Abstract:
The public submissions made to the Parliamentary Health Committee on the Human Assisted
Reproductive Technologies (HART) Bill and Supplementary Order Paper 80 are analysed in
this report. Within this corpus, five major themes are identified: normality, humanness,
natural versus social constructs, moral decline, and rights and power. The report is organised
on the basis of these overlapping themes. Running throughout these five very general themes
were two major discourses: one Christian-identified; the other, medical-scientific. A minor
discourse of disability rights was also present.
Many submissions, from all three of the modes of discourse, expressed fear that assisted
human reproductive (AHR) technologies were challenging the boundaries of normality. AHR
technologies were seen in many submissions as potentially opening a door to eugenics and the
commodification of humans. Such submissions often requested the establishment of more
strict regulatory frameworks. The natural order lying behind kinship relations was seen to be
greatly challenged by AHR in some submissions, particularly those which were Christianidentified.
Many such submissions viewed the HART legislation as part of a general moral
decline of society. While some submissions viewed AHR technology as distinctly unnatural,
others asserted the naturalness of the human use and development of technology. The desire
to have children was cast as natural throughout the submissions.
The right of offspring to know their origins emerged as a key issue. Questions of whether the
production of children was a right or a privilege, and whether AHR was a constraint or a
support, also emerged from the submissions. Adherence to human rights was seen as
fundamental within the submissions, with differing conclusions about the correct use of AHR
technologies, influenced by whether the authors viewed personhood as being established at
conception or at some later developmental stage.
Placing our research into an international context, we note that the limited use of scientific
(both social and bio-medical) evidence within the New Zealand debates contrasts greatly with
the extensive use of such evidence within British Parliamentary debates. Other aspects of the
submissions appear to be unique to New Zealand, including the emphasis upon the
importance of whakapapa (genealogy) in the establishment of identity.
Description:
Assisted human reproduction legislation has provoked wide-ranging debate in all those societies that have
enacted it. New Zealand is no exception. The public submissions to the Parliamentary Health Committee
on the Human Assisted Reproductive Technologies (HART) Bill and Supplementary Order Paper 80
provided an opportunity to consider how those who wrote submissions conceptualised important aspects
of being human. Using an anthropological discourse analysis approach, the authors analysed the New
Zealand submissions. One reviewer comments: “The work provides important further information on the
wider topic of cultural understandings of innovative technologies in New Zealand society”; another wrote
“contemporary, contentious and of great public concern ... it opens up the topic for further research”.