Turner Judy: Te Runanga o Ngati Awa Bill — First Reading 
Turner Judy: Te Runanga o Ngati Awa Bill — First Reading 
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JUDY TURNER (United Future) 
: 
 I am not sure what the record is for a bill that has had the longest passage through the House but this Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill must be a high contender for gold for that particular record. It started out as a member’s bill based largely on legislation in Britain and Canada. It has passed through the hands of several Governments it has been changed and rearranged considerably and it arrives in the House today markedly different from the original proposal in Dianne Yates’ name. 
I would like at this point to commend Dianne Yates for her thoroughness and commitment to this whole bioethics issue. I want to express my own personal disappointment that the bill as it has now arrived in the House largely overturns Ms Yates’ efforts. Dianne Yates’ bill covered a licensing regime that meant policy development remained firmly in the hands of Parliament. I believe that when issues under consideration are purely medical then medical experts are best left to get on with the job. However when issues being considered have major social implications then Parliament should be setting the policy platform. 
The system proposed by Ms Yates also made very clear distinctions between situations when someone was breaching the law as opposed to situations when that person was breaching professional standards. My belief is that regulations are clear and a lot less ambiguous. My other concern is that with the system this bill puts in place the exceptional circumstance ends up setting policy perimeters. That really is a concern. Most significant is the fact that the ongoing development of birth technology has been so substantial during the same time period this bill has been in process and that the very scope of the bill has ended up being far more extensive than first envisaged—to the point where the very title of the bill is now questionable. In vitro fertilisation accounts now for only a fraction of the procedures involving embryos that will be covered by this bill and the conditions under which embryos can be used for purposes other than reproductive purposes are included. Suffice to say this bill is aimed at covering the handling and treatment of embryos outside the body. Other Acts cover the treatment and health of embryos inside the womb. 
All activities that fall within the parameters of this bill fit into one of three categories: permitted activities prohibited activities and those activities that require case by case approval. It is that third category that is of greatest concern to me. United Future has made it very clear in our minority report in the commentary on the bill that we are not wanting to hamper the progress of medical science to develop new ways of alleviating suffering. The concern is that we have to be very clear that the means by which we achieve our medical breakthroughs are as ethical and desirable as the intended outcomes themselves. That means that the policy base underpinning regulations should not be handed over to experts but remain in the control of society’s elected representatives. The licensing regimes that operate in other jurisdictions are based on clear regulations that are prescriptive. Exceptional circumstances can be considered case by case but exceptional circumstances do not set the bottom line or precedent and are not used to benchmark standard practice. The progress of medical technology has not been hampered in those countries that use such an approach. 
New Zealand along with other Western societies is very consumer-driven. We have an existing track record for taking medical advances and applying them to non-medical priorities. Let me give members an example. In the 1980s two drug companies were awarded patents to market human growth hormones to a few thousand American children suffering from dwarfism. The market was considered small so the Food and Drug Administration gave that human growth hormone drug orphan-drug status. Within a few years though human growth hormones became one of the largest-selling drugs—not because there was an increase in dwarfism but because of the increase in numbers of parents who wanted their short children to be taller. 
The argument that science and in this case medical science should not be micromanaged by politicians is used to justify establishing special advisory groups to reduce the active scrutiny of the laity which in this case is elected members of Parliament. What concerns me is that the focus of bioethics rarely addresses the larger issues about the impact of such procedures on society as a whole; the attention is usually directed to questions about the individuals involved instead; for instance did this person sign a consent form is this procedure safe or is the information recorded and stored appropriately? 
In this bill we would manage the use of developing technology through a ministerial advisory committee that makes recommendations to the Minister and then with ministerial approval would set guidelines for ethics committees to use when approving individual applications. However in New Zealand to date that kind of process has already had some questionable practices. For instance on 15 November last year the  
Dominion Post  
ran an article headed “Designer babies for $16000”. The article went on to talk about pre-implantation genetic diagnosis which is a process whereby a woman’s eggs are harvested fertilised outside her body and two cells are removed from each embryo tested and analysed for chromosomal abnormalities and for gender. When abnormalities are discovered those embryos are discarded and then one or two of the other embryos are implanted and the rest are frozen for future use. New Zealand fertility clinics admit that they have regular queries from patients wanting that service and that many of those queries are for social reasons for instance sex selection. Six days after that article appeared the Minister sent a reply to a member of the public stating that she had already given approval in principle to the use of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and had asked the National Ethics Committee on Assisted Human Reproduction to draft ethical guidelines. The concern that I have is that while the bill has been strengthened by requiring the ministerial advisory committee to consult the policy is no longer truly determined by Parliament. 
The decision to overturn Dianne Yates’ member’s bill is on one hand understandable considering the immense development in technology that has happened in the last 8 years but on the other hand I am saddened that the Government has moved towards a system that focuses more solidly on medical safety and individual consent processes at the expense I believe of the many social concerns that that technology presents. It is of interest that in the last week the New Zealand media has recorded the fact that current in vitro fertilisation figures show that about half the clients using this service are women who have no apparent intention of giving the resulting children fathers. I suspect that this social trend was never a consideration of those who 20 years ago set out to help infertile couples have children. 
United Future like other parties has a variety of opinions on this issue. By the third reading we will probably be treating this as a conscience vote. At this stage we have real concerns about the system that is being put in place. I understand Ms Yates’ concern that something is better than nothing but we are not so sure that this something is good enough so we will be opposing the second reading.