THE Pro Life Campaign has called on the Medical Council to clarify its ethical position on in vitro fertilisation following a television programme which showed how some Irish doctors "create" more embryos than they intend to implant in the womb.
The council's ethical guidelines currently state that all embryos must be "replaced" in the womb.
The Pro Life Campaign noted that a recent RTE Prime Time programme had shown these doctors placing the unwanted embryos in the cervix, or the neck of the womb, with the intention that they will die.
"In doing this, they are not only deliberately causing the deaths of human beings, but also exposing the woman to the risk of a dangerous cervical pregnancy. This is contrary to the purpose of the ethical guidelines and to the constitutional protection for unborn life."
The immediate past chairman of the Medical Council, Dr J. Stephen Doyle, said yesterday that the normal procedure was to collect three eggs from a mother for in vitro fertilisation, with four or five the absolute maximum. To implant any more could lead to multiple pregnancies, thus putting both the baby and the mother's health at risk.
The Medical Council accepted "at the present time" the current practice of putting surplus unwanted embryos in the neck of the womb, he said, but no definitive decision had been made because the council had not been asked to give an ethical ruling. He expected that the matter would come up at a meeting of the council's ethics committee in the near future.
He accepted that the ethics in this area, drawn up by the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and accepted by the Medical Council, needed to be updated.
Dr Peter McKenna, the master of the Rotunda, one of the two hospitals mentioned on Prime Time as carrying out this procedure, said that he had never seen a cervical pregnancy arising from a procedure in the Rotunda.
There is debate among Irish obstetricians about what to do with the surplus embryos which are the inevitable result of in vitro fertilisation. Some senior obstetricians would like to see Ireland following general European practice and freezing such embryos.