A FEDERAL Court decision to allow a single woman access to Victoria’s invitro-fertilisation program has been condemned by the Catholic Church.
The Australian bishops’ spokesman, Archbishop George Pell of Melbourne, deplored the decision as “on the verge of creating a whole new generation of stolen children”.
In Melbourne on July 28, in the case McBain v the State of Victoria and Others, Federal Court Judge Ross Sundberg ruled that IVF and artificial insemination must be made available to single women.
He based his judgment on the inconsistency between the federal Sex Discrimination Act, which says no one can discriminate against people on the basis of their sex or marital status, and Victoria’s Infertility Treatment Act, which says that a women must be married or in a de facto relationship in order to receive IVF or artificial insemination.
The bishops had intervened in the case, as “a friend of the court”, for the sake of the children who could be born to single mothers, Archbishop Pell said. There would have been no one else pleading the cause of marriage.
