QUEENSLAND’S Parliament has taken ‘a very sad and dangerous path’ with the approval of legislation allowing embryonic stem cell research, said Catholic MP Ronan Lee.
Mr Lee, who is the Labor State Member for Indooroopilly, led a campaign against the legislation, which was approved in a conscience vote 65-20 on March 12.
He said the result was very disappointing.
‘I feel that, as a parliament, we’ve gone down a very sad and dangerous path where we’ve given people the right to use embryos to be stripped and used for parts as human lab rats,’ he said.
The legislation mirrors that passed by the Federal Parliament last year.
Premier Peter Beattie bowed to pressure and agreed to split the original bill to allow a conscience vote on embryonic stem cell research, and a separate vote on human cloning, which was defeated.
Mr Lee, in a speech to parliament, said: ‘This is a bill that labels part of the human family as disposable and without intrinsic value.’
He criticised an information paper distributed to MPs in the lead up to the decision. He said it was misleading in that it focused heavily on the benefits of embryonic stem cell research and very little on its faults.
Director of the Queensland Bioethics Centre in Brisbane archdiocese, Ray Campbell, said he had to agree with Independent Member for Nanango, Dorothy Pratt, who commented that many people, inside and outside the House, had been seduced by fiction, and not fact.
‘As happened with the Federal Parliament, many members opted to disregard the significance of what they were actually sanctioning – the destruction of members of the human family for the sake of research – and focused rather upon some mythical cures in some distant future,’ Mr Campbell said.
Queensland Right to Life president, Dr Donna Purcell, said the decision ‘instituted a principle which would poison the medical research psyche for years to come’.
‘Parliament has consigned a certain class of human being to be used as a laboratory resource,’ Dr Purcell said.
The legislation allows excess IVF embryos created before April 5 last year to be used for research, with the consent of parents.
