Turner Judy: Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill — In Committee Procedure 
Turner Judy: Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill — In Committee Procedure 
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JUDY TURNER (United Future) 
: 
 I want to take another call on this part because other parliamentary colleagues have talked about several things that I want to talk about. Before the dinner break Mr Franks talked about what he saw as a complete nonsense for those of us who have some serious concerns about the bill. He talked about a society where large numbers of children are born in unplanned and unfortunate circumstances—children who arrive unwanted and who live unwanted maybe even for large parts of their childhood—which is somehow a lot more scary than this very planned approach to parenthood. 
I remind the Committee because this applies to Part 4 where we talk about the implementation and policing of those provisions that part of this technology allows for the fact that children may be brought into being for purposes other than those we would normally think of bringing children into the world for. We imagine that most people want to bring children into the world to love and nurture but there are a whole lot of other reasons which now become possibilities for why one would want to have a child. 
Firstly there is the huge possibility that a child may be designed to provide body parts for a sickly sibling. That is a rather interesting motive. As this technology is advanced under these very flimsy guidelines another concern I have is that we start to bring into being children who have been so tampered with—I guess advocates would say in a positive way—that those children are now born with a whole new set of expectations upon them that most of us never considered when we had our children. We had our children we accepted them as they came and loved them regardless of any warts and glimps that might have been part of who they were. 
The new potential that this technology brings along is that we can now have a far greater say and a huge investment—and I am talking in monetary terms—in the outcomes of the children who are born. Because of the investment we have made these children now arrive with a huge set of expectations upon them to perform and to succeed in ways that previously loving parents did not have the ability to have expectations about. We need to be very clear that this legislation has the potential at one end of the spectrum to change the face of parenting completely. 
I can remember reading stories of early days in England where people were not allowed to marry or were discouraged from marrying below their class. When a gene-rich generation of babies is developed who have had a huge amount of money invested in them by their parents maybe a new class of people will be developed with a similar set of biases concerns and pressures upon them that we thought we had moved away from. That is why I am so concerned about the very loose nature of the guidelines that this legislation puts up. 
When one looks at the British system that the original bill of Dianne Yates was based upon which is a strongly regulatory and licensing regime we see that it has never stopped the British medical profession from developing that technology and from moving forward and making genuine advances in that area. Nothing has been held back by that system. The fear that by going into a more tightly regulated system we would somehow be holding back medical advances and increasing levels of suffering is just a complete nonsense. In other jurisdictions that is certainly not the case when Parliament has chosen to keep a very close eye on the development of this technology and to make informed choices.