The late Douglas Adams, RIP, would have found a rich lode of material for one of his absurd novels in last week's news about IVF.

On Monday, a couple were given permission to create a designer baby to cure a youngster with anaemia. The Victorian Infertility Treatment Authority said this was ethical. On Tuesday, Monash IVF applied to screen embryos so that some couple's grandchildren would not have haemophilia in 30 years. Its ethics committee said this was ethical. On Thursday, a single woman was confirmed in her right to have IVF. All the relevant authorities said that this, too, was ethical.

I feel gobsmacked. It reminds me of the opening scene in The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy when a Vogon spaceship announces that the planet is about to be annihilated.

"People of Earth, your attention, please. As you will no doubt be aware, plans for the redevelopment of personhood, family, and sexuality and morality require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your values, and regrettably they have been scheduled for demolition. An independent ethics committee has given its approval. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you."

Don't we have a say? Or are we just supposed to collapse in terrorised acquiescence while terra firma boils away into space?

All the procedures approved last week in Victoria involve the destruction of human life and the creation of new parent-child relationships. All of us have a stake in whether these should be permitted. Even if you do not believe that the embryo is a human person, it is clearly human life.

French plans to bulldoze a World War I cemetery, disturbing the repose of Australian war dead, have caused a diplomatic ruckus. If we care this much for 90-year-old human skeletons, surely living embryos deserve respect as well?

But apart from the deeper philosophical and moral questions, who are these independent ethics committees wielding demolition beams at us earthlings? If last week is anything to go by, the role of ethics committees seems to be to approve everything that won't land you in jail. Instead of philosophers discussing life, the universe and everything, they are rubber-stamping bureaucrats who ensure that names are spelled correctly, boxes are filled in and the project is approved.

If ethics committees can authorise the extinction of human life, shouldn't their moral reasoning, procedural guidelines and financial interests be open to public scrutiny? At the moment, this is not happening. Indeed, it has been reported that the memberships of the two hospital ethics committees dealing with the "designer baby" case last week were kept secret, with Epworth and Monash Private Surgical hospitals refusing to comment on the case.

This lack of transparency is not only arrogant but alarming. It raises the suspicion that the principal ethic of ethics committees is to approve whatever employers want. What if this includes - as it soon will - sex selection, hybrid man-animals, or designer children?

And even if there are no financial incentives for institutional ethics committees to give the green light to their colleagues' experiments, there will be personal pressures. An MBBS or PhD is a warrant of intelligence, not impartiality or independent thinking.

The flurry of announcements last week underscores the urgent need for an independent review of Australia's institutional ethics committee system. This was the unanimous conclusion last year of the Kevin Andrew's federal parliamentary committee on cloning, which called for "greater transparency and accountability" in institutional ethics committees.

As the Queensland Bioethics Centre told the committee: "To leave oversight of this important area to such committees would do little to inspire confidence in the community that justice was being done, whatever the good intentions of individual committee members."

We don't pay taxes to live in a country run by doctors. The last country to experiment with medicocracy was the Serbian Republic of Bosnia under president Radovan Karadzic, a psychiatrist. That adventure had a very unhappy ending.

Michael Cook is editor of the bioethics e-mail newsletter Australasian Bioethics Information.

E-mail: michael.cook@australasianbioethics.org