Ms THEOPHANOUS (Northcote): I am honoured to make a contribution on this bill, and I want to start by acknowledging those members who during this debate have shared their deeply personal experiences of assisted reproductive treatments (ARTs), IVF, conception, pregnancy, childbirth and child loss. These members have spoken with bravery and candour to give every one of us a deeper understanding of exactly what it means to struggle with fertility. It is no small thing to relay these most personal of experiences on a topic that, despite all our progress, still carries unwarranted stigma and taboo. Each time our brave colleagues step up and speak about these things they etch away at that stigma and they bring new understandings and humanity to the public discourse on infertility, on pregnancy complications, on miscarriage and on so many other elements that are not included in the mainstream narrative around parenthood. The contribution of the Minister for Women, the member for Dandenong, was a powerful illustration of some of the deeply unfair consequences of Victoria’s current laws in relation to assisted reproductive treatments and IVF. We are privileged in this Parliament to have the chance to amend these laws and make things fairer and easier for Victorians who want to grow their family.

My husband and I have been fortunate in our journey to parenthood. After months of uncertainty, in the end I only needed to take a medication to stimulate ovulation to get things rebooting after years of being on the contraceptive pill, and then we were able to conceive naturally. But for so many Victorians the road to growing a family is much, much harder. I know so many people who have struggled with fertility and so many wonderful sole parents and same-sex couples for whom assisted reproductive treatments have been critical to having children. Growing a family is not a choice that every Victorian or every couple will make, but the realities of having that choice stripped away from you by chance, by nature or by circumstance are heartbreaking. That is why options like IVF are so important and help overcome the barriers that prevent Victorians from making that deep personal choice to become a parent.

We have heard from others with much more experience than I have about just how physically and mentally taxing the IVF journey is for women. We have heard just how expensive it is and just how isolating it can be. In the Minister for Women’s own words:

It is a roller-coaster of hope and despair, and it can leave you feeling utterly broken.

While in a sense no level of legislation or regulation will be able to prevent the inherent uncertainty and the struggle of going through IVF, we can work to make it as fair, as accessible and as compassionate as possible.

In 2018 the Andrews Labor government commissioned an independent review of assisted reproductive treatments in Victoria to be undertaken by Michael Gorton, known as the Gorton review. Eighty recommendations were made to improve the way we support families and provide access to assisted reproductive treatments. We have already begun the process of implementing these recommendations, and as a government we have made some incredible reforms to strengthen our assisted reproductive treatment sector. In a very short space of time we have announced a public IVF service, a public sperm and egg bank and an end to the humiliating police checks and child protection checks for people undergoing IVF. This of course builds on Labor’s legacy in the ART space, which has also seen access to assisted reproductive treatments expanded to single women and LGBTIQ couples. Over the years Labor has led changes that reflect not only changing technologies but also changes in our society. We have seen changes in our understanding and appreciation of surrogacy and the donor relationship, and critically we have seen a greater community understanding of and respect for gender equality, diverse gender identities and sexual orientation and the rights of our rainbow families.

A key reform in this bill goes to the recommendation in the Gorton review around the 10-women limit. In short, currently there is a restriction on donating eggs and sperm to more than 10 women. The restriction was designed to reduce the chance of genetically related people in Victoria unknowingly forming relationships, but in practice it means that if a donor has already reached their limit, it prevents same-sex couples from having biologically related children. For example, if two women in a relationship are seeking to have children, they should be treated as what they are—a family. There is a great deal of joy to be found in the wonders of little ones with shared traits and seeing your own face reflected back in your sibling. This bill will create an exemption for existing families to have genetically related siblings from the same donor irrespective of the limit.

I want to turn now to another important reform in this bill, relating to the withdrawal of consent by a donor. This is an incredibly important change to the current state of play, and it warrants explanation. Right now in Victoria a donor can withdraw his consent for the embryo created with his sperm to be used right up until the point at which it is transferred into a woman. You sort of have to do a double take on this one to really comprehend the significance of it, because what it means is that a woman who has gone through the roller-coaster of infertility, who has taken the step to try to conceive by IVF, who has spent tens of thousands of dollars, who has gone through incredibly invasive medical treatments over months, who in many cases has contributed her own egg, who has crossed that anxious threshold in having finally created a viable embryo and who has all her hopes on the line can then all of a sudden have that snatched away by the donor. It is absolutely heartbreaking, and we are the only jurisdiction in Australia that allows this to happen.

I cannot agree more with the changes in this bill which prevent this from happening. An embryo is not sperm, it is a fertilised egg. A donor has no legal obligation in relation to the child that might eventuate from his donation, yet he currently has the right to extinguish the embryo that would create that child, effectively usurping the reproductive choice from the woman, who has gone through every obstacle to have a choice at all. I can only imagine the immeasurable grief and sense of powerlessness this would create. Indeed some families have even given up on their IVF journey after such a traumatic experience. This law is outdated, it does not reflect community values and it does not recognise the cruelty that it can inflict. We need to do better by Victorians accessing assisted reproductive treatments. The process is hard enough as it is. Under these changes the donor will only be able to modify or withdraw consent up until the moment their donation is used, which applies to either insemination or when an embryo is created. That is a much more sensible arrangement.

There are other reforms contained in this bill which are aimed at removing discrimination and making assisted reproductive treatments more accessible to more Victorians. This includes expanding the range of professionals who can perform artificial insemination to include, for example, nurses under the direction and supervision of a doctor in a registered assisted reproductive clinic. It also means that doctors can carry out artificial insemination outside of registered clinics and patients of these doctors are able to seek pretreatment counselling outside a registered clinic. Fundamentally this will mean more access to treatments closer to home, more choice of clinicians and lower costs for patients. Quality and safety will remain key. Doctors and other health professionals acting under the supervision of a doctor will still be required to provide the same information and meet the same standards as doctors operating out of a clinic.

There are many improvements contained in this bill, but I want to turn to an aspect which goes to language. We all know that words matter and words can hurt, so we are amending the guiding principles of the Assisted Reproductive Treatment Act 2008 to make the language non-discriminatory and more sensitive to Victorians seeking to grow their families. This includes changing ‘commissioning parents’ to ‘intended parents’ throughout the act in reference to surrogacy arrangements. This more sensitive language is preferred by those with lived experience and acknowledges the basic humanity of wanting to start or grow a family. This is not a product or a project someone is buying, it is a child and a lifetime of love, care and commitment. We are also clarifying the meaning of ‘donor’ to make clear that anyone who provides an egg or sperm to their partner is just that—a partner or a parent. So much of the process of going through assisted reproductive treatment can reduce people going through it to clinical units. That can be incredibly hard and make an already incredibly difficult process even more distressing, because the reality is that words do matter; they shape the world we live in and the way our society views issues. These words are dehumanising, clinical and divisive, and if we are honest and true in our commitment to diverse families we need to make sure that the language we are using to describe them in all settings reflects the respect and understanding with which we want to see them treated in our society.

I am proud that this bill will result in the implementation of a further 10 priority recommendations from the Gorton review, with a strong focus on reducing discrimination, improving access and providing more certainty for Victorians accessing assisted reproductive treatment. These are complex policy issues with deeply personal consequences—literally matters of life and death. I thank the former Minister for Health, the member for Altona, for her bold leadership, and I thank the current Minister for Health for continuing with it. I commend this bill to the house.