The latest edition of the Medical Council's ethical guidelines will allow for the donation of embryos, The Irish Times has learned.
This means that spare frozen embryos, produced during IVF procedures for treating infertility, could be donated to infertile couples.
The new provision is likely to be seen as another assault on the conventional family, which could open the way for further controversial procedures such as surrogacy and the donation of eggs. However, it also means that embryos that might otherwise die can live and become the children of what will effectively be adopting parents.
The new edition of the guidelines, the sixth since the Medical Council started drawing them up, will be published tomorrow. All doctors in the State must follow the guidelines, and can face sanctions if they are found to have been breached.
As well as this major departure in the area of reproductive health, it is understood they will contain new guidelines on the relationship between doctors and the pharmaceutical industry, and a section on the ownership of medical premises by doctors, including guidelines on referral to premises where the doctors have a financial interest.
However, it is likely that the provision permitting the donation of embryos to unrelated potential parents will provoke most debate. Until now IVF, available in Ireland for about two decades, has been limited to cases where an embryo is produced by the fertilisation of the woman's egg by her partner's sperm outside the womb and then implanted in her womb.
This procedure normally produces a number of surplus embryos as it involves the stimulation of the ovaries to produce a number of eggs, which are then harvested and fertilised. In recent years the Rotunda Hospital has started freezing surplus embryos.
This was introduced to reduce the number of embryos implanted into the woman's womb, some of them into the neck of the womb where they could not survive, and to reduce the number of times she had to undergo the harrowing procedure of having eggs harvested.
The protocol signed by participating couples includes an agreement that, if all the embryos are not eventually implanted in the womb within five years, or before the woman is 45, they will be "thawed without transfer". Effectively this meant they would die.
By allowing the donation of surplus eggs to other couples, the new guidelines will reduce the number of embryos (or zygotes, as they are known at this stage) that are allowed to "thaw without transfer" following IVF.
However, the practice is likely to lead to complicated legal problems as there is no provision in law for children who are not the genetic children of at least one parent apart from adoption.
It is unlikely that such embryos would be regarded as babies for the purposes of the Adoption Acts. At the moment the law assumes that a child emerging from a woman's womb is her biological child.