Maltese Church seen diverging from the universal Church

The position of the local Church on the definition of the start of life differed from that of the universal Church, Nationalist MP Michael Asciak said in Parliament.

Dr Asciak said the House Social Affairs Committee and the government-appointed Bioethics Consultative Committee agreed that life started at syngamy, the pronuclear fusion when there was the mingling of the mother's and the father's chromosomes which created a human embryo.

But the Maltese Church was saying that life started earlier, from the moment of penetration of the sperm into the ovum.

This, Dr Asciak said in an adjournment speech, was a position which practically no one had adopted, not even the Universal Church, and it would be a mistake for Malta to do so through legislation.

Dr Asciak observed that the Archbishop was arguing that since there was no precise information, one should take the stand that life started at penetration.

He found it difficult to agree with this stand. The Archbishop had the right to interpret the teachings of the universal Church as he thought fit, but the Universal Church had referred to all the arguments and left the issue open, using the word conception.

No law anywhere in the world referred to penetration. Italian law, which was one of the most recent, spoke of conception.

It would be a mistake to base the argument on penetration and he felt Maltese law should speak of fertilisation. Law should state that an embryo existed from fertilisation. Fertilisation was a process and there could not be an individual human being until fertilisation was complete.

This debate had a bearing on other issues, Dr Asciak said. Almost no one claimed that an embryo existed at penetration, but only after syngamy. Therefore he felt that second polar biopsies should be allowed at the early stage to detect and prevent serious diseases from developing by allowing nuclear transfer, something which had nothing to do with cloning. It would be irresponsible to prevent this.

He was against the freezing of embryos, but one could allow the freezing of eggs at the pronucleate stage so as to enable fresh implantation into the uterus when IVF treatment failed, thus avoiding the need for a repeat of hyerstimulation, which was delicate and could be dangerous to a woman.

Dr Asciak said the debate included other issues, such as what would happen if embryos were frozen and the woman died.

Should one allow those embryos to die or should one try to save the life that had been created? He was in favour of saving life, with a donor found so that the eventual children could then be adopted.

Speaking on IVF treatment in general, Dr Asciak noted that the present Pope had indicated that legislators should not make it illegal for married couples to seek this treatment.

A thorny problem was whether IVF should also be allowed for couples who were not married. Some argued that having sex outside marriage was not illegal, even if it led to children, and IVF should therefore be allowed outside marriage.

But others felt that the state had a duty to conserve the structure of marriage and IVF outside marriage could be seen as undermining marriage. This, in fact had been the position of Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict.

If one was against divorce, how could one allow IVF outside marriage when the main argument against divorce was to protect the family and children within the family?

Concluding, Dr Asciak said this debate had been running for over a year in Parliament and he marvelled how the MLP had said nothing about it.Did it have another agenda, such as IVF by donor outside the couple? The fact that the MLP was silent showed it was either not interested or it had another agenda. But it was about time it made its position clear.