Back in 2000, the IVF issue triggered Webdiary’s first sustained and passionate debate. Today, my comment piece on its resurrection, and what you said in 2000.

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The proposed ban on single women accessing sperm banks and IVF clinics was a hell for leather debate in 2000, so now that John Howard again wants to do it, here’s a reminder of the story so far.

In August 1999 a straight single woman consulted a Melbourne gynaecologist specialising in reproductive technology. He believed he should assist but could not because Victorian law banned access to single women. He asked the Federal Court to rule that the Victorian law was overridden by the federal Sex Discrimination Act, which bans marital status discrimination in the provision of services.

As required when constitutional questions are raised, he advised State and Federal Attorney-Generals, who had the right to intervene, and then to appeal. None were interested, including federal Attorney-General Daryl Williams.

In July 2000, Justice Sundberg struck down the Victorian law. John Howard suddenly cried foul, reversing his government’s lack of interest. He discovered a new, Howard right, “the right of a child born into this world to have the role model of both a mother and a father”.

His bombshell wrecked what had been a successful Labor Party federal conference, as Labor feminists and some Labor Catholics fought it out. Labor finally agreed to oppose the plan, but several Senators said they could cross the floor.

On August 17, 2000, Williams released his proposed new law. I thought there must be a drafting error, for it contradicted Howard’s new right. Williams made it lawful for the States to refuse or restrict access “on the grounds of marital status”. That meant States could ban defacto couples.

But Williams said this effect was intended, even though he’d just told parliament his law meant the States could limit fertility treatments “to married women and those living in a defacto relationship”.

Asked why he discriminated against defacto couples for the first time in sixteen years, when the Sex Discrimination Act passed, he said the States should legislate “as they consider appropriate”. Howard’s office backed Williams.

How could Liberal Party women have condoned this deceit? Western Australian Liberal Julie Bishop’s State asserts it can discriminate by saying women married for a day can get access but only defactos who’ve been living together for five years. She was outraged – the party room had approved William’s bill sight unseen and he had not disclosed that it allowed discrimination against defacto couples. She protested to Howard and Williams.

By next afternoon, Howard backed down. A plan ripping apart the Labor party was now threatening to rip apart his own.

The defacto scam only emphasised that the child’s right to the care of a mother and father was not the basis of government action, but a cover for it. If it was the basis, the new law would have guaranteed access to a single woman when her sperm donor or another man had agreed to be a father to the child.

By February 2001, the Senate committee examining the bill reported – Liberal moderate Marise Payne, the Democrats and Labor found the bill breached our international obligations. The bill never came to the Senate and elapsed when the election was called. (In August 2001, Williams gave Catholic Bishops permission to appeal the Sundberg decision, now more than a year old, to the High Court.)

Yet last week, when the High Court threw out the appeal – partly because had the government cared it would have intervened in the case earlier – Howard again finds the matter urgent. Just think of all those poor children born of single mothers through assisted reproduction without “a father” while Howard twiddled his thumbs!

Howard said he might now give the Liberals a conscience vote. Another unprecedented action, surely, proving yet again the relativism of his conscience. It wasn’t a matter of conscience in 2000 – nor was the mandatory sentencing of kids in the Northern Territory, where his concern for children’s rights was non-existent and he turned down desperate pleas for a conscience vote from some Liberals.

If he goes ahead with a conscience vote, it will be because he’d believe Labor will be in turmoil again, and an already fragile party since the split on refugee policy will weaken yet further. Perfect wedge politics.

If he drops the conscience vote, it will be because he feels there’ll be enough dissenters in his Party to risk defeat for the bill anyway, or at least to cause him embarrassment.

Using people desperate to have children for craven political purpose is not nice to see. That’s politics, Howard style.

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WEBDIARY ARCHIVE

Webdiary 1: Random thoughts about the IVF debate

The more I think about this IVF issue the more layers it gets. Here’s a few random thoughts that have popped up in my head – please throw yours in too and we’ll try for a synthesis of facets, meanings and consequences.

IVF

Many people – religious and otherwise – don’t like IVF per se. They think it interferes with what should be a rather more natural conception process. Where to draw the line these days is a big issue – with fertility drugs, artificial insemination?

The real question in this debate is that since IVF is here to stay, should it be available on a non-discriminatory basis? It’s not good enough for the Catholic Church leadership to see a discriminatory restriction on IVF as a win in the battle to ban IVF, because a ban is not realistic.

WOMEN ALONE

The silence of female Liberal MPs is eerie. There are several feminist women in the Party who have fought as individuals for a woman’s right to control her reproduction. They’ve fought battles for the pill and for abortion.

Now the sheer populist appeal of Howard’s stand and the party-political joys of watching Labor tear itself apart have seen these women either not return calls or call back to say they won’t comment. Goodbye Liberal feminism when the chips are down. Remember, there has been no partyroom decision on this.

