John Anderson (Gwydir, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you. Let me conclude by asking: where to next? This bill, like the legislation we passed in 2002, has a built-in review process. In my view, this review is designed to facilitate a further slide down the slippery slope. The review must consider any research which has been prevented as a result of legislative restrictions and recommend amendments to the legislation having regard to this matter. What more could scientists want? Anticipating the cheap accusation of scaremongering, let me mention two of the most likely proposals that will face this House in 2011. I will not be here, but others of you may be.

Firstly, there is likely to be a demand that women be paid for providing the thousands of human eggs that are likely to be needed if human cloning is ever going to produce any results. In Korea, the disgraced Professor Hwang Woo Suk used over 2,300 human eggs in his failed attempt to repeat his successful cloning of Snuppy the puppy in the human species. He could only get this number of eggs by a combination of coercion and bribery. In Britain, attempts at human cloning have not yet succeeded, despite the Newcastle facility using about 70 human eggs a month. They can only get these numbers by offering bribes, in the form of discounted IVF treatment, to poorer women. I believe that this is a real issue. I think we will next be presented with arguments justifying all sorts of payments as a simple market exchange. We will be told that it is patronising to deny women the right to choose to exchange their eggs, a valuable resource, for valuable consideration.

Secondly, we will be told that a real answer to the organ shortage and to the need for tissue for therapies is at hand. Scientists could transfer a human embryo clone to a woman’s body for a few weeks, certainly less than 20 weeks, which is the cut-off for legal abortion in some states, and the foetal clone would then be removed and dissected to obtain whole organs—liver or pancreas or whatever—or tissue such as brain tissue for treating the child or adult patient from which the foetus had been cloned.

People will say that that is just science fiction and the bill prevents it. Well, the bill presented just four years ago said no to cloning—never. But it is not just science fiction. A serious Professor of Practical Ethics at Oxford University and Head of the Melbourne-Oxford Stem Cell Collaboration, which is devoted to examining the ethical implications of cloning and embryonic stem cell research, in 1999 wrote:

… it is not merely morally permissible but morally required that we employ cloning to produce embryos or fetuses for the sake of providing cells, tissues or even organs for therapy, followed by abortion of the embryo or fetus.

We should reject this bill because it dehumanises a whole class of human beings and it represents a further decisive slide down the slippery slope into a scientific barbarism that will treat some human beings as raw material to be cannibalised at will for the benefit of other human beings. I seriously believe it should stop.

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