Jackie Kelly (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Every mother in Australia today has had an ultrasound at 18 weeks. It is a very much anticipated event, and we keep these little heat-sensitive photos in our wallets and show them to our family and friends. Science has determined that late-term abortions occur after 12 weeks, because a different and more difficult procedure than a curettage is required to terminate a pregnancy after 12 weeks. If a girlfriend has an ectopic pregnancy or a miscarriage at six weeks, we commiserate with her, we share her pain and we help her to grieve for her lost child.

Women do not grieve every month for each egg that passes unfertilised. Our husbands may think we do, or at least that we behave in a very strange manner, but let’s put that down to PMS and move on. Women do not usually check for a pregnancy until they have missed a period, which is usually about two weeks after ovulation or fertilisation. A woman who has undergone in-vitro fertilisation treatment may indeed experience grief at the first sign of a period, but normally somewhere between two weeks and six weeks our awareness of life, and hence our potential for grief at the loss of that life, is born.

So I am inherently suspicious of legislation that says fertilised eggs can be the subject of experimentation up to 14 days but not later than two weeks. It coincides with that two weeks when women are usually unaware of life and not at all likely to grieve for loss. There will be numerous scientific reasons why they say 14 days is best—and I am pretty sure that people will be back in four years saying, ‘What about four weeks?’ or ‘What about six weeks?’ and so on. In any event, somewhere between two weeks and six weeks a woman’s attachment to the life we have formed is created.

Unlike fathers, mothers are emotionally connected to their eggs and their eggs’ future. To collect IVF eggs is a very complicated procedure involving day hospitalisation. Most women I know who have undergone the procedure are hampered in the following days and at the very, very best are really restrained in their care for their children. In some cases they are bedridden. It is not like spending five minutes—or in some men’s cases 30 seconds—with a dirty magazine and a cup and then collecting $50 for the pleasure. In a more serious tone, it is really surprising actually the dramatic reduction in men’s sperm donations now that identification of biological fathers is a possibility, which shows how easily the mechanics of things can ignore the long-term feelings and emotions of us mere mortals—and I know that doctors think they are God. But those legal battles that these things create for custody and the like and that have occurred in the sperm area will likely follow in this area.

It will be the same, in this matter, if we go down the path of the legal loopholes created by the science of experimentation on female eggs. Can I demand, in my very best Jerry Maguire impersonation, ‘Show me the eggs’? I would expect that, when approaching a female patient for the very complicated and painful procedure of extracting eggs, every doctor’s proper counsel would be, ‘Do not undergo this dangerous procedure when there is no benefit to you.’ I know women who are desperate to have children and who have walked away from IVF when the complications and possible side effects of the drugs and procedures have been explained to them. So show me the eggs.

Will we have to make it an offence for a doctor to give a woman improper advice in this area—or will we have to mandate female doctors? How many offences do we have to create to go down this path? A number of offences have been proposed. These include placing a human embryo clone in the body of an animal, importing a human embryo clone and exporting a human embryo clone. Thank goodness those offences have been considered! But there is nothing about importing eggs harvested from women in the Third World. By creating a market for women’s eggs, won’t we see the exploitation of women in the Third World? Won’t we create a market? Exploitation will surely follow and the offences will keep piling up. (Time expired)