As of today Labor has no policy on the matter, despite the fact that the Sex Discrimination Act was a Hawke Labor government achievement against great odds.

This means that advocates of women’s rights are reliant only on the Democrats and the Greens in the public debate. So sad. It’s not even a fair fight in the sphere of public conversation.

It’s at times like these that you realise the terrible injustice of having so few women in federal politics. They’re just another minority when it comes to issues that are central to women but on which men have all sorts of emotions, prejudices and fears they seem to need to force down women’s throats.

WOMEN TOGETHER

But wait. The Sex Discrimination Act was the result of fierce lobbying by an activist women’s movement in the 1970s and 1980s. They were radical, ideological and deeply committed to the cause.

Since then, feminist has in some respects become mainstream, and young women have in many cases come to believe that discrimination on the basis of gender or marital status is over.

This debate could bring the generations together at last. Older feminists can remember the old battles, younger women will discover the excitement of the repeat performance. Both groups will teach each other. This could be the rebirth of feminist activism. Watch out, John.

AND THE WINNER IS …

Do Australians really want to be told by the State what to do in their personal life? The strength of that strand of the Australian psyche will be tested in this debate. Howard looks like he’s on a sure winner, but when you polarise opinion so hard on lifestyle as Howard has done on this one, you just never know.

I remember attending an Opposition party hosted by Peter Reith many years ago, and having a spirited debate with John Howard on citizenship initiated referenda. No way, I said, citing majority opinion in favour of capital punishment.

Howard accused me of elitism. He said he too opposed capital punishment, but believed passionately that a sustained debate on its merits leading up to a referendum would see Australians vote no.

Well John, here comes the debate. With Labor so split, this one will be fought mainly at a grassroots level, in town protests, public meetings, and over dinner tables.

CULTURAL ROLLBACK

Banning discrimination on the grounds of marital status helps married women, and single women, married men and single men. The Sex Discrimination Act was riddled with exceptions after tumultuous public debate. The Act helped decide who we were and what we believed in. Some exceptions have since gone as the slow progression to judging people on their merits continued.

I see this reopening of the discrimination debate as an aspect of Howard’s CULTURAL rollback setting itself up against Labor’s GST rollback. Open the gate to discrimination and the potential consequences are horrifying. He has coopted the human rights debate to suit his ends – speaking of the right of the child to a mother and father involved in his or her upbringing.

How ironic – a man who has trashed the human rights discourse as irrelevant when it comes to race discrimination (Wik) and the right to a fair trial (mandatory sentencing) suddenly turns it all around when it suits his value system to do so. Human rights should not be treated as political footballs to be forgotten if unpopular and promoted if popular.

I have never heard of a child’s right to a mother and father involved in his or her upbringing before, but Howard’s invention means, by definition, that this new right should be enforceable. Should a child be able to sue his or her mother for failing to ensure a father on hand?

Should the State enforce the right to a father by requiring him to participate in the child’s upbringing.?

Should the State take a child away from a family without a live-in father and put him or her into a family which has one?

Imagine how the debate changes if the IVF criteria include the requirement that the mother should be able to show that the child will be brought up with love, with the family involved, however constituted, willing and able to provide the necessary physical, emotional and intellectual support.

This is not a right – it cannot be given the failures of many parents – but it is an obligation which the State should be satisfied of before providing financial assistance for IVF. This approach does concern itself with the welfare of the child – John Howard’s approach merely discriminates on the basis of his preferred family model. Guess what John, the overwhelming majority of child abuse is perpetrated by live in fathers or step fathers. Guess what John, most homosexuals were born of straight parents, and on my anecdotal experience, all children of homosexual parents are straight.

The Liberals’ core philosophy of respect for individual choice has been replaced by John Howard’s moral fundamentalism.

HOWARD AND HURT

A lesbian friend of mine had a baby two years ago. A male friend donated his sperm. She needed fertility drugs to conceive, and if that hadn’t worked, she was prepared to incur the expense and pain of IVF.

The father has agreed to be identified as her son’s father when he asks the question. He visits every few months to say Hi. My friend has been assiduous in having male friends involved with her son, so he has male role models. Her son is healthy, happy and loved. She finds it hard to mange her full-time job and being with her son as much as she wants, and has asked her employer to consider letting her work part time, because she wants more time with him.

Her stated reaction to Howard’s announcement was outrage at the financial inequity of it all. She pays her taxes and her Medicare levy. Yet that was just cover for her devastation. Howard has told her the State disapproves of who she is, how she lives her life, and her capacity as a mother, without knowing who she is as a person.

Howard has never been for all of us, and now he is getting more explicit in saying which of us he targets for discrimination. My friend is fighting back. At her son’s birthday party tomorrow, her friends, gay and straight, will bring their children on the understanding that they want to be interviewed by the local paper. They want to say my friend is a good mother and that her son has the rights most children don’t have.

