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Thursday's Quebec Court of Appeal decision has left unregulated important aspects of human reproductive technology and marked a new chapter in Canada's beleaguered attempt to regulate the emotionally-sensitive field. What amounts to a federal-provincial dispute risks redirecting focus from the needs of children.

The court nullified important sections of the federal Assisted Human Reproduction Act because they were related to health and were, therefore, of provincial jurisdiction.

Among other things, the act required a federal agency to: keep records of children's parentage, license reproductive clinics, and address threats to human health or safety posed by reproductive technology's use in Canada. The law also prevented, for example, the extraction of eggs and sperm from children for use by others. These provisions are no longer law.

This is not where we aimed to be almost 20 years ago. In 1989, the federal government, responding to public outcry, created the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies. Four years and $28 million later, and after hearing from over 40,000 Canadians, that body recommended that the federal government legislate immediately.

Nevertheless, it took 11 more years before law was finally enacted in 2004.

During this time, the Bloc Québécois raised the objection that the federal government was purporting to regulate in an area of provincial jurisdiction. Now we have reached the predicted impasse.

While our federal governmental system has slowly responded, the challenges of reproductive technology have grown rapidly. From one private reproductive Canadian clinic in 1989, there are now about 30, in an estimated $5 billion international industry. In vitro fertilization and egg, sperm and embryo provision have become regular medical treatment with little long-term data on the physical and psychological outcomes for all, especially the offspring. Other procedures have similarly taken root without understanding the consequences for the children thus created. For example, intracytoplasmic sperm injection — artificially putting a spermatozoa into an egg — has a higher incidence of complications in the offspring created.

Likewise, a social revolution has occurred in which it has become politically incorrect to question the deliberate separation of genetic, gestational and social parenting. Accelerating this change has been the lobbying of public and government opinion. So-called "infertility patient groups" have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to highlight the plight of the infertile. Who supplies the funding? Clinics and the pharmaceutical industry profit from a much larger unregulated market — something not highlighted in such advertisements about adults.

The children of assisted reproduction must be the clear priority because they are the most affected for the longest time. The wishes of many are clear: to know their genetic and gestational parents, the truth about their conception and all their parents' current medical status so that they can take preventative measures to protect their own health. Some adults say that, as long as children are well loved, their deliberate separation from all their parents doesn't matter. One child answered, "All the good intentions and love in the world won't change the definition of right and wrong. It won't change how the kids feel."

Children need adult protection. This is why we urge all levels of government to work together to regulate this field. From the perspective of a child of assisted reproduction, inaction is not just unhelpful, it is a dereliction of duty. As you read this, children are being created in Canadian clinics that no longer have regulatory oversight, or even clear legal obligations to make and preserve records that could enlighten people about their genetic and gestational parents' identities and what disease they are likely to inherit.

The use of reproductive technology is not a routine issue for government. Never before have we been able to create human beings outside the body or to put maternity in doubt. To quote the Royal Commission, "The field is developing too rapidly, the consequences of inaction are too great and the potential for harm to individuals and to society is too serious to allow Canada's response to be delayed, fragmented or tenuous."

As governments consider how to respond to the Quebec court decision, they should find motivation in the plain language of those whom reproductive technology affects the most. Children of assisted reproduction need expeditious action — time is of the essence. The most pragmatic approach now would be for the federal government to appeal the Court of Appeal decision to the Supreme Court of Canada because it would clarify the jurisdictional issues once and for all. Governments in Canada should act urgently to protect the children of reproductive technology whose conceptions have, for decades, been challenging us to focus on what it means to be human in an increasingly complex world.

Juliet Guichon is a senior associate in the Office of Medical Bioethics at the Faculty of Medicine in the University of Calgary. Michelle Giroux is associate professor of law in the Civil Law Section at the University of Ottawa. Ian Mitchell is pofessor of pediatrics in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary.