Peta Credlin: Law allowing children to have two genetic parents should not have been passed

Peta Credlin argues that while we elect politicians to decide the hard questions, there’s one law that should not have been passed this week without more public debate.

I bet you didn’t know that this week the parliament passed a law allowing children to have more than two genetic parents. Some months ago, “Meave’s Law” passed the House of Representatives without a vote at all and last week it passed the Senate too, 37 to 17 on a conscience vote.

I think we all understand a parent’s desperation for their children to be healthy and the hope that IVF gives so many. There are few things more heart-wrenching and family stressing than a child with severe birth defects. Hence the push by parents who might pass on mitochondrial disease to allow embryos to be specifically created for the purpose of replacing defective mitochondria rather than use donor eggs or adopt.

According to an ABC Science Report, “most of the one in 200 people estimated to have these defects never go on to develop disease but it can be devastating for the small number that do”.

Thanks to this law, trials of mitochondrial donation can now go ahead: “an IVF technique that replaces a woman’s defective mitochondria with those from another woman’s egg to help her conceive a healthy child” that could prevent the development of catastrophic mitochondrial disease in “about 60 births per year in Australia”.

The laws that had to be amended included the prohibition on creating embryos for research and the prohibition on creating an embryo with the DNA of more than two people. Meave’s Law advocates say this doesn’t open the door to “designer babies” but that’s what is always said every time the law changes to permit things once unimaginable. Next, it will be same sex couples wanting to ensure that both partners’ DNA is included in their IVF children.

Sure, our “parents” are those who raise us; but the legal, social and cultural ramifications of allowing what are genetically “three parent babies” have not even begun to be widely considered.

Some Australians will support changes like this, others will not; at the very least, it’s a biological leap like no other and should be debated in the community, not just rushed through the parliament late at night.

It’s always been a fundamental ethical position that human beings should not simply be used as a means to an end; that we don’t create embryos with the sole purpose of being ‘spare parts’ for another human being. Just because we can do things doesn’t mean we should. As Labor’s Deb O’Neill told the Senate, creating a potential human life only to destroy it for the benefit of another life crosses a “new frontier for society”.

I know we elect politicians to decide the hard questions but none of this should have happened without much more public debate.

And that fact that it was buried in the House of Representatives and only debated in the dying days of this parliament in the Senate tells me everything; they didn’t want us to understand what was happening and what it really means beyond the issue of mitochondria disease.

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Originally published as Peta Credlin: Law allowing children to have two genetic parents should not have been passed