THE RIGHT TO IDENTITY

To me, a child should have a right to know who his or her father is. That’s the basis on which adopted children now have rights to access their adoption records. There is a real debate to be had on the identity confusion that can result when a child has no way of finding out who his or her father is. Personally, I could accept State intervention to insist that State funded procedures to help a woman get pregnant include that requirement. But that isn’t what this is really all about, is it, John.

HOWARD AT LARGE

This is an exchange between a listener to Melbourne Radio 3AW and our Prime Minister this morning.

Lisa: I’m a lesbian. I have a child. I didn’t go through IVF because it wasn’t available to me. I took the risk of getting AIDS to have a child. I changed my career to make sure I could be home after school and also thought every long and hard before I did it. Also something else I have heard you say is that its a lifestyle choice. Well when I was 17 and realised (I was a lesbian) I definitely wanted to be was a parent. There is nothing I could do about being a lesbian, but there was something I could do about being a parent and I thought long and hard, and I am a damn good parent with a wonderful son who excels at school, who gets fed, looked after, better than the children that I work with with two parents that are drug addicted, 25, with five children and one on the way and they could be entitled to IVF but I can’t. Can you answer me, where is the logic in this?

PM: Lisa, it is not just a question of the government intervening in something which is intensely personal because there are public resources made available in relation to IVF, so therefore the government does have a role. I mean the idea that governments who are the representatives of the entire community have no role at all in relation to a service which is in part at least funded by the general community of taxpayers is wrong.

Now I don’t criticise in any way or denigrate in any way your affection towards your child. Equally I dont think it is fair to, as your observation and comparison suggested, to categorise all two parent families in quite the derogatory terms of the example you quoted. I mean look there are good and bad two parent families. There are good and bad parents. That is not the issue.

I mean the issue is whether you believe, or society believes, in the principle that every child born in this world should have the expectation, other things being equal, of the care and love of a mother and a father, whether that is a reasonable principle.

Now, I happen to believe and the majority of my colleagues in the government happen to believe that that is a good principle and we think its a principle that’s worth supporting and its a principle that is worth promoting. It does not represent a negative value judgement on people who have a homosexual lifestyle. I have never wanted people in that situation to be discriminated against or persecuted and that is why I supported the former Labor governments legislation to over turn the Tasmanian anti homosexual laws. Its a question of whether you wish to positively assert that fundamental right of children and I think that fundamental right takes precedence over all other rights in this case.

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Your say

David Hancock

What the debate should be about is whether we should fund IVF at all. These procedures cost us huge amounts of money, and producing sickly and unhealthy premature babies most of the time. To what end? There are far more important areas where that money could be spent. Areas where people really suffer.

The way this turd floats these red-herrings and people who should know better bite makes me sick. The words of Bob Hughes after we lost the republican debate come to mind constantly these days………”The country’s not fucked, merely delayed”…………………

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Georgia Gray in Fairhaven

Do we know what polls say on this issue? It’s surely not just the Labor party which is divided. There must be some concerned people in the Liberal party? Maybe not. Bob Carr’s line seemed to diffuse it a bit with ‘this is a private matter for women and their doctors’. Labor just has to do what’s right – support human rights and get on with the big picture. I don’t reckon too many cross country people will change their vote on this. It will be forgotten soon if handled decisively.

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David Davis in Switzerland

John Howard may be the bad guy in this most recent issue regarding lesbians and IVF. His “tolerance without endorsement” is an interesting policy to say the least. Perhaps this is an example of where pandering to the masses is not always as attractive as it intuitively seems.

I don’t really see Labor as being very different though. Few mainstream politicians are prepared to go out on a limb on these kinds of issues.

This kind of discrimination cuts equally across both parties. Of course there are different aspects to the hardliners in each party but the end result is the same.

The “tolerance-speak” on both sides is just a thin veneer to cover up a great deal of very real intolerance. No influential politician (I mean REALLY influential) ever takes leadership on such issues.

Several continental European countries are a long way ahead of Australia in this regard. They may also be ahead of their respective publics but that isnt ALWAYS a bad thing.

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Webdiary 2: Progressive lefties and libertarian liberals unite!

In the week before Parliament resumes, when the cultural wars will be toe-to-toe and eyeball-to-eyeball, IVF e-mails are running hot. We have a wildly skewed readership judging from the poll results and e-mails. Progressive lefties and libertarian liberals unite!

Nick: Population policy

In a country where birth rates are stillborn or even negative, every cent that goes to ‘singles’ and ‘lezzo wannabes’ is well spent. Somebody has to have the bloody children.

