ASSISTED REPRODUCTIVE TREATMENT (EQUALITY OF ACCESS) AMENDMENT BILL

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 17 May 2012.)

Dr CLOSE (Port Adelaide) (11:18): I speak in favour of this bill. I do so because I recognise that one of the most painful experiences in life is an unrealised longing to have a child and that, from my perspective, the ideal is for children to grow up knowing that they are wanted and loved, and having a parent or parents who care for them and will provide the home life that enables them to fulfil their potential.

If it was possible to legislate for this, no doubt many would want to. We cannot and, indeed, we should not. We have seen in the last century the terrible consequences of governments choosing who should and should not have children. The nearest we can get is to not prevent people who really want children from having them. Being wanted, being welcomed into the world is surely the best that a child can have. Arbitrarily deciding that some people are worthy of assistance in getting pregnant and others are not is an unwarranted intrusion into the private lives of our citizens, and suggests that there are second-class citizens and families who are not desirable.

Assisted reproduction is available to some—why not to all? To oppose this legislation is to presume that we in this house know more about who is going to be a good parent than the people making the choices do and, by implication, being a heterosexual couple puts you into the improved category and being in a same-sex relationship, or being single, excludes you.

For some in this house, the ideal they uphold is of a family with a mother and a father who have together produced children. I understand that, for this reason, they oppose this bill, as it threatens the circumstances they believe to be ideal for children. I accept that this view is genuinely held and that there is no malicious desire to cause harm; it may, however, do so.

Their view has two problems with it, from my perspective. Firstly, it is blind to the realities of many families in South Australia: products of separations and new partnerships, IVF, adoptions, fostering, large extended families and small nuclear families. It suggests that there is only one kind of family that is desirable and that everything else is a compromise.

Secondly, it fundamentally misunderstands what is important for children. Being loved, being nurtured and having adults you can depend on matters, so too does feeling that you are not part of a disenfranchised and despised minority. We are all alert to being different, and children, searching for their way and their place in the world, are often more conscious of being in or out of dominant groups and are often even more sensitive than adults to being regarded as not part of the norm.

What I fear is that opposition to this bill will be interpreted by people who do not come from a family of a mother, father and biological children as saying they do not live in the best kind of family and that there is something somehow undesirable about their family and, by this, I mean families headed by a single parent or children who are adopted and have no means of finding out about their parentage, or children conceived using donor-genetic material and children brought up by a same-sex couple.

None of these descriptors matter. None of them tell me how loved the child is, nor how supported and nurtured the child is. I will not be part of saying that some women do not get to have access to reproductive assistance. I will not be part of saying that there is only one kind of family that is worth having. I will always vote in favour of overturning discrimination.

Debate adjourned on motion of Mr Gardner.