I.V.F. a con — professor

Press, 22 September 1987, Page 21

I.V.F. a con — professor

NZPA-AAP Melbourne The international “prolife” movement is backing opposition to in-vitro fertilisation, a British antiabortion campaigner told AAP.

The chairman of the British anti-abortion group, Life, Professor John Scarisbrick, has visited Australia to promote opposition to all fertility techniques and embryo research, including world-leading research at Melbourne’s Monash University. Professor Scarisbrick, an historian, said I.V.F. dehumanised birth and made it the property of scientists and doctors. “You don’t make babies with white coated chaps in a laboratory,” he said. “The parents are not parents and the children are not their children.” Abortion and I.V.F. “thingified” children by making them disposables in a consumer society, he said.

The prospect was worsened by the production of extra embryos which were experimented on and disposed of to suit scientists.

“The scars which I.V.F. leaves are similar to, and perhajis worse than, the scars of abortion.” Professor Scarisbrick

said I.V.F. was a glamorous money-spinning technique. It was blocking out the development of simpler, more natural techniques, such as taking an egg round a blockage in a fallopian tube rather than removing it for testtube fertilisation. “I believe I.V.F. is a con. It allows doctors to exercise control with the supreme arrogance of generating human life. “They are so obsessed with I.V.F. they are refusing to look at anything else.

“We could produce a solution to infertility for a tenth of the cost, in a quarter of the time, with a thousandth of the trauma.” In Britain, where the Thatcher Government has promised to bring in I.V.F. legislation during the present Parliamentary term, “pro-lifers” are Campaigning for the adoption of a clause which will forbid spare embryos, storage or ‘anything beyond direct infertility relief.

“I’m not happy with allowing any I.V.F. because I don’t trust the doctors.

“But if we keep saying this loudly enough, the bill may help,” Professor Scarisbrick coi><