Dell Horey: Pre-human rights and the relevance of men

What I find really hard to get my head around is the argument that this is about the rights of children to have both a mother and father. It is so weird because they seem to be setting themselves up as the defenders of children who don’t even yet exist – and they are so concerned about protecting their rights, they want to stop them from existing.

So women who do exist have to have their rights diminished unless they can find a man. It is even worse than the anti-abortion argument. The hierarchy of rights seems to be States then children then women!

Part of the problem is that most of the people in the Cabinet are unable to imagine that this issue would ever apply to them or people they love. Of course, their children and grandchildren will do the right thing – be heterosexual, find the perfect person to marry and have perfect babies. I just wonder how John Howard would see things if his daughter got to her late 30s and hadn’t found the “right man”?

While (the yet to exist) children must have their right to both a male and female parent apparently it is ok not to try to protect them from potential diseases such as HIV and hepatitis.

There is a sense that this is about men claiming their relevance in society. Some men feel very threatened by the thought that they are not essential in happy family life – but I don’t think that women can claim that they are essential either – there are some great single parent families around with a male head. You can’t make generalisations about this and men and women have to make meaningful contributions not just think it comes just by being there.

The hurt from the debate is enormous – and it may explain the silence from the Liberal women. If they have witnessed anything like the response I have they probably don’t know what to do with all that anger. It isn’t only lesbians either. My dentist, who is a very calm and I would have thought conservative woman, asked me what I thought about the latest thing “our lovely PM” had to say. She was so angry that I was quite surprised. She was insulted that someone would suggest that as a single mother her child was being properly looked after. “I’m a very good parent,” she said and indignant that someone should suggest she should pick up someone if she wanted to have another child.

I am just so infuriated by the whole idea that some people in society (who just happen to be women) are permitted to participate fully when it comes to paying taxes and using skills and talents but others can determine whether they can have the right to use the services and resources available to others in community. Basically what is being said is that women can’t be trusted to make decisions on their own about what is good for them when it comes to children.

While in some ways I think it is a worthwhile debate to have – like a lot of other issues I worry about who ends up paying the cost for that public debate. It isn’t really the politicians who will be affected by it but women and children who didn’t ask for their private lives to be made so public.While there may be some long-term benefit, it could be very painful (I am thinking here of the teenage children of a lesbian friend who don’t want their schoolfriends to know about their mother’s sexuality).

Brendan:Us and them

Politicians create their meaning through division. Howard is a master of it. By demonising lesbian mothers, Howard has created another outcast group as a vehicle for building his group’s identity.

He did it with Aborigines during Wik (remember the map?). He’ll do it again before the next election with some other group. And those small l liberals will keep quiet as they did during Wik and have subsequently on mandatory sentencing – moral cowards the lot of them. They should read Dante (Inferno: Canto 111). They wait for Costello, but he won’t save them.

This talk of children’s rights I find particularly dishonest. Deconstruct it and they are saying, better not to be born rather than be born without a father. Are they serious? If they were, they would advocate abortion as a vehicle for social engineering. But of course that’s not what they mean.

They are saying, you must conform to our version of family and society or you can have no rights. Of course, the implication is that no one can have genuine rights because rights will always be conditional on conformity. So in the end it’s the same old authoritarian stuff wrapped up in the rhetoric of the rights of the child.

People who make family structure and conception processes an issue make the world smaller and sadder for all of us. But they divide and conquer only themselves.

Cathy Bannister: Why not sterilise?

Howard claims that “every child needs a father and a mother”, and that, therefore, single mothers and lesbians should be barred from the IVF program. The extension of this is almost too backward to contemplate.

What next, denying Medicare payment for obstetric care for single and lesbian women? The same logic could be used to justify forced sterilisations: “We’re not discriminating against you as a lesbian, it’s just that any child you had would be so messed up it would be better for them if they didn’t exist.”

What’s so intrinsically important about “a mother and a father” anyway? Why not just two loving parents? Why not one loving parent and enough funding and social support to actually do a half decent job? It’s old fashioned Christian disapproval of non-trad families, pure and simple. The stance is otherwise totally indefensible.

He’s not even arguing the rights of the child but the rights of the hypothetical child. And this hypothetical child is being denied the right to exist, on the basis of it’s own hypothetical rights! At this point the logic disappears up it’s own fundament.

Never, ever, has a politician made me so angry.

Emma Bridge in Hobart: Children’s rights after conception

The ethics of IVF are difficult – who could forget those early pictures of the beaming doctors who brought us the technology, who were always given credit for the babies as if the mothers were irrelevant in the process. Unfortunately our society still values reproduction so highly that those who cannot conceive are left feeling incomplete or failures. Unlike other cultures, we have no concept of the community sharing in the upbringing of children leaving direct parenting as the only way to “have” children. If we resolved this, maybe some of the pressure on reproductive technologies may lessen. Given the way we are though, I firmly believe all women should have equal access to the technology.

