Kedgley Sue: Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Kedgley Sue: Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:620;Page:15934] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 As the debate has shown aspects of this bill are highly contentious so it is pleasing that one part I think has the support of all parties in this House. I think that all of us support this provision and all of us I believe will also be supporting Dr Hutchison’s amendment to establish a voluntary register for people who have already been born from assisted human reproductive technology. 
Like others I have been contacted by people who are offspring from human-assisted reproductive technologies and are utterly dismayed that they cannot find out who their parents are. This is what is called an unintended consequence. When people began using this new technology obviously there was no thought that the offspring would be as desperate as anyone else to know who their parents were. So it is interesting that this aspect was ignored by the legislators of the day but now we are trying to rectify it. For many of those people who cannot find out about their parents it is a source of great heartache and distress just as it was in an earlier period for adoptees who were not able to find out about their parents. 
The only other thing I would say is that some people have said that if donors cannot be anonymous then there may be a significant fall-off in donor numbers and I think that that has happened overseas. In fact I heard an interview where the participants said that in Holland there had been a significant decrease in the number of donors once they were no longer able to be anonymous. But the regulators over there said that despite the fall-off in donor numbers they still felt that they had made the right decision in requiring donors to be identified and not be anonymous because ultimately the interests of the child should prevail. 
However there also have been some rare but high profile cases in which for instance someone who ran a clinic had been anonymously donating sperm to literally hundreds and thousands of people. People had not realised this and there were neighbours down the road not realising— 
Dr Lynda Scott 
: There were children who looked alike. 
SUE KEDGLEY 
: Yes the children looked alike and they all came from the same sperm donor. We have had cases of this even in New Zealand where people have found that in various communities children all have the same father as they have come from the same sperm donor. Indeed they could be marrying each other because the sperm donation was all anonymous. There are very very good reasons why we cannot allow donors to hide behind anonymity. This move may result in a fall-off in the number of donors but we will have to live with that because ultimately—as the bill states—the rights of a child to know his or her parents must prevail in this instance. 
Many people have been talking about how sad it is that adoption rates are falling off and infertility rates are increasing. We all tend to look at adoption and technology as being the solutions but in fact we really ought to be looking at why we have such declining rates of fertility in this country and around the world and why sperm counts are estimated to have declined by up to 50 percent. For those reasons we ought to be looking at environmental causes in particular such things as the estrogenic environment that we are creating. Ultimately it is only when we look at the environmental causes behind the decline of fertility that we will find a solution to it. All the technology and techniques are expensive and invasive and they will not provide a solution to the seriously declining fertility that we have in New Zealand. 
However I digress. The Green Party is very very pleased to support Part 3 and to support Paul Hutchison’s amendments to this particular section.