Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to make a few remarks before the end of this debate on the Prohibition of Human Cloning for Reproduction and the Regulation of Human Embryo Research Amendment Bill 2006. I do not apologise for detaining the house at this time of night, because I think that the issues that are being raised by this legislation are extremely important and deserve to be fully understood by every senator and every person listening to this debate. I hope I can shed light on a couple of matters that have been discussed in the course of the last 36 hours or so.

I see that we have amended the legislation in a number of ways. We have, for example, taken out reference to the idea of hybrid embryos being used for scientific research. At one level that pleases me greatly. I think that it is a good development to see. It was claimed that the legislation did not in fact lead to the sorts of concerns that some had expressed about this, but I note that, nonetheless, the amendments have been made. I do take the point that Senator Bartlett made in respect of this, which is that as a consequence of that amendment all the experimentation that will be done in this field will be on human embryos, not on hybrid embryos, which would arguably have minimised the number of human embryos required to be used in those experiments. I did not suggest that we should take one course or another, because, frankly, neither course was particularly acceptable. Both courses result in, in my opinion, unacceptable uses of human embryos in circumstances which I believe have not been fully understood, certainly by the broader community in Australia.

The point is not so much what this bill does with respect to opening up a variety of uses of cloned human embryos; the point is what other legislation that will follow it down this pathway will do. I repeat the point that with this legislation we accept the concept that it is acceptable for one human being, albeit in a pre-birth state, to be used and then destroyed for the therapeutic benefit of another. That human being, under this legislation, remains less than 14 days old. Under this legislation, its life is brought to an end at the end of that 14 days. I fully accept that that is the case. It is not changed by this particular legislation. But I have asked in the course of hearings of the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs and I have asked again in the course of debate here for a clear description from those who support this legislation of why they draw the line at 14 days—a clear, ethical description of the reason for that line.

There is a scientific reason for that line to be drawn at 14 days, which is that in their present state of knowledge scientists believe that they can extract the necessary stem cell lines from embryos during that period, before the embryo reaches 14 days. That is in their present state of knowledge. But no-one in this debate has guaranteed that it will not be possible for scientists to return to the Senate and say: ‘Fourteen days is not long enough. We want more.’ If a scientific case is made for more, the question I want to have answered today in response to this debate is: why do we say that 28 days is not acceptable but 14 days is? What are the limits of acceptable experimentation on human embryos at that stage of their lives? We do not know. It has not been explained. The extent of the parameters and the appropriate limits of scientific inquiry have not been described by anybody who supports this legislation. Some have said that an embryo at that stage of life is not a human being. I respect them for the frankness of their point of view but I would be more comforted if I could know when an embryo or a foetus becomes a human being by that reasoning.

How many more iterations of this debate are we going to see, describing the expansion of this area of technology, this area of exploration by science, that will further penetrate into that area of discomfort that I certainly feel, and I know other senators feel, at the idea of embryos at a later and later stage in their lives being used for this purpose? I do not know where that will end. I think that today, in conjunction with this debate, is the appropriate time to ask the question and to get answers. If we do not have an answer, we should not support the legislation.

Senators, if you are comfortable in supporting this legislation tonight because you think that an embryo at 14 days is not really a human being, you need to ask yourselves: what about an embryo at 28 days? Is that a human being? What about an embryo at 50 days or beyond? If you cannot describe clearly where that line gets drawn then you have to accept that there is some prima facie value in the argument that the line is not clearly drawn anywhere in that period and that in fact the critical line is the line that we cross by passing this legislation today, where we say that it is acceptable to use a human being at any stage of its development for the therapeutic benefit of another human being. I want to understand what this legislation does in that respect. The proponents of the legislation have not, with respect, outlined at any point what they see as the appropriate limits of scientific inquiry—that is, at what point scientists may not continue to conduct such experiments.

I think this legislation has a number of very troubling features. It has been amended to remove some elements that had the potential to be particularly troubling for the proponents, but there are other things which I think are quite unacceptable. The fundamental point about the legislation is that it allows the creation of human embryos, other than by fertilisation between an egg and a sperm, for scientific experiments. The legislation will also allow the NHMRC licensing committee to create human embryos where there are more than two genetic parents. This has been described by some people as science fiction—the idea of people with multiple parents, like something out of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxybut it is possible. It can happen. This legislation actually makes it allowable. It gives the NHMRC licensing committee the power to authorise experiments for that purpose—provided the embryos do not live beyond 14 days. Why 14 days? What is the immutable magic about 14 days? Where will we end up if there are further debates in this place suggesting that some later period is appropriate? Why is a later period not acceptable?

The legislation would also allow the creation of human embryos using precursor cells from a human embryo or a human foetus. For example, the cells of an aborted foetus could be extracted for the purpose of creating a human embryo. I do not think the Australian community fully understands that implication of this bill. I am certain that, if I walked through the streets of this city and stopped 100 people, there would be almost nobody who would be able to tell me that that is what this legislation does. That raises a very interesting question about just what Australians think is happening here tonight. We have heard a lot about how, supposedly, the opinion polls demonstrate that Australians want this legislation; they want to see heinous diseases destroyed and for the community to be freed of those diseases.

Professor McNeil, who appeared before the Senate community affairs committee in Melbourne on the last day of hearings, appeared to support the legislation, but he made a very interesting point. He said that most opinion polls suffer from the disability that they present people with a simple question—a little bit of preamble but a simple question—and people are expected to understand enough about the science to be able to say whether they approve or disapprove of these particular uses of those embryos by science. He said that the only research that had been being conducted by means of deliberative polling—which, as members would be aware, is a form of polling where you actually take people to one side, properly educate them about the issues, and then ask them the questions—was conducted by Swinburne University. It found much more ambiguous outcomes as far as the attitudes of Australians to this technology are concerned. I think that there are, quite rightly, questions that Australians would ask about where this leads.

I conclude by saying that this process really deeply troubles me. I was chair of the Senate community affairs committee, and the committee worked very hard over three days to understand the very detailed information in the Lockhart review—a very large report—and to understand a small cross-section of the huge amount of scientific debate and argument about this. We discovered that there was very lively and very real debate in the scientific community about this and no consensus about the issues subject to this legislation. We produced in very short order a report for this Senate. Now, just a little over a week later, we are voting these changes into law. Given the lack of understanding by so many Australians of what is entailed in these changes and the nature of the process that we have used, we do not greatly dignify the process or serve the public interest by the means that we have used to reach this point today.

I appeal to senators to consider whether it actually is in the public interest of Australians to pass this legislation tonight. I suggest to them that, with the passing of this legislation, we will cross a critical line. We cannot retreat from this point. With the passing of this bill tonight, we will have established that it is acceptable to use one human being for the therapeutic benefit of another human being. The possibilities from that proposition, once established, are quite limitless. We need to ask ourselves where that will end. It begins tonight, and I would argue that we should not take that step unless we are absolutely certain that we know where we are going to end up.