The irony of Howard championing the rights of children (to have a father in their lives) is almost laughable. Here is a government which has done nothing to improve conditions to allow working parents of either gender be more involved in their children’s lives.

Here is a government made up largely of men who have spent huge periods of time almost completely absent from their children’s lives.

Here is a government that will not apologise for a policy under which the State denied children the right to either a mother or father (well not a black one anyway).

Here are a bunch of hypocrites.

I find it distressing to see in a lot of the news coverage of this issue, how it has forced women to belittle other women’s mothering. The Victorian woman whose rights were being tested in the first place has been quoted as saying she will make a better mother than young women who sleep around and get pregnant (or something like that). Lesbians have been quoted as saying they are better mothers than another group of women and so we go on. As a mother and a daughter and a feminist I find this very sad, that women have been pitted against other women to come up with their “good mother” credentials. Lets not get sucked into that. We are all the best mothers we can be, sometimes that isn’t good enough but it is very very rarely from a lack of trying.

David Davis in Switzerland: An outraged Howard fan

Your “random thoughts about the IVF debate” was quite incredible. Incredibly thought provoking and moving. I liked the way you employed the term “the State”. To me, the term “the State” has particular overtones which make me feel uneasy. I don’t want “the State” in my life. Who does?

We don’t need the State to be making value judgments and choices like these. I really thought that respect for individual choice was a core Liberal philosophy (as you say). I always thought it was one of the most attractive aspects of the Liberal Party that was under-promoted.

But then, I suppose it is no use promoting something that isn’t really respected and enacted in practical ways by the people at the top. People that do have a coherent philosophy will always be marginalised and fail in politics. Politics is the art of compromise, sell-out and the lowest common denominator.

I haven’t noticed the Australian Tax Office making value judgments when it takes the money from us. So one arm of government takes our personal resources without discrimination, while another arm of government in the form of Medicare then nominates some people as worthy and others as not. It’s really quite sickening.

This is just good old fashioned politics and discrimination in the most pure form imaginable.

It hurts people to the core though. They can dress it up however they like but they can’t run away from the reality. The reality is they are pointing a discriminating, intolerant finger at certain Australians and are deeming them to be unworthy.

The rhetoric becomes really offensive when you are personally affected or know someone who is.

The story of your friend is very moving. I can understand how hurt she would be and really love the idea that she’s fighting back with the support of her friends.

Unless people stand up and be counted, we will be stuck with the medieval mindset for a lot longer.

Carolyn: Dissident voice

How very strange that you should treat facetiously the “right” of children to a mother and father, yet totally accept the very modern, very recent, and entirely unsupportable concept of the “right” to have a child.

No government in the world can legislate to give anyone the “right” to have a child, the whole notion of such a right is entirely artificial (no pun intended). Why has the public and the media accepted such a nonsensical right?

If we accept that everyone (let’s include men as well as women here, shall we?) has the right to have a child, or many children, then, by the same logic that you deride the concept of a child’s right to a mother and father, that is, “Should a child be able to sue his or her mother for failing to ensure a father on hand?”, we are led, inevitably, to the question “Should a person be able to sue the Government for failing to ensure they have a children if they want them?”

The next step, logically, is the right, not just to have a baby but to bare a healthy baby, followed by the right to bare a healthy, happy, intelligent and grateful child etc, etc. When the initial concept is so utterly artificial, there is no natural point at which to stop. The perversity of treating babies as a consumer item has no natural or social boundaries.

Let’s stop pretending that there is something good or altruistic about any of this: if single women can demand to be impregnated with tax payers’ financial support, the next logical step is that single men, of whatever persuasion, should also be permitted to buy a baby with taxpayers’ financial support.

Never, never, in history have children been so totally treated as a commodity to satisfy the unquenchable wants of adults (not needs, wants!). Whether taxpayer funded or not, is it really a reflection of a healthy society, and healthy adults, if we treat conception and children as an entitlement to be exercised regardless of how extreme or artificial the means required to achieve that entitlement? And regardless of the consequences and lifetime impact on the children concerned?

No amount of parental love and devotion can override fundamental social constructs that can & will damage a lot of these proposed children. What a self-absorbed, self-obsessed, self-indulgent, bratty generation of adults we have become.

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Webdiary 3. And now for something completely different

Moira Rayner, director of the London Children’s Rights Commissioner’s Office (a former equal opportunity commissioner in Victoria, Real Republic delegate to the Constitutional Convention and author of “Rooting Democracy”:

Now the ‘real’ agenda is not the rights of the child or even the integrity of the traditional family. It seems to be:

1. Divide the ALP. Brilliant. Worked. Plenty of good Catholics in the Labor Party.

2. Distinguish between ‘good’ mothers and unpartnered mothers. Good precedent for the delayed response to the pregnancy discrimination report (a Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Report prepared by the Coalition-appointed Sex Discrimination Commissioner Susan Halliday calling for laws to ban discrimination based on pregnancy) which the Government hasn’t responded to now for over a year. Then we can introduce a response that rewards married pregnant women: a tax benefit to the husband of a woman who gets ‘leave’ perhaps?

