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Department of Health

Not in the slightest. I made the lifestyle choice of getting married and having children. People make such choices. If one chooses to live in a same-sex relationship, it is difficult to have children naturally. I have a good friend who is a homosexual. He and his homosexual partner found a surrogate mother and had a child. Those two men are excellent parents and I am fond of them both, but that does not mean that I believe that children’s best interests are served, in the main, by having two fathers, or that I subscribe to the idea that gay couples should automatically have the right to have children. The scientific community seems to have its own agenda. We read in the newspapers today that Britain is about to have its oldest mother because a woman of 60—I believe—is about to have a child. Whose interests will that serve—those of the child who is born, the woman having the child, or the scientific community? What will happen next year? Will a woman of 70 or 80 be Britain’s oldest mother? The House needs to exercise control over what the scientific community is doing in this area, because the child’s welfare should be absolutely paramount.