By GREG ANSLEY
CANBERRA - For eight years Lisa Meldrum tried to have a baby, travelling from her Melbourne home to New South Wales, even as far as Ireland, to attempt conception by in-vitro fertilisation.
Now in her 30s, Meldrum has been racing against her biological clock and a Victorian state law restricting IVF to women in a stable relationship with a husband or male partner.
Last week, to the delight of Meldrum, lesbian groups and human rights advocates, a Federal Court judge held that the Victorian law contravened the federal Sex Discrimination Act and that all women should have access to IVF, regardless of marital status or sexual orientation.
The ruling has opened a social and political schism across Australia, providing a new morals platform for Prime Minister John Howard, splintering the Labour Party, sparking debate on the role of the courts and pitting humanists against the religious right.
Howard intends legislating to override the Federal Court decision to enable Victoria, where even the present Labour state Government supports married-only access to IVF, and any other state to restrict the provision of fertilisation services.
The Democrats, who hold the balance of power in the Senate, will oppose the proposed amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act, which in theory should kill it.
But this presumes the support of Labour, which cannot be taken for granted.
The party leader, Kim Beasley, at first equivocated, then insisted that he would drive his rejection of Howard's amendments through the Labour caucus. But the caucus has many Catholic and right-wing members who deeply oppose the provision of IVF or other fertility services to single or lesbian women.
Then there is Meldrum and a plethora of other women who have surfaced demanding the right to bear children and producing apparently well-adjusted children raised in lesbian relationships.
On Melbourne radio a man identified only as James told Howard that life as the son of a lesbian couple had been rich and rewarding.
But in Queensland a woman also raised by lesbians said that while homosexuals should have the same rights as heterosexuals, their children faced problems.
"I worry about the children," Dimity, now 25, married and with a 2-year-old daughter, told the Australian. "I just want people to understand that it's hard on children growing up in the way of the schoolyard."
The case successfully taken to the Federal Court by Dr John McBain on behalf of Meldrum has shaken an Australia that is already grappling with vast social changes.
On one hand the nation sees itself as still wedded to traditional family values; on the other, it is accepting the rise of new family structures that increasingly include de facto, single-parent and homosexual households.
One in five families with children under 15 are now single-parent - mostly mothers - who support over 980,000 sons and daughters.
There is a fundamental concern that this is already too many and the provision of IVF, particularly through the public health system, should be restricted to nuclear families.
There is prejudice against homosexuality: many donors now insist their sperm not be used to inseminate lesbians or single women.
And there is wide support for the restriction of taxpayer-funded IVF and donor insemination to women with a genuine medical need, rather than those whose sexual or other preferences were defined earlier this year by IVF providers as "social infertility."
But requiring fertile women who want to have a baby without a male partner to pay their own costs is one thing. Blocking infertile women from motherhood because of social or sexual status is a different proposition.
Howard's own federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Susan Halliday, rejects the Prime Minister's argument and is furious that the decision to overturn the Federal Court's ruling was taken without consultation by the Government.
She said the federal cabinet was not listening to Australian women.
Her views, supported by lesbian and human rights groups, were given force on the streets of Australia's major cities when protesters stormed Howard's Sydney office, and forced their way into Government buildings in Brisbane and Melbourne.
In Melbourne, Lisa Meldrum invited Howard to visit. "Then he could tell me why I wouldn't make a good mother."
IVF sparks mother of all rows in Australia
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