3. Brownie points for talking about ‘the rights of the child’ without referring to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. This doesn’t actually mention the right of a child to two parents. It does protect the child’s right to an identity (breached by the ‘stolen generation’ policies, anonymity of gamete donors, denial of identifying information to adoptees during a child’s minority) and the right not to be separated from parents without consent (denied by, for example, deporting the custodial parent of Australian-born children) and the right to have their rights considered (as decided by the High Court in Teoh’s case – now overridden by Federal law). The UNCRC does enable the Commonwealth to override inconsistent legislation. And mandatory sentencing legislation, come to that. Mmm.

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Webdiary 4. More on IVF, genetics, parties and pictures

The IVF debate ain’t going to go away for a long time. Today’s revelations in the Herald that the Government plans to amend the Sex Discrimination Act to give the States open slather to discriminate against de factos as well as single women has given Labor its first chance to get on the front foot. (NEWSFLASH: The Attorney-General has just backed down and will now amend his own bill to protect de facto couples.)

The layers on layers in this debate will produce, I predict:

* Labor proposing legislation to give children conceived through IVF and artificial insemination the right to be told the identity of the father at 18. Tasmanian independent Brian Harradine and Democrats Senator Aden Ridgeway have already publicly supported this idea. The Minister for Health, Michael Wooldridge, also wants this but has been unable to convince the States to do anything. Sooner or later, Howard will be forced, through his own “rights of the child” rhetoric, to confront this issue.

* The inevitable Senate inquiry into the Coalition’s plan will be passionate, wide ranging and could even come up with sensible policy on this fraught area, instead of Howard’s knee jerk abolition of fundamental human rights. Expected participants include Joe de Bruyn from the shoppies’ union and the Howard-appointed Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Susan Halliday, who’s been left out in the cold by the Government and is so angry at the loss of protection for de factos that she’ll put her good relations with government on the line to fight for women’s rights.

* Attorney-General Daryl Williams has been forced to shift the Government’s rationale for the amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act from seeking to ensure a child has the right to a father, to vacating the field on marital status discrimination when it comes to IVF and artificial insemination. This is intellectually untenable, as Howard has invoked the “rights” of the child to justify his action, which shows he believes there is a national responsibility in this area. You’d also have to start wondering what other human rights protections in the Sex Discrimination Act the Government thinks should be left to the States. Also, since Howard finds the whole thing so important, why not produce a national policy? It’s sort of like euthanasia when you think about it. Howard on that one said the issue was so fundamental it couldn’t be left to the Northern Territory or the States.

* The Senate inquiry could well be broadened to take on other big genetic issues so far undealt with. It could investigate the thorny issue of genetic testing by insurance companies, employers and banks. It could also take in cloning.

* Howard has opened a Pandora’s box and he can’t close it now. As Aden Ridgeway says, without national legislation, there can be no national data base, and tragic stories of half siblings falling in love without knowing their biological relationship are bound to happen.

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Name withheld

I am a 30-something full-time working mother. I pride myself on being a feminist and my husband and I (yes, he and I are married) try our best to bring our boys up to be feminists as well.

Throughout the entire debate on IVF and the issue of lesbians and single mothers, I have had a few problems with how I felt that the issue is not so black-and-white. All my women and men friends expect me to support the lesbians and boo Howard’s stance on this issue.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no problems with lesbians bringing up children, be they adopted or children from one or both of them when they were in heterosexual relationships. I have no problems at all with that situation. In fact, some lesbian couples I know would make very good parents.

What I have problems with though is this: If you are a lesbian, why on earth do you want to biologically have your own child? Isn’t your child one of the many consequences, accidental, happy or otherwise, of a heterosexual relationship and if you don’t want such a relationship, then why do you want the consequences?

If you have maternal instincts that you need to satisfy, then foster a child, adopt a child, whatever. Why insist on IVF? To my mind, IVF technology is to treat and address a medical need, not a sexual preference. The ethics have not kept up with the technology but hang on a minute, why on earth do lesbians or for that matter, gay men have to have everything?

If I go into a relationship that would not enable me to conceive and have a child, then I go into it with my eyes wide open; I don’t turn around and expect society to owe me a living and satisfy my maternal instincts regardless of the costs.

I think it is obscene to put lesbian women on the same standing (as it were) as heterosexual couples who medically and health wise have a problem conceiving. [MARGO: Lesbians go into IVF for the same reason – that they have a problem conceiving. Hell, you wouldn’t go through all that pain, with such low odds of success, otherwise.] It is denying the heterosexual couple’s very real problems of conception, de-valuing their trauma of trying to have a child, if you equate their problem to that of a lesbian couple’s.

