President Eddie Fenech Adami is making no bones about his opposition to a Bill regarding bioethics and IVF if it is not acceptable to the church.

According to sources within the PN parliamentary group who have spoken to this paper, the President is even said to have buttonholed individual ministers and told them he would not sign any IVF Bill if it is not in keeping with church doctrine.

No minister, contacted by this paper, would confirm this but other MPs have confirmed the President told them he was “very concerned” about the direction he felt was about to be taken by the Social Affairs Committee at that time.

The President is also said to have told people “Don’t force me into a crisis of conscience”

And in an interview he recently gave The Times, the President ambiguously said the President should have the power to send Bills back to Parliament. This comment would seem to make sense within the context of the concerns about the bioethics bill.

At the same time, however, there is no draft bill ready to be presented to Parliament. What has taken place so far is a long series of hearings by the Social Affairs Committee in Parliament (amply reported by this and other papers) during which certain hot issues such as sperm donation, the freezing of ova, allowing unmarried couples to have IVF, etc were discussed.

But the recommendations of the committee purposely left four issues to be decided on later: the freezing of embryos, allowing unmarried couples to have IVF, sperm donation, the beginning of life.

In his report, SAC chairman Clyde Puli expanded on these issues.

The Maltese bishops had issued a statement condemning IVF stating that life begins “with penetration” rather than with fecundation.

Despite all those meetings of the SAC, it seems that no position has been crystallised, not just on the government side but also on the Opposition side. Even on the government side, the leaders, that is those at Cabinet level and higher, look as if they will take the stance taken by the church while others, further down, are open to other interpretations taken by civil society.

All this however, has not stopped Malta from being criticised abroad.

Writing on website www.staminali.aduc.it, a website on stem cells, Donatella Poretti criticised Malta. She said a government commission in Malta has taken as the basis for its regulation of experimentation the church document Donum Vitae.

Maltese sources denied that the recommendations by the SAC were based on Donum Vitae. It could be that Ms Poretti was referring to a statement by the Bioethics Committee.

Ms Poretti commented: “We think it was an aberration that a government commission based itself on a religious text to draw up a law on a scientific matter in a lay State, but when we then read about the loud protests by the Maltese bishops we smiled and in a way sympathised with the commission members.

For they had not noticed that the Catholic Church itself, basing itself on scientific discoveries on the human embryo, has since changed its thought and thus also the indications it gives to legislators.”

Donum Vitae, (http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19870222_respect-for%20human-life_it.html), was drawn up by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith in 1987 but since then scientific research on embryos has revealed that there is a lapse of time from the fecundation of the ovum by the spermatozoo to the time when the spermatozoo reaches the zygote; and that this can take many hours, even up to 40 hours.

Science now speaks of an ozyte, that is when the paternal and maternal genetic heritages are not yet fused in a new cell, and so have not yet formed a new and unique genetic unit which is indicative of an individual.

The issue now is: what can be permitted to be done in those 30 to 40 hours? The church in Donum Vitae said: Nothing. But Donum Vitae knew of the zygote but did not know of the existence of the ozyte because this was discovered later.