IVF - in pursuit of the unattainable?

How can we consider giving anonymous sperm donors access to records that will allow them to contact children they have fathered in only the most rudimentary, biological sense - even after they were under the impression that anonymity was a key clause of the initial, porn-fuelled deposit?

Yet we’re unwilling to allow a woman access to the sperm of the man she loved and shared a life with. Such decisions are made in isolation and with a lack of regard for the deeper social consciousness that tries to make sense of these outcomes.

We despise hypocrisy, but in the rapid pursuit of choice and perfection we’re unable to avoid a myriad of ethical inconsistencies.

Of course just before Christmas the Civil and Administrative Tribunal overturned this decision, and perhaps during 2006 we will have the first child fathered in Australia by a dead man. A Ripley’s Believe It or Not if ever there was one.

Still, our continued lack of adherence to rigorous and thoughtful processes exposes our human tendency to hypocrisy. We’re so very fallible. Thanks to scientific discoveries and the strangely held idea that any new science is actually “progress”, we find ourselves in an ethically confusing and contradictory world.

We need to return to the root of the dilemma and start asking questions that are progressive in action, not just in name. We need to ask how important choice is. Is it really a right for most of us to have freedom of choice above everything else?

The root of the IVF dilemma is whether IVF itself actually contributes positively to society. Is it just another example of the pursuit of unattainable perfection?

We want to believe it isn’t that complicated. But it is. The issue of fertility decision-making doesn’t have any perfect answers. The real question is not who should have access to IVF, but just how perfect do we think our lives should be?