Our new parliament will have before it a vote to amend, for the second time: the IVF law called The Embryo Protection Act. This law was first amended in 2018.

The 2012 law had allowed ova freezing but not embryo freezing. The narrative for the legal amendment was that it allowed embryo freezing and that this was more efficacious than the one allowing ova freezing only.

I spoke up at the time in the respective House committee to say that the government’s research was wrong as there was no particular advantage in freezing embryos in IVF as opposed to freezing eggs. The result would simply be the same but with a surplus of frozen embryos.

How the government insisted that it wanted to improve the efficacy of the procedure. Four years later here we are with further amendments which gave credence to what I said then. The fact is that the success rate with the 2012 law was around 20 per cent and the success rate after the 2018 amendments remained more or less the same at 20 per cent. The only difference is that, after four years, there is now a parallel humanity of more than 300 left over frozen embryos with not one being taken up for adoption.

What happens to these human embryos is, as I warned four years ago, that, after they accumulate exponentially, someone will have to take the decision to turn off the freezer.

The argument now is once again that these new amendments will increase efficiency and efficacy, allowing more couples to undergo IVF, preventing miscarriages and introducing free medicinals during the process which can go up to an exorbitant amount per cycle.

I fear that, somewhere in the pro bono story, and I hope that I am wrong here, will be an amendment to introduce Pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnosis, PIGD for short. PIGD involves genetically testing the embryos before they are inserted into the uterus so that only the healthy and strong ones will be inserted, which could theoretically bring up the success rate to around 25 per cent at best.

This means the weak ones will be left out and frozen. What worries me here is that this is a eugenic practice. Eugenics is selecting people according to their physical and genetic characteristics. This means the left-out embryos are even less likely to be adopted as they have been certified as disabled.

There are more than 300 left over frozen embryos with not one being taken up for adoption- Michael Asciak

 Now here are serious ethical issues. What message does this send to society in general with respect to the dignity of human beings with disabilities? What will be the cut-off point for embryo disabilities considering that every embryo has at least five genetic defects? Would, for example, Down syndrome embryos be inserted or left out? What message does this send? What about the myriad of other diseases which exist?

What type of society are we expecting to generate here?

I already believe that our constitution is being contravened with the freezing of the more than 300 embryos which have been in limbo and denied the right to life but this will be made worse with PIGD. In article 33, our constitution states: “No person shall intentionally be deprived of his life (save in criminal execution by court order).”

The second sub-article of this article 33 lists the exceptions where a person may be deemed to not be regarded as deprived of his life and none of these are during early embryonic life or during IVF. This is in keeping with the legal maxim that the right to life is not an absolute right but a prima facie one.

However, the right to life of an innocent human being is such an absolute right as denying it is a threat to human dignity. The Maltese translation is even clearer and its interpretation supersedes the English translation in Maltese law. “Ħadd ma jista’ jiġi pprivat mill-ħajja tiegħu intenzjonalment (ħlief fl-esekuzzjoni tas-sentenza ta’ qorti dwar reat kriminali etc).” One notes that the exclusion here is tighter referring to “Ħadd” that is no one, nobody, no one human being, no one human person.

A person, after all, is an individual substance of a rational nature and, therefore, a human person is an individual being of a human nature, a nature whose essence is rational.

This rational human being and person is established in early human life in fertilisation by the singular genetic component within a human cell which is in active potency. So much so that it develops and divides even outside the uterus. Is this the development of a brave new world?

Michael Asciak, senior lecturer in health studies at MCAST