Am I the only one who thinks like this?

Obviously I haven’t been brave enough to broach this topic amongst our friends for fear of an outcry. What has really niggled me, too, is the way the media and indeed our friends have immediately surmised what our stand on this issue is – oh, they are a left-leaning, well-read, professional couple, surely they must have this view, which is to support the lesbians.

I have no problems with single women having IVF technology, really, I have no problems with heterosexuals having IVF technology, single or married.

I must confess I don’t know what your personal or professional views are on this but if I don’t share this with someone else apart from my husband soon, I am going to scream!

Do raise my concerns in your columns but please do not use my name. I am not sure I am ready to be “outed” yet!

***

Jane O’Dwyer:

Suddenly the gains made for women by feminism seem terribly fragile – all thanks to a clever but nasty piece of political skulduggery on Howard’s part.

There is not really an IVF debate happening here – no debate is actually taking place about IVF itself and the vast number of issues that arise out of it. Perhaps that debate does need to take place. This legislation sure as hell ‘ain’t it.

What this is really about is government-sanctioned discrimination against women on the grounds of marital status and sexuality. The right of women to enjoy all the opportunities of life regardless of marital status was hard won (and I know we still haven’t really got there on sexuality).

If a Federal government can legalise discrimination on the basis of “morality” or State rights, what is next? Does marital status once again become the determining factor for women’s status? It was only 35 years ago that women were tossed out of the workforce when they got married – this sort of discrimination cuts both ways for women. Maybe we haven’t come a long way, baby.

All of which makes the silence of the non-Lyons Forum Liberals and the excessive noise of the SDA Labor Senators look unforgivable. Maybe this will jolt women to protect and build on feminist gains – but do we really need these kind of threats?

How tragic a reflection it will be on our political system if a political stunt is the starting point for unravelling the anti-discrimination act.

#######

 

Webdiary 5: The tangled web of sex, rights and IVF

Oh what tangled webs we weave when we decide to roll back human rights. This story is complicated but bear with it because it will assist in understanding further developments in the IVF debate.

On Thursday, the Attorney-General Daryl Williams produced the legislation the Government claimed would allow States to discriminate against single women in IVF and artificial insemination treatment.

The Current Law:

* Section 22 of the Sex Discrimination Act (SDA) bans marital status discrimination in the provision of services.

* The SDA defines “marital status” as “the status or condition of being single, married, married but living separate and apart from one’s spouse, divorced, widowed or the de facto spouse of another person”

* The SDA defines de facto as two people of the opposite sex who live together “on a ‘bona fide’ domestic basis although not legally married”.

Williams’ First Take:

Easy. His amendment simply said that nothing in section 22 (the ban on marital status discrimination) made it unlawful to “refuse a person access to or restrict a person’s access to assisted reproductive technology services (ARTs) if that refusal or restriction is on the ground of the person’s marital status” and is authorised by a State or territory law.

Williams was simply vacating all Commonwealth protection in the area of marital status discrimination for ART. What that meant, of course, is that a State could ban de facto couples or ban de facto couples who hadn’t been living together for 5, 10 or even 20 years (at least one State has tried to limit access only to married couples and been frustrated because of the SDA). A State could also ban married couples for that matter or even provide that only lesbians could access ART.

There are two extraordinary aspects to Williams’ actions.

First, he did not tell his Coalition colleagues that he planned to remove protection against all forms of marital status discrimination, not just discrimination against single women. At no time did he or the Government generally disclose to the public that this was the plan – instead, Howard made it explicit that the action was motivated by the “right” of a child to a mother and father.

Second, how on earth did Williams think he’d get away with it? The outcry when yours truly broke the story in the Herald on Friday saw Howard act that day to make Williams back down. (To be fair to Williams, he was alone in raising doubts about Howard’s plan in the Cabinet meeting that decided on it.)

Why Did Williams Do It?

Neither Mr Williams nor the Attorney-General’s department are stupid. Removing the protection from de factos was not an “unintended consequence” or a drafting error. Indeed, Williams made that very clear in his comments to me the day before Howard made him back down.

He said then that his amendment was designed to hand back the power to restrict or deny access to IVF and artificial insemination to the States. It was “consistent with the States’ responsibilities in relation to the regulation of the provision of medical care and treatment – that they be permitted to legislate in the area of ARTs as they consider appropriate and in a manner which reflects the views of the community”.

I believe that the REASON he took so stark an approach, which removed de factos as well as singles from the protection of Federal discrimination law is for the very reason that two States CURRENTLY discriminate against de factos.

South Australia and Western Australia restrict access to de factos who have lived together for 5 years. The SDA, in contrast, merely requires that they live together on a bona fide domestic basis. Neither SA or WA require that married couples have lived together for five years.

