IVF and the right to life

Gift of Life are confused at how bioethicist Pierre Mallia has come to the preposterous conclusion that affording the right to life to the unborn child from conception would somehow render IVF as being illicit. Dr Mallia seems unaware that the pioneers of IVF in Malta are in favour of this Constitutional amendment. Josie Muscat has also signed the petition showing that he too has enough confidence that the amendment would not shut the IVF practice down in Malta.

Given that the providers of IVF are in favour of this amendment we are hard pressed to understand this misleading statement reported to have been made by Dr Mallia in a news report in The Times of January 4.

Dr Mallia himself has pointed out, quite rightly, that a natural miscarriage after the embryo has been implanted in its mother's womb is not the same as an abortion, so how can providing the right to life to the newly conceived, designed to protect that life against deliberate extermination, be confused with natural miscarriages occurring after implantation?

We agree with Dr Mallia that this constitutional amendment and any other eventual act to protect the embryo would not be in the interest of any Maltese scientist who intends to carry out IVF and deliberately destroy human embryos in the process. Indeed that would be considered unanimously illicit and morally objectionable. So unless what he is defending is already ethically illicit, he should have nothing to be concerned about, given that he has on many occasions gone to pains to defend his pro-life position.

So the question remains, why is Dr Mallia against the unborn being given the right to life from conception unless he feels that this right may at some time, by someone, for some reason, be intentionally broken?