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Pro-abortion Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett wants Canada to initiate an industry for human sperm and eggs.  Bennett objects to the country’s Assisted Human Reproduction Act, which banned the sale of gametes and human embryos.

At the National Post on Monday:

The law criminalizing payment for donor gametes or surrogates is putting desperate couples “in the hands of people that may not be competent or qualified,” says Liberal MP Dr. Carolyn Bennett, a former public health minister.

“This is something that we could control and regulate if it was done here,” she added.

The argument is that we should revoke the ban and give the government oversight of the new gamete industry because people are working around the law, putting themselves and their families at risk.

Clearly the underlying assumption here is that gametes should be available for sale. But if it’s wrong to sell gametes, then we wouldn’t change the law simply because people are doing it anyway.  We don’t legalize murder so that we can protect the murderers.

Suppose a law against buying slaves was driving people to smuggle them in from foreign slave markets.  According to Bennett’s argument, the solution is to make it legal to buy the slaves in Canada, and then make the government complicit by giving it oversight of the industry.

But perhaps it is simply wrong to buy slaves.

This isn’t just about sperm and eggs either.  People like Bennett want embryonic children on the market as well.  Last year, Canada’s new governor general David Johnston called for the sale of embryos in a report he chaired for the Ontario government.  (See LifeSiteNews coverage here.)

We live in a culture where it seems like anything can be bought and sold, but the human person is simply too sacred to be reduced to that level.

Yet we’ve already gone that way.  The demand for marketing human gametes is simply a natural result of our decision to allow artificial reproduction in the first place.  Once we dissociated procreation from the consummative love of man and woman in the marital act, we already reduced the human person to a lab experiment.

But allowing the sale of gametes and embryos is simply another horrific step.  What’s next?  The buying and selling of infants?