Thus, a couple might have never lived together, been married for a day and get access. De factos who have lived together for less than five years are out, as are de factos who, say, separated after five years then got back together two years later.

If Williams had followed the Government’s public rationale for amending the SDA, he would have granted an exemption from section 22 to States who discriminated only against single women.

He didn’t because then he would have to define what a de facto relationship is and either override the SA and WA laws or allow all States to require a five-years living together period. The WA and SA regimes are considered certain to be overridden when and if a challenge is mounted. So far no-one has challenged it, preferring instead to get married under protest or go interstate for treatment.

Messy, hey? As Labor’s shadow Attorney-General Robert McClelland told me yesterday, “Williams is in a double bind. If he relies on the Federal definition of de facto, he’ll override the SA and WA laws. If he defines de facto as living together for five years, he is discriminating against de factos.”

Where that does leave the claim of Williams and the Prime Minister on Friday that NO State or Territory currently discriminates against defactos? Pretty sick, I’d say. Williams, in his backdown press release, was careful enough to admit that some States defined de factos differently but claimed that they did not do so “in unreasonably restrictive ways”. Note he was careful not to claim that all State laws complied with the SDA on de factos. No wonder everyone is waiting with bated breath for Williams next attempt. Believe me, Liberal women won’t give his legislation a tick sight unseen as they so foolishly did last time. And perhaps, just perhaps, the penny will finally drop on all those supporters of Howard on this one that he’s not on about the rights of the child at all but the right of the States to discriminate as they wish, regardless of whether the child will get a father or not.

I wrote to Williams today with some questions:

August 21, 2000

Daryl Williams QC,

Attorney-General.

Dear Sir,

Re: AMENDMENTS TO THE SEX DISCRIMINATION ACT

I refer to your press release of August 18 in which you state that no State currently discriminates against de facto couples in the provision of Assisted Reproductive Technology.

Were you aware when making this statement that both the South Australian and Western Australian laws and/or codes of practice restrict access to de facto couples who have lived together for five years and place no such condition on married couples?

Is it your opinion that such restrictions do not amount to a breach of the SDA and, if so, what is the basis of that opinion?

Given that you have now decided to propose an amendment to your proposed amendment to the SDA “to give effect to its commitment in relation to ART services for women in a defacto relationship with a man”, do you propose to define “de facto” for the purpose of the SDA exemption?

If so, do you intend to specify the length of time in which a defacto couple need to live together to qualify for non-discrimination protection?

If so, what time will be nominated and do you intend to impose a similar condition for married couples – ie that they must have lived together for at least five years?

Late today, Williams’ office replied that the Government’s position was that even under his fresh amendment, the WA and SA restrictions should stand. Therefore, it seems, all States will be able to discriminate against de facto couples by requiring of them, not of married couples, to have lived together for five years. After all the denials, the fact remains that de factos have now been drawn into the discrimination net.

***

Dell Horey

I have to respond to ‘Name Withheld’ in case no one else does. I wouldn’t like to see her arguments unchallenged.

As I see it Name Withheld makes major assumptions when she asks why on earth do you [lesbians] want to biologically have your own child?

It seems that she believes that lesbian women are fundamentally different to heterosexual women and not only in regard to their sexuality. This must follow if she believes that the desire (or urge) of lesbians to be mothers is not the same as that which drives heterosexual women.

I am not sure that there is any evidence that would support this belief, nor does it seems rational that such a desire is solely related to sexuality. If it were to hold true, it would suggest that the stronger your sex drive the greater would be your desire to have children. Is there any proof of this? I dont think so.

Advice to lesbians to foster or adopt should hold equally true for infertile heterosexual couples and was certainly the only option prior to IVF when there was no possibility of biological children.

But like the introduction of a lot of new technologies, along with all the problems, we now have new choices. We no longer have to walk everywhere, we can drive (or go by train or plane). Medicines have saved a lot of lives and improved the quality of many others. We can adopt these new technologies and learn how to use them wisely, though admittedly that can take some time.

However, I can’t see how discrimination, based on the direct involvement of a male partner actually helps anyone. I don’t see how men are made redundant by IVF – surely the sperm donors have made a choice too!

The test of our commitment to human rights must be our willingness to see that they apply to all people not only those like ourselves or those that we like.

I am heterosexual, fertile and married and I don’t believe that I would ever (access) use IVF services. However, I will never need to test my belief because I will never be in the situation to need to. But how I possibly think it is OK for me to veto the choices of others.

Most of the lesbian parents that I know were married and only after some struggle came to terms with their sexuality. I think that it is a vast improvement in our society that gradually homosexual people are able to live without the horrors troubled previous generations.

I don’t believe that homosexuals’ whole identity and their rights as citizens be determined by a small part of them.