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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, the noble and learned Lord may have misheard me. I was talking about the equally contentious issue of assisted dying in order to make the point that that Select Committee, which inevitably did not reach a conclusion, was nonetheless able to inform the debate by producing weighty documents based not entirely on taking soundings on public opinion, as the noble Baroness just said, but also on taking huge amounts of evidence. It thus informed the debate in your Lordships’ House, and I would argue that before we proceed to any changes in abortion law, the right way to proceed would be by the creation of a similar Select Committee so that we can look in detail at those contentious questions. I turn next to the welfare of children. As my noble friend Lady Deech has said, there are serious concerns about the issue of ““saviour siblings”” and about the need for a father. The Bill extends the creation of saviour siblings to the treatment of serious disease rather than just life-threatening disease. To deliberately leave it open for children apparently to be created for the sole and explicit purpose of being available to provide any type of tissue at all for an existing sibling is appalling. This is truly dehumanising society, and is a serious development. I am currently awaiting an answer to the Parliamentary Question I tabled to the Minister on this subject, but will he say today where the Bill uses the words, "““umbilical cord blood stem cells, bone marrow or other tissue””," what ““other tissue”” means? The phrase in the Bill does not seem to exclude anything specifically. I was deeply concerned to hear these words from Dr Simon Fishel, the managing director of the CARE Fertility Group, who is also an inspector, peer reviewer and external adviser to the HFEA: "““You might start looking at organs””." Given that the chairman of the Joint Committee, Mr Phil Willis, bewilderingly suggested that autism was also a condition that a saviour sibling might in future be created for, Parliament surely deserves to know what the Government have in mind in extending the definitions from ““life-threatening”” to ““serious””. Also, precisely what in the Bill itself would unequivocally ban the creation of a child to be a kidney donor, for instance? Instead of creating saviour siblings for umbilical cord, how much better it would be if we were routinely collecting umbilical cord and cord blood. Only four National Health Service facilities do this at present, while 98 per cent is routinely destroyed. That would save lives immediately. I intend to ask your Lordships to amend the Bill in Committee to ensure that harvesting causes no harm to the donor. I would also like all references in the Bill that seek to create a legal fiction around parenthood to be deleted. As the Joint Committee rightly said, to deny to a child that he or she had a real biological father would be nothing short of the state colluding in a deception. An estimated 800,000 children in Britain already have no contact with their father. To deliberately add to that number is downright irresponsible. One of the deepest questions that we ask ourselves is, ““Who am I?””. The right to lineage affects us all, and uncertainty over parentage can profoundly unsettle people. The popularity of television programmes such as ““Who Do You Think You Are?”” illustrates the natural desire to know one’s family history. The guidance of the Oracle of Delphi to the Lydian King Croesus was that to be happy, he must know himself. That is true for us too. The Government’s decision to remove the reference to the ““need for a father”” from law and social policy is a huge error. Women should not be interrogated at IVF clinics about their sexual orientation or their marital status and many single women are loving and exceptionally good mothers, but the need for a father, and the right to know who he is, are the issues. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Warner, in the debate last week on the Queen’s Speech, when he said, "““children are not accessories to adults’ preferences””.—[Official Report, 8/11/07; col. 157.]" Like my noble friend Lady Deech, I urge the Government to delete those references from the Bill. I turn to the issue of embryology. I want to challenge the provisions in the Bill that will add to the 2 million human embryos that since 1990 have been destroyed or experimented upon. The new Bill goes even further, permitting the creation of hybrid animal-human embryos. Many of us have previously pointed to the futility and lack of progress of embryonic stem cell research, but the argument has now shifted to the new methods for producing stem cells with the same potential as embryonic stem cells. Those committed to human embryonic stem cells now have no excuse to work with—that is, to destroy—embryos for the purpose of deriving new or patient-matched pluripotent cell lines. Last Saturday Professor Ian Wilmut, who famously cloned Dolly the sheep, declared cloning work with human embryos needless. He said: "““The work which was described from Japan of using a technique to change cells from a patient directly into stem cells without making an embryo has got so much more potential””." However, the justification given for this new Bill in the recent Queen’s Speech was that we have to, "““ensure that Britain remains at the forefront of medical research””." It is clear from what Professor Wilmut said that interspecies cloning is not the way ahead. As yet, no therapies anywhere in the world use embryonic stem cells. Strikingly, an editorial in Nature Biotechnology in 2005 stated: "““Meanwhile, forward steps continue to be made in the field of adult stem cell therapy””," for which there are no moral hazards. It continued: "““One estimate is that there are currently over 80 therapies and around 300 clinical trials underway using such cells””." When I divided the House on this issue in 2001, many of those who voted for embryonic cloning, and who will vote for animal-human hybrids, did so out of a genuine humanitarian desire to help those who suffer from disabling diseases. The state of stem cell research led them to believe that they had to choose between the ideal of helping to cure disease and the equally cherished belief of many that it is unconscionable to destroy nascent human lives in experimentation. Six years on from the hype of 2001, not only is it clear how the hopes of the desperate have often been cruelly and falsely raised, not least by the scandal of fraudulent cloning claims, but it is apparent that the supposed ethical dilemma may have been rendered redundant. In June 2007, three separate publications heralded the successful creation of embryonic-like cells from adult stem cells. This allows for the creation of a middle ground in the debate. Ethically uncontroversial stem cell techniques are where the future lies. In the House of Lords debate in 2001, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, the then government Minister, said that, "““the 1990 Act already provides the answer to the question of what happens if and when research into adult cells overtakes research using embryos: embryonic research would have to stop because the use of embryos would no longer be necessary for that research””.—[Official Report, 22/1/01; col. 120.]" It is no longer necessary. I hope that, instead of ending the unnecessary destruction of human embryos and advocating the creation of animal-human hybrid embryos, we will agree to that simple test—let us call it the Hunt test—which I will seek to move as an amendment in Committee; that is, licences will not be granted unless applicants can prove that no alternative is available, and applicants should have to demonstrate that embryos from no other species could be used for the same purpose and that their proposals are well founded and based on prior work from other species. In these controversial areas of embryology, child welfare and abortion, the House should proceed with great care and be prepared, if significant improvements are not made, to reject this Bill outright at Third Reading.