Scott Lynda: Te Runanga o Ngati Awa Bill — First Reading 
Scott Lynda: Te Runanga o Ngati Awa Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:619;Page:15070] 
Dr LYNDA SCOTT (National—Kaikoura) 
: 
 I too want to give credit to Steve Chadwick who chaired the Health Committee. This is a comprehensive and difficult bill that has been in the select committee process since 1996. It is a hybrid of two bills: Dianne Yates’ Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill and Doug Graham’s Assisted Human Reproduction Bill. A Supplementary Order Paper based on Australian Canadian and UK legislation was introduced to give a real update to this bill. 
Some of the heat has been taken out of this debate because we have followed other parts of the world in what we have been doing. We certainly need this legislation. In science fiction if one can think it up then generally man can turn round and do it. When Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1997 scientific cloning became a reality. There was then a huge push for legislation because the ability to clone human beings became reality at that point. 
I want anybody listening to this debate tonight to know that schedule 1 of this bill has very clear prohibited actions. The first of those is to “Artificially form for reproductive purposes a cloned embryo.” Cloning is totally and utterly outlawed in this bill. Artificially forming for reproductive purposes a hybrid embryo is banned. The implantation into a human being of a cloned embryo is banned. The implantation into a human being of an animal gamete or embryo is banned. There is a list of nine things that are banned. 
A system has been set up whereby this country can move forward the ability to have assisted reproductive technology. For those people in this country who suffer infertility it is a huge burden. Nobody who has not been in that position will know what it is like to want a child and not be able to have one. For 35 percent of infertile couples the problem is with the male for 25 to 35 percent it is due to tubal damage or to the gametes not being able to get up the tubes for 20 percent it is due to the woman’s ovulation problems and for 15 percent the cause is unknown. For those men and women who really desperately want to have a child and cannot do so being denied that right is a huge tragedy in their lives. This bill allows for things like surrogacy—but not commercial surrogacy. It allows for non-commercial surrogacy in vitro fertilisation and some research that allows men and women who wish to have a family to be able to proceed to do so. In this country over the last 15 years there have been huge advances and developments in our ability to help infertile couples become pregnant. 
It is unfortunate that in this country at the moment we fund only one cycle of in vitro fertilisation. That is being increased to two but many countries have more cycles available than that. Those women who suffer infertility suffer a huge cost. This bill will help enormously in that regard. There are five or six clinics at the moment in New Zealand that do this work. Initially the first bill that Dianne Yates introduced looked at a licensing regime based on the UK model. It was superseded by the Health and Disability Services (Safety) Act in New Zealand. The clinics no longer need specific licensing as a hospital because that is all taken care of. 
So the main debate in terms of this bill came to be how we would make decisions about what was happening in the field of cloning and how we would decide on sex selection embryo splitting experimentation and stem cell research rather than how to license clinics. That was an extremely interesting debate and I really enjoyed my time in the select committee looking at that. 
There has been evolutionary growth in the technology of in vitro fertilisation and the gamete intrafallopian transfer programme. Donors in New Zealand for the last 10 years I think have always been named. When they have donated an egg or a sperm they have had to be prepared to give their name and all their genetic details to the clinic. 
As I said in schedule 1 there is a list of prohibited activities. The debate then raged around those activities that have become common those that are developmental and those that occur when one person presents a very unusual situation. A young woman who has cancer of the ovary might be under what was previously the consent age but may still want to harvest cells from her ovaries to be able at some time in the future to have the potential to have a child of her own. That is something that can occur now but in the past it could not. If that young lady had to wait a year or two to go through an ethics committee what would happen? The harvesting could not occur because her cancer would have needed to be treated. That is an example of some of the cases that have come before ethics committees. There needs to be a really timely response. 
We have set up a system whereby there is only one ethics committee—that was the recommendation from the select committee—and also a ministerial advisory group that can advise the Minister on new technology. As I said there has not been as much heat in this debate in New Zealand as there has been in other countries because basically we have followed those countries and that has led to a real understanding. Although it has taken since 1996 to get this bill to this point today it has probably been a good process because other countries have moved ahead of us and had the debates and we have been able to learn from their examples how to deliver good legislation. 
 We actually have three bills that all overlap. They are this bill which is the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill plus the hazardous substances and new organisms legislation plus the medicines legislation. The lines of somatic cell gene therapy germ-line genetic modification and embryonic stem cell therapies using genetic modification all overlap between these three bills. It will be interesting to see how they are dealt with. 
I mentioned surrogacy before. In the United States one can have commercial surrogacy but in the New Zealand bill it has been decided that that will not be the case. The fees for having a child plus the cost of having time off work can be met by the couple who want the child but commercial surrogacy will not be allowed. 
The age of consent for obtaining information about a donor sperm or egg was of great debate. In the end we decided that at 16 years and below one could get information on genetic heritage but not the name of the donor and that from 18 years one could have the name of the donor. Donors often are known to the family and a child needs the maturity to be able to handle that information when it is given. But the genetic information is essential. All of us want to know where we came from. People say that maternity is never in doubt but paternity always is. Most children in this country do know who their parents are and it is a very sad situation if they do not. We have encouraged and we would like to see great openness and transparency in the system when a child is born as a result of a donor egg or donor sperm and we would like the family to tell the child right from the beginning—to have total openness about that process. So the age of consent was the cause of great discussion. 
There has been debate about the expert advisory committee and the ethics committee taking away—and Steve Chadwick talked about this—some of the parliamentary scrutiny. That will I think be a continued area of debate in the Committee stage. The Health Committee as Steve Chadwick said had two doctors on it and a nurse and someone experienced in research but it still had difficulty with this bill given its highly technical nature. There was a lot of debate and there were a lot of briefings but the committee felt that to actually bring back to Parliament some of the decisions that would need to be made would slow the process too much. 
So I will be supporting this bill at this point.