I was never a real fan of the so-called ‘slippery slope’ articles. I believe that proper legislation can prevent us ‘slipping’ from one action deemed to be right or tolerable to another deemed wrong

Therefore we can tolerate the use of guns for collection purposes or hunting, but legislation ought to prevent them for defence. However one can never really be prepared for everything and two cases reported this week illustrate the latter whilst support the former.

Last week a court ordered that a couple, who had a child by IVF, was too old to take care of the child. The couples were reported by neighbours after leaving the child for a few minutes in the car and social services took custody. The father, 70, and mother, 57, were told that they showed indifference to the child’s needs and that they indeed had a child to fulfil a narcissistic need to have one. Both statements can be true but both merit different judgement.

Just because the couple had a child by IVF does not make it any different to the many elderly couples who look after their children’s children day in, day out. It may however be very true that nature did intend children to be born when a couple are still relatively young. Of course an advanced society, combined with human rationality pushes to the edge what is ‘natural’, and, as the naturalistic fallacy goes, just because it is like that in nature does not mean it ought always to be like that. But it is food for thought and certainly one should contemplate the age limit of IVF. The ‘narcissistic need’ argument may be more pertinent in this case. We should not indeed strive to have children at all costs and perhaps we owe it to the child we are wishing to think about whether we actually can raise him/her right.

One may of course argue that narcissistic need or not, and natural law or not, the court had no right to take away the child when there was no case for neglect. Would the court have delivered the same verdict to a young couple who did the same thing? If it did then many parents will be convicted. Whether older people have it in their brain’s wiring to raise children is another matter, but older people have been known to take good care of children as well.

I certainly believe the court’s ruling was wrong as it confused the ‘neglect’, if there was any, with a prejudice of what it called a narcissistic need. I always thought that courts should follow the law and act if someone does something unlawful. Whether they had a narcissistic need does not come into the equation here – what if they did have that need but were perfectly capable of taking care of the child? What the court seems to be expressing is a warning to legislators on the proper use of this technology.

Certainly we can make an age limit based on social justice of costs etc.; to make it on ageism is dangerous; however there is food for thought in the argument that these children will be made parentless and/or that they will also have to look after elderly parents at a younger age than is average. But the law cannot cater for all eventualities of good ethical conduct.

A radio station in Ottowa, Canada, hosted a ‘win-a-baby’ competition which rewarded payment for three cycles of IVF to the listener who wins. Although being denounced for this action, the station remained adamant, saying that the competition was “the first of its kind”; BioEdge (24 September 2011) reported and wondered how the child should feel when he/she finds out that the parents actually won a competition to bring him/her about. Well, it does not mean that the parents would not have used IVF anyway, but it does send off a message that we cannot be prepared for everything. Yet these cases should at least trigger legislators to act immediately on what we ought not to do; at least a moratorium until the action can be dealt with legally and ethically by parliamentarians.

Pierre Mallia is Associate Professor in Family Medicine, Patients’ Rights and Bioethics at the University of Malta; he is also Ethics Advisor to the Medical Council of Malta. He is also former president of the Malta College of Family Doctors