Hutchison Paul: Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill — In Committee Procedure 
Hutchison Paul: Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill — In Committee Procedure 
[Volume:621;Page:16364] 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (National—Port Waikato) 
: 
 Once again while sticking strictly to the title of this bill—the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill of 1996—I will stray a little like my other colleagues. I want to follow up on the point that Dianne Yates made about this bill being modelled on the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 or her original bill and she lamented that there had been departures from that. It is important to point out that just recently Lord Winston has said that that human embryology legislation is in need of quite radical revision. 
In my view one of the strengths of this bill is that it has done a very important balancing act in relation to the extremes of views we have heard. On the one hand the Greens talked of the dangers of eugenics being a logical conclusion and on the other hand we have heard from Stephen Franks and ACT who believe that any regulation in this field is absolutely inappropriate. My colleague Bill English talked about schedule 1 and the implication that while there is a list of procedures that are prohibited if they are for reproductive purposes that automatically implies they would be legal for non-reproductive purposes. That is inappropriate and in my view it is pretty far-fetched. He referred to procedures such as artificially forming for non-reproductive purposes a hybrid embryo. We do have within this legislation both the ministerial advisory committee and the ethics committee which can go through a considerably arduous process. Nevertheless if indeed the recommendation is to ban or to have an amendment to the bill there is no reason whatsoever that action cannot be recommended to the Minister to take up. 
It is important to point out that too much regulation or inflexibility could cause huge setbacks for personkind. I think specifically of what occurred with intracytoplasmic sperm injection in the 1990s. It is a technique introduced into New Zealand for which as has been pointed out many times specific regulations have not been in existence. It has opened the way in dealing with male infertility in New Zealand by means of a technique whereby a single sperm is injected into the nucleus of an ovum. The remarkable thing about this technique was that initially the sperm was injected just below the surface of the cytoplasm. The resulting fertility was in the order of 5 or 6 percent. But by serendipity some of the workers in that area started injecting into the nucleus and remarkably the fertility rates changed from 5 percent to 70 percent and over. That opened the way for a huge revolution and hope for many tens of thousands of men and couples right around the world. This was done without any specific regulation and has proven to be an absolutely safe procedure though one might think at first glance that putting a needle into a nucleus and injecting a sperm into it could hugely disrupt the genetics of the future being. 
The point that I wanted to make was that it is very very important not to be too rigid and to have the flexibility that I believe the framework of this Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill has indeed made possible.