Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Prohibition of Human Cloning for Reproduction and the Regulation of Human Embryo Research Amendment Bill 2006. I would like to begin by thanking my constituents and, indeed, those right across the country for contacting me, be it through a telephone call to my office, through an email or through visiting me personally to have a chat about this important issue. I have welcomed the advice I have received from many people. I must confess, though, to some surprise and disappointment that we are debating the issue of therapeutic cloning so soon after it was so roundly rejected as a scientific procedure in this very parliament in 2002. Senator Patterson’s bill puts into legislation the recommendations of Justice Lockhart’s review and radically redefines the existing landscape to permit therapeutic cloning, simultaneously going well beyond the safeguards and restrictions currently governing stem cell therapies and cloning.

As one of eight parliamentarians in Australia who wrote a submission to the Lockhart review, I have taken a very keen interest in this matter. The first point of entry into the current debate is to come to terms with the practice of so-called ‘therapeutic cloning’. It is a technique that produces cloned embryos with the sole intention of using them for research and destroying them. Despite its enticing and desirable sounding title, the practice of therapeutic cloning is anything but therapeutic for the cloned human in question. Only four years ago, the sponsor of this bill said that the vote in 2002:

… in no way heralds an increasingly liberal attitude to research involving human embryos.

How things change. When I looked back at the speech I gave in this place on the 2002 legislation, I saw that I had asked a few questions, namely:

Where will this debate take us once this line has been crossed? What will scientists demand once they have exhausted the current supply of unwanted IVF embryos? Will those lobbyists in favour of embryonic stem cell research come back to parliament in a year’s time arguing that millions of dollars have been invested in such research and that they need more embryos harvested?

With this in mind, I shudder to think what debates we will face in 2009, 2010 and beyond when perhaps even more unbending demands come from the scientific community.

As one of the younger members of this parliament, I will probably live to see the day of the inevitable consequences of the passing of this bill. Down the track will we be horrified to see those wealthy enough to do so pay to clone themselves and harvest the spare parts and skin? Some will immediately jump up in rage and call me an alarmist, as they did in 2002 when I said at that time that we had commenced the path to cloning.

Should this bill be passed, we will have entered the brave new world of the new utilitarianism—a moral and ethical minefield and a dark step into the unknown with potentially disastrous outcomes. Therapeutic cloning is a step in the wrong direction—a depraved practice reflecting nothing more than the turpitudes of modern scientific egos in their race to the bottom of the ethics ladder. The proponents of therapeutic cloning have such little faith in their craft that they now enter into a debate on semantics. For instance, the public hearings of the Lockhart review committee in Melbourne heard from witnesses who suggested that the public feared the term ‘cloning’ per se, so it was better to couch the notion of human cloning in more sympathetic language. That is why we have such terms as ‘therapeutic cloning’ and ‘somatic cell nuclear transfer’. These terms are misleading and highly deceptive, clearly designed to confuse and lull the public into a full-blown affirmation of this unethical practice.

The journal Nature raised this issue as well when its editorial team commented on the 2005 meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in San Francisco. It said:

The scientists ...fear that the word ‘embryo’ is a lightning rod that attracts negative scrutiny. But the work is far from yielding any therapies, and scientists realised that the word ‘cloning’ was generating public concern. So they decided to adopt a more technical term less likely to stir up strong emotion.

We need to rid this debate of this type of confusion.

Since the passing of the 2002 legislation, those who promised so much have in fact delivered nothing. And since we stepped over the line with the 2002 legislation there has been no successful model of treatment success from embryonic stem cell research in animal models or any current clinical trials or treatments which offer any of the inflated hope that is peddled somewhat vaingloriously by the proponents of therapeutic cloning. In fact, after four years of having access to excess human embryos for research—and with significant taxpayer funded assistance—those clinging to the hope that embryonic stem cell research would be the new panacea for all sorts of complex ailments are entitled to exclaim at the scientists who promised so much: ‘We was robbed!’

What has changed so markedly since 2002 that would justify going down this path? Why are we so swiftly ditching the spirit of the unanimous opposition to cloning that we put in place in 2002? What will the vote in this chamber mean for women, for the biotech industry and for the ambitious scientists who promise so much but in reality can deliver so little? Some members of the House and the Senate have spoken of their great hope for this type of research and accused those opposing it of playing on fear. Let us not get carried away. The scientists and we politicians need to rein in our inflated expectations that these therapies will be the cure for all human suffering. Such an approach is intellectually and scientifically dishonest. Such an approach is holding out false hope to the vulnerable and the weak. Such an approach is peddling an unfortunate myth-making that miracle cures are just a few cloning procedures away—whilst at the same time ensuring the scientific community and the big biotech companies the self-satisfaction and complacency of a dramatically lessened scrutiny.

Lord Winston, the eminent British stem cell expert, succinctly wrote about the dangers of relying on the myth of miracle cures recently when he said:

One of the problems is that in order to persuade the public that we must do this work, we often go rather too far in promising what we might achieve. This is a real issue for the scientists. I am not entirely convinced that embryonic stem cells will, in my lifetime, and possibly anybody’s lifetime for that matter, be holding quite the promise that we desperately hope they will.

This bill raises a whole set of concerning scenarios—for instance, why are there not more concerns being raised about the inefficiencies of therapeutic cloning? What about the problems associated with abnormal genetic programming? Why should we ignore the moral and ethical difficulty of the creation of a new embryo as part of the process? What about the potential minefield of problems based on the fact that to clone embryos requires a significant number of human eggs—and where are they going to come from? Will women be forced to harvest eggs in aid of ambitious biotech companies? Will we see a trade in eggs from females in the years to come? How are we going to regulate this secretive and lucrative research to ensure it is carried out within the alleged safeguards of the legislation? Is it ethical to harvest eggs from destroyed female embryos? What further demands will we as legislators be asked to bow to in four years time? These are questions that go unanswered in this legislation.

One of the terms of reference of the Lockhart review was the reflection of community standards in any future enabling legislation. The prominent Jesuit Frank Brennan—not someone I would normally quote in this place—basically got it right when he said:

The science has not changed, the moral arguments have not changed, community standards have not changed. It should take more than a handful of scientists seeking out more value-free research environments for our politicians to change their conscience vote.

For my part, I will not support legislation that essentially places some lives in a different category to others; where one class of human life is more important than another; where human life is downgraded to an interchangeable commodity placed in the hands of ambitious scientists; where the powerful embryo experimentation and the cashed-up biotech lobby groups can operate free from the constraints that the rest of society operate under; and where we fall further down the slippery slope through allowing the wanton destruction of human embryos in the name of scientific extremism.

I support and will continue to support scientific research in its objective of alleviating human misery. That is why I support research using adult and cord stem cells, which is the type of cell research that actually has the runs on the board and has provided many positive outcomes, unlike the track record of experimentation with the cells from embryos, which is fraught with difficulty and has not produced any results that would give impetus to further liberalisation of the current restrictions. Even if such results existed, the end in itself should not justify—in the concise words of the member for Gwydir—this ‘further decisive slide down the slippery slope into a scientific barbarism that will treat some human beings as raw material to be cannibalised at will for the benefit of other human beings’.

Others in this debate have spoken of serious reservations about the implications of passing this bill and of concerns about where it could lead, yet they are still voting for the bill—something I do not understand, but it is a conscience vote and such is their choice. I for one do not believe that we can airbrush out of existence the immense moral and ethical concerns that arise through the deliberate creation of life only to be harvested for the so-called benefit of others. That is why I will be voting against this bill.

See this speech in context