MAUREEN McTEER READING
Where: Russell Books, 100-747 Fort St.
When: Saturday, April 22, 1 p.m.
Information: 250-361-4447
Maureen McTeer has many questions. And in her new book, Fertility: 40 Years of Change, she hopes to provide some answers.
The topic of assisted human reproduction has fascinated McTeer for decades, and is central to her book. The lawyer and women’s rights advocate breaks down the issues involved with in vitro fertilization, or IVF, which involves the creation of a human embryo outside of the womb in a lab, and puts forward some ideas about its future.
A key moment in her research is related to the Human Genome Project, a biological breakthrough that succeeded in mapping and sequencing genes of the human genome in 2003. DNA sequencing brought about by the groundbreaking project gave scientists the capacity to look deeply into human embryos. And that’s when the lawyer and women’s rights advocate, whose husband is the Rt. Hon. Joe Clark, the 16th Prime Minister of Canada, really got invested.
She’s an expert on medical law and public policy, and has several degrees (both honorary and academic) connected to the issue. She has also served on several boards and chaired conferences in the field, in addition teaching an introduction to genetics and the law course each summer at American University in Washington D.C., among other related posts.
However, her purpose for writing the book was macro, not micro; she wants more people to be part of the broader public policy discussion. She wrote the book in layperson’s language to make Fertility an accessible read — an approach she used in writing her 1995 book, Parliament: Canada’s Democracy and How it Works — hoping it would reach the general public.
“We’re at a stage now where we have to have these very important discussions,” she said in an interview with the Times Colonist.
“Governments always say, ‘Tell us what you think.’ But if you don’t even know what they’re talking about, then you can’t be part of that. We are talking about the future, and what it means to be human in the 21st Century. It’s a pretty important subject.”
It was a gradual process that saw McTeer go from simply being interested in the topic to writing about it, more than 20 years after her previous book, 1999’s Tough Choices: Living and Dying in the 21st Century.
As a scholar and lawyer, she’s been following developments very closely. The deeper she went, the more she saw links between disparate elements. “I could see that the reproductive and the genetic were building seamlessly, one upon the other.”
McTeer and Clark spend much of their time in Ottawa. Being in the nation’s capital gives McTeer, who has a master’s degree in biotechnological law and ethics, a front row seat as this issue evolves.
She was a member of the federal Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, from 1989 until 1991, a post that sent her back to Dalhousie University, from where she received her master’s degree — one of three she studied to receive — in health law. “I felt I didn’t know enough about these issues, but I was fascinated by them,” she said.
Her thesis looked at the medical and legal challenges of reproductive technology to the Canadian legal system, a topic she continued to examine in 1993, when McTeer and Clark were named visiting scholars at the University of California at Berkeley. She spent her time there in the school of public health, and organized international conferences on the topic.
Her ongoing interest in the topic led to the writing of Fertility, which was published last year and will be celebrated today with a reading and discussion led by McTeer at Russell Books. “It was always in the back of my mind that I should write a book, to bring together all of my knowledge in one place.”
With COVID-19 pushing science to the fore, on several fronts, it was an opportune time to write a book that tackles, in part, legislative changes at the provincial level regarding fertility treatment. McTeer could not have wished for a better timing, though the issue of fertility, she said, has been causing some scientists concern for more than 30 years.
“One in six couples has fertility issues. And that statistic has been there since 1989.”
Though the data have largely remained unchanged, our ability to do something about it has sprinted forward. Before IVF, the options for couples who couldn’t conceive were fairly limited. They could adopt, remain childless, or use artificial insemination.
The first baby conceived through IVF was in 1978. The technology involved has since exploded, but the cost to conceive remains a barrier for many. That is a concern McTeer covers at length in her book. “If we’re going to have this technology, and if we are going to have a public health care system, how are we going to handle this medical need? How provinces are going to fund that, and what are they going to fund?”
McTeer and other have been lobbying provincial governments, in hopes they will join an international effort seeking new regulations on the issue.
Science and technology have come to the point where the health a human embryo created in a lab can be controlled at a very early stage. Perceived genetic abnormalities, some of which can be fatal, can effectively be removed. These technologies can be used not only for infertile couples, but for fertile couples who have a genetic anomaly that runs in families. While a miraculous development, this degree of control can be problematic, or worse — unethical.
“That is when you get into the very far-reaching idea of what the press call designer babies,” she said. “Do we really want to use that capacity to create human beings that have been altered? Who decides? And what are we altering them to and from and for?”
That makes for a politicized issue — think Roe vs. Wade and how legalized abortion was co-opted by U.S. politicians — when it should be anything but. “The idea is not to force people on how they reproduce, the idea is that we can help people who need that kind of assistance.”
McTeer has taken part in events similar to the one set for Russell Books this afternoon, and finds the results fascinating. Women and men attend in equal amounts, and from a range of backgrounds. “The book is a tool for a lot of people. IVF doesn’t just change how we procreate, but who can procreate. The topic is current and crucial. Things are ticking along here at lightning speed.”
