Thursday June 10, 2010
Overwhelming Support in Ireland for Law Protecting Human Embryos
As government gears up to allow embryonic stem cell research
By Hilary White
DUBLIN, June 10, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – An opinion poll published last Sunday shows overwhelming public support in Ireland for legal protections of embryonic human life.
In the poll, commissioned by Pro-Life Campaign, 950 people were asked whether the government should legislate to protect human embryos from deliberate destruction, either by experimentation or by methods of assisted human reproduction that destroy embryos.
59% responded that the government should legislate to include embryos in the country’s constitutional protections for human life from conception. 12% were opposed and 29% did not know or had no opinion.
53% said Ireland should follow the example of countries such as Italy, Germany and Austria in banning experimentation on human embryos.
Pro-Life Campaign said the numbers actually show the country is over 80% opposed when the “Don’t Knows” are excluded. 83% of those who expressed an opinion support introducing legislation to protect the human embryo while only 17% are outright opposed to such a law.
Moreover, the support for legislation protecting human embryos has risen from 48% in a similar poll in 2005. The number of those with no opinion has shown a corresponding drop, from 39% to 29%.
The poll comes in response to a decision of the Irish Supreme Court that ruled in December last year that embryos created at in vitro fertilisation facilities were not protected by the country’s constitutional guarantee for the right to life because they do not qualify as “unborn.”
The ruling said that embryos were deserving of “respect” and said the government needed to legislate on the issue.
Ireland’s pro-abortion Health Minister, Mary Harney, quickly took the opportunity to announce that the government would begin to prepare legislation that would allow “left-over” embryos from IVF facilities to be used for destructive medical research.
Dr. Ruth Cullen of the Pro-Life Campaign noted that the government appears to have decided ahead of time that using human embryos for research is morally acceptable, in opposition to broad public opinion. She noted that the government’s own Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction, voted 24 to 1 in favour of destructive research on living human embryos.
Dr. Cullen said, “The widely supported views of the pro-life side in this debate have been largely ignored to date, which is intolerable.
“Before any proposed legislation is brought forward, the Government must address this glaringly obvious bias in the consultative process.”
Mary Harney’s announcement came after years of prompting from the research community. The Irish Stem Cell Foundation has launched a full scale media campaign to push the government to allow the use of living human embryos as test subjects in research.
They have argued that the lack of a legal framework was hampering Ireland’s ability to become a leader in the field. The Foundation also maintains that failure to legislate in this area means there is no legal impediment to human cloning.
The Foundation’s Dr Stephen Sullivan told the Irish Examiner that currently, with in vitro fertilisation procedures going forward, embryos left over from IVF are “discarded as medical waste”.
This line of argument is only too familiar to pro-life advocates who have battled reproductive technologies bills elsewhere. In Canada, a human reproductive technology law was put in place in 2004, after years of wrangling in the House of Commons and Parliamentary commissions and committees. It was an omnibus bill that was described by pro-life ethicists as one of the most permissive of such laws in the world.
During the Canadian consultation period many groups broadly opposed to the research, including the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, supported the bill on the grounds that “some law is better than none” and that at least the proposed legislation created a legal framework in which restrictions could later be proposed. Since the passage of the law, however, the public debate has died out and no further restrictions have been put in place in Canada.
Pro-life groups in Ireland are broadly active in educational campaigns, but appear to have their work cut out for them on the early life issues surrounding embryo creation and research. The same poll by the Pro-Life Campaign showed that more than half of the respondents, 56%, did not know the difference between adult and embryonic stem cell research.