reason, such as evading child support payments, and so on. Why has Labour not done something similar to this for the 40,000 children in New Zealand today who find themselves in that situation? I find the double standards in this Parliament quite bizarre, when we can be holier-than-thou and say how important it is for children who come under the auspices of this bill to have the right to know who their other parent is, whereas out there in New Zealand today there are 40,000 kids whom nobody seems to care about. I find it absolutely bizarre that on the one hand our New Zealand Parliament can treat the issue with such care, concern, and consideration, and on the other hand it does not give a toss.

I would like the members of the Labour Party, who all appear to be voting en masse for this bill, to actually reflect on that issue. The issue is alive for every single child out there who does not know who his or her father is, not because of the fact that his or her father is hidden away on the other side of the world and cannot be found, but simply because the State colludes with the mother to prevent that child from finding out who the father is. I think that is one of the biggest disgraces in New Zealand today, and it is aided and abetted by this Government. Just this week the Government passed a bill to a select committee that dealt with this issue, without actually even trying to address the right of those children to know their dads in the way that we see in this particular bill here. I think that it is something that this Parliament should actually be ashamed of. If anybody listened to the families and the children out there who do not have a dad, and who know that that is because somebody did not ask their mother to provide the detail on the birth certificate, they would realise what heartache there is. Also, we have heard about the future genetic problems as children who are related and do not know it intermarry, and so on. Those issues are alive and well out there, and it has been going on for the last decade, yet nothing is being done to fix it.

I would suggest to the member sitting in the chair, Dianne Yates, who has obviously persuaded her own party that it is an important issue that certain rights and provisions should be made for children, that maybe she needs to extend that influence to the other children who are not captured by this bill. I suspect they are out there in far greater numbers than the children this legislation will affect, so I suggest she picks that up as an issue that she can help to pass on to her colleagues.

The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 270 in the name of Dr Paul Hutchison to clause 42 be agreed to.

I raise a point of order, Madam Chairperson. Can I just clarify. Is this the amendment that will bring in the voluntary register—this is the beginning of that amendment? Is that correct?

Yes.

I raise a point of order, Madam Chairperson. I have listened to the debate this afternoon and this evening with some interest. I have heard several parties give a split vote. I am formally asking your advice on how I can get to know who in those parties voted for and who voted against. I believe the public is entitled to know. This is quite shattering legislation, and I think the public want to know who put their name up to go with it and who voted against it. I know that National recently had a split vote; as did United Future, in particular, and probably some other parties. I just want your advice on how I can obtain the names of the people who voted for and voted against.

We voted a split vote at the first reading, and this House allowed a split vote to be taken at that time. That has continued today during the Committee stage. The House gave approval for a split vote, and that is why we—

💬 Peter Brown: I am not opposing it.

The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley): Please be silent while Mr Tisch is speaking.

I know the member is not opposing it. The procedure is as we are conducting it. I do not believe, when the House has given approval for a split vote, that an individual’s vote has to be divulged.

The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley): The member is quite correct. That is exactly the situation. There is nothing in the Standing Orders that—

💬 Peter Brown: Madam Chair—

The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley): Please be seated. I am just affirming Mr Tisch’s analysis.

I raise a point of order, Madam Chairperson. I am not wishing for this to become a personal vote. I am simply asking that the parties at least say who voted for and who voted against any particular clause. I believe that the public is entitled to know. I believe, with due respect to yourself as Chairperson, that this is a serious issue, and I do not want to go past it tonight unless I can get some assurance from the Speaker—and I am prepared to call the Speaker back on this matter.

I understand that this issue was also traversed by the Business Committee today.

💬 Jill Pettis: Yesterday.

Yesterday—I am corrected.

💬 Peter Brown: No, it wasn’t.

It was, actually. I have seen the minute referring to it, so it should be no surprise to any party that was represented there. I suggest to the member that if he wishes to have that information he could write to the whips, who, if they chose or if party members authorised it, could make it available. But obstructing the business of the Committee around a procedural issue that has already been debated is hardly constructive or productive.

The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley): I want to confirm this. Mr Benson-Pope is quite correct. That is exactly what the Business Committee did agree to, and it is entirely a matter for the whips whether they divulge that information.

I raise a point of order, Madam Chairperson. I concur with your ruling. We have written proxies from our members, which I hold here. I am not prepared to divulge who voted which way. I have cast the votes with the leave of the House for a split vote, and it is certainly not my intention to divulge the information about our members’ preferences. This is not a personal vote where we go out to the lobbies. This is a split vote, which the House has agreed to.

The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley): And the House gave leave for that. Mr Lindsay Tisch is absolutely correct. That was exactly the procedure the House gave leave for.

I raise a point of order, Madam Chairperson. I want to get it absolutely clear in my mind that you are accepting Mr Tisch’s assertion that he can sit privately and in no way divulge who voted one way or the other. That is acceptable to the chair?

The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley): That is the leave the House gave. It has nothing to do with Mr Tisch. We are talking about the leave the House gave. That was the correct procedure, as was indicated.

I will seek the leave of the Committee, if I have to, to divulge—not necessarily now and not privately to me, but publicly, through the system—who voted which way. I seek leave.

The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley): The member can seek leave for that purpose; that is quite correct. Is there any objection? There is objection.

Part 4 Enforcement and miscellaneous provisions

The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley): This includes debate on schedule 2.