Views held by Paul Ryan – the man chosen by US presidential hopeful Mitt Romney to be his running mate – that life begins at fertilisation have caused a media furore in North America.
Ryan is a co-sponsor of the Sanctity of Human Life Act, which has been reintroduced to the House of Representatives and that states ‘human life shall be deemed to begin with fertilisation’.
Under the proposed law, embryos discarded during IVF would become ‘murder victims’, commented US political magazine Mother Jones. The magazine said, if it became law, the Act ‘would make Romney’s kids criminals’ since three of them have relied on IVF treatment in order to become parents.
During IVF multiple embryos are often created that may not all be implanted during one cycle of treatment. These ‘spare’ embryos can either be frozen and stored for future use, used by other prospective parents, used in research, or destroyed.
If passed, the Sanctity of Human Life Act would ‘criminalise IVF’, said The Daily Beast, a US news and opinion website – something which Amy Goodman in the Guardian reflected on: ‘As reported in Mother Jones, this law would make normal IVF practices illegal’, she said.
However, other journalists are calling much of the attention ‘bad reporting’, claiming that the media has distorted Ryan’s Act. There is no evidence that Ryan believes in criminalising IVF and that ‘efforts to imply otherwise in order to create a neat little conflict… are misleading and irresponsible’, Marni Soupcoff said in the Canadian National Post. Read full article.
