Regulation of clinics vital, says ethics expert

A LEADING expert on medical ethics said legislation and regulation was essential to govern the activities of fertility clinics and clarify the rights of the embryos they produce, store and implant.

Dr Deirdre Madden, a lecturer in medical law at University College Cork, was also a member of the Government-appointed Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction (CAHR) which delivered a comprehensive report a year-and-a-half ago highlighting precisely the problems Mr Justice McGovern alluded to in his High Court ruling on the frozen embryo case yesterday.

“We don’t have any legislation dealing with the issues raised by this case and others in the assisted reproduction context,” she said. “This was one of the recommendations by our Commission — that legislation would be drawn up to set up a regulatory body.”

Dr Madden said that, in the absence of legislation, it was a matter of the policy in place at each individual clinic what they did with embryos in the kind of situation that arose in the Roche v Roche case.

Given that there were nine clinics offering IVF services and one-in-six couples suffered from infertility difficulties, there was potential for many other problematic cases to arise.

Dr Madden also said that legislation was necessary to govern the fate of embryos no longer wanted or needed for the purpose of an attempt at pregnancy. There was currently no law to say whether couples could donate their embryos to other couples or for stem cell research. She said it may be necessary to hold a referendum to allow the public decide whether they wanted to extend the Constitutional right to life of the unborn to frozen embryos.

Justice McGovern yesterday interpreted the “unborn” as meaning only the foetus in the womb. His interpretation is compatible with the views of the CAHR which concluded in its report: “The embryo formed by IVF should not attract legal protection until placed in the human body, at which stage it should attract the same level of protection as the embryo formed in vivio [in the womb].”

The CAHR made 40 recommendations, the first of which urged the establishment of a statutory regulatory body to regulate assisted human reproduction services in Ireland. It said, “The regulatory body should, in accordance with statutory guidelines, have power to address cases where embryos are abandoned, where the commissioning couple cannot agree on a course of action, where the couple separates or where one or both partners dies or becomes incapacitated.”

The all-party Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children was due to discuss the CAHR report and its recommendations but deferred it when the High Court case was pending.

The issue will be raised at a scheduled meeting of the committee today.