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{
    "id": 542050,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/542050/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 60,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. (Prof.) Nyikal",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 434,
        "legal_name": "James Nyikal",
        "slug": "james-nyikal"
    },
    "content": "Hon. Speaker, there is the situation that once you have many embryos and you are transferring them, you will be forced to reduce their number. Ethically, at that point that is a human being. The issue is which embryos you will destroy, which one you will use and what you will do with the rest. These are the offshoots of the good technology that is making us have babies when we cannot. There are other issues. For example, such embryos can be frozen and kept for years. We need a law to say how long these embryos are going to be kept, and if you keep them, what you are going to do with them. Who can you transfer them to? Who can use them? In whose hands should they be? We need a law to look into such issues. Our Constitution defines sex as it takes place between a man and a woman. What is possible is that people in same sex marriage can get a baby because now we cannot only use a womb of a mother we have chosen, but we can actually hire a womb, which is surrogacy. So, you can have two males that purport to be married, go and hire a womb of a woman. In case of a male, they can extract sperms from one of them, who calls himself the father; and then they can hire the womb of a woman. They will then have a baby whose social mother will be another man. These are the areas we need to look at. We have to define by law who a parent in this situation is. There is an attempt to address this aspect in clauses 22 (1) (b) and (22) (2). Hon. Speaker, there is the issue of dead donors. It is possible to take sperms from a deceased person immediately they die; store and use them later on. In this situation, what is the parenthood? What are the ethical issues? If we do not have a law, people will go round those things and we will not know what they will be doing. What about the issue of consent when you are taking material from somebody who is already dead? We have to look at that aspect. There is the possibility of children abuse. Biologically, from the age of 15 or 16, one is able to reproduce. Therefore, you can start to get gametes of either male or female. If you start to harvest these from children of the ages 17 or 18, how does the law protect those children? Right now, in this country, we have sperm banks. I hear that the most popular places where sperms are collected are the universities, where the clients hope that the offspring will have the same level of intellect. What law protects the young men who give their sperms, or the young women who give their eggs? I am told that even now there are people going round telling girls that giving an egg is just like donating blood. We cannot allow that to go on. These are issues that we should look at."
}