The Opposition proposed on Wednesday that IVF treatment should not be available to single persons, as the eventual children should not be deprived of the family unit.
The proposal was made when the House Committee for the Consideration of Bills started debating amendments to the Embryo Protection Act.
Nationalist MP Claudio Grech explained that the Opposition was not against providing access to IVF to same-sex or unmarried couples, but he insisted that a child should not be deprived of an upbringing within a family unit.
“The family remains a pillar of society, irrespective of its form. We shouldn’t pass on the message that a family doesn’t mean anything,” he said.
Reacting, Health Minister Chris Fearne said that there were people who were single parents by choice.
Simone Attard, director of the Embryo Protection Authority, said that single prospective parents would be obliged to sit for counselling and an assessment procedure similar to that of couples who applied for IVF treatment.
Dr Grech said later in the debate that the Opposition disagreed with the proposal for the adoption of embryos, which he called “an insensitive compromise to a surplus” of donated embryos.
The first and foremost interest should be that of children, and undoubtedly, the adoption of embryos was not in the children’s interest, he said. He also noted that adoption in exceptional cases was already possible under the current law, but it seemed like the government wanted to make adoption “mainstream”.
The PN MP flagged the concern that the Bill did not provide adopted embryos the same protection granted to adopted children by other laws.
The committee members spent a long time discussing the “matching” of donated embryos and prospective parents, with the Opposition raising concerns about racial profiling.
Noting that there would not be a large number of available embryos, as these would be used in consecutive cycles, Ms Attard said that the matching procedure was similar to that of the adoption of children.
Present briefly for the discussion, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat warned against “reinventing the wheel”, noting that adoption by single people has been possible for a number of years.
Matching already took place when people adopted children locally or abroad. “This doesn’t mean that they will choose embryos off a shelf, but that there will be a guide on how they are matched. There will not be any racial profiling,” he added.
Health Minister Chris Fearne said that the government will not budge from its principle of providing more opportunity to people to become parents, provide the best medical service, avoid discrimination and respect life from the beginning, however, it did not mind changing the methodology to reach these aims.
Mr Fearne said the government wanted to introduce principles similar to those in Finland, where donors remained anonymous for prospective parents and vice versa. However, once the child turned 18, they could, if they wanted, request the identity of the donor.
The donor can never request the identity of the child, however, the authorities could decide, in exceptional circumstances such as medical ailment, that the identity needed to be made known to the child before they turned 18.
Addressing the same committee, Pierre Schembri Wismayer from the University of Malta and Doctors for Life suggested keeping a blood or tissue sample of the donors, so as to allow future genetic testing.
The debate will continue on Friday.