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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, we are almost at the end of a debate which, by any standards not least those of this House, has been one of remarkable quality. That fact is as it should be because, as almost every noble Lord has remarked, the matters before us in the Bill are of exceptional social and ethical importance. While the opinions expressed by noble Lords have been wide-ranging, we can all agree that as a House of Parliament we have been tasked with addressing issues of the utmost gravity, which the British public rightly expect us to examine forensically and with due sensitivity. The phrase ““from these Benches”” is not one that I shall be using during the passage of the Bill. Any views that I may express will be my personal views and no more than that. The Conservative Party, deliberately, has taken no position on the matters in the Bill because, as with the 1990 Act, they are issues that should be left to individual parliamentarians to decide for themselves in a free vote. Therefore, but for the fact that it is the custom of the House to have an Opposition spokesman winding up, my presence at this Dispatch Box is not of significance. This Bill has been long in gestation. It comes to us following a House of Commons Select Committee report in 2005, a public consultation, a government White Paper, a draft Bill, pre-legislative scrutiny of that Bill by a Joint Committee of both Houses and a government response to the Joint Committee’s report. By no stretch of the imagination therefore could this Bill be regarded as having been fashioned in haste. All that should give us reassurance but, at the same time, the prior history of the Bill is no reason for saying that what it contains is necessarily perfect. It is for Parliament as a whole to decide on its merits or failings. I have absolutely no doubt that we shall wish to debate every issue thoroughly and very often from first principles. However, while the Bill may break important new ground, it is for all that an amending Bill. As such, it seeks to build on an inherited corpus of thought and public policy embodied in existing legislation. As has been said by many speakers, we owe much to the work done by the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, and her committee in the 1980s, which gave us much of the ethical and practical underpinning for our present regulatory regime. Perhaps the defining feature of that underpinning was the balance which the Warnock committee sought to strike between utilitarian considerations about treatment and research and strongly held, often absolutist, beliefs about the sanctity of life and the status of the human embryo. The balance was struck by acknowledging on the one hand the legitimacy of the medical and scientific case, but on the other hand insisting on a system of strict regulation, tight codes of practice, an outright prohibition on certain sorts of activity and the adoption of a gradualist ethical position on the status of the developing human embryo, based on science. From this emerged the concept of the special ethical status of the human embryo—a concept that means, put at its simplest, that anything done in a laboratory with or to a human embryo may be done only for compelling and benign reasons, as defined in law, never frivolously, lightly or wantonly. This approach was adopted by Parliament in the 1990 Act and sought to reconcile as far as was possible two diametrically opposed camps. Full-scale consensus between the two camps was never going to be achievable. That is perhaps the first key point to make in the context of this debate. For Parliament there is no unequivocally right answer to the questions we are addressing, nor can we be reasonably expect to do other than debate those questions within the broad framework of principles laid down by the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, and the 1990 Act. It is entirely possible that we will end up drawing lines in the sand that are substantively different from the lines currently drawn in the Bill; but those individuals who wish to see the entire structure of law in this area overturned—which is the manifest desire of many who have written to Members of this House in sometimes passionate terms—need to understand why we are not in that territory. Having said all that, there is a troubling feature to the Bill, or rather, to Part 1 in particular. This point was made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans and by the noble Lord, Lord Brennan. The Bill lacks the equivalent of a Warnock report establishing the ethical values and evidence-based pointers that should guide Parliament and the regulator in these novel areas of decision-making. Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of this lacuna relates to the question of whether or not to legalise the creation of hybrid embryos. A number of witnesses to the Joint Committee regretted the fact that that question was made more difficult by the uncertain and vague ethical status of such hybrids. No group of informed men and women has yet sat down to form a considered view of these issues; and the Bill itself is silent about them. As the Joint Committee commented, the fact that the Government initially proposed one set of provisions for hybrid embryos and then another—each time expressing surprise that there could be any other viewpoint but theirs—only then to change their minds again, is a graphic illustration of how rudderless they were, and perhaps still are, on the issue. Perhaps the Minister thinks that that does not matter, provided that Parliament places a clear and unambiguous set of provisions in the Bill. Even if that is his position, I still believe that we owe it to the regulator to articulate a set of fundamental guiding principles that are relevant to the exercise of his discretion in making licensing decisions. That is perhaps a task which we can begin to tackle in Committee. The provisions relating to hybrid embryos are perhaps the most controversial from an ethical perspective. Many people regard the very idea with revulsion and many have expressed outright hostility on religious grounds. I am sure that noble Lords have been right to say that those views are ones which we have a duty to respect. On the other hand, the reasons that researchers wish to create cytoplasmic hybrid embryos have been well rehearsed in this debate. They are essentially reasons of expediency and pragmatism in the cause of pursuing potentially beneficial science. Until now, the creation of interspecies embryos has been prohibited by law, with the sole exception of the hamster test to assess the performance of human sperm. The Joint Committee recommended that the matter be put to a free vote of both Houses, and I believe that that is what we should do. We will debate these matters in Committee but, as we do so, we need to be careful about clarity of thought and language. It is surely not enough to say, as some do, that the mixing of human and animal genetic material is inherently degrading to humanity. What exactly do people mean by that? If researchers are to be denied by Parliament the freedom to conduct certain kinds of research, then parliamentarians, in turn, have a duty to define precisely the alleged harms to society that would ensue from such activity. The Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 already sanctions the mixing of human and animal genetic material. It is far from self-evident to me that the creation of a very few cells of a hybrid nature which would soon be destroyed would of itself degrade the human condition or engender disrespect for humanity among either scientists or society at large. Nor can I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Alton, that the recent emergence of techniques which may one day make embryonic stem cell research unnecessary is reason enough now for Parliament to make embryonic stem cell research illegal. All the available scientific advice, including that from the MRC, is that, of the three possible routes to the applied use of stem cells, including the reprogramming of adult stem cells, there is no conclusive evidence which of them will ultimately prove the most effective. The noble Lords, Lord Patel and Lord Walton, re-emphasised that point. In my view, it would be highly premature for Parliament to close off one or more of those options. In any event, the regulator already has to be satisfied that the use of human embryos is necessary for the purposes of a given piece of research. Many noble Lords spoke about the proposal to remove from the conditions of treatment licences the requirement that clinics must take account of the future child’s need for a father. I was particularly struck by the speech of my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern on this subject, as I was by the speeches of the most reverent Primate the Archbishop of York and the noble Baroness, Lady Deech. Equally, this afternoon I was extremely impressed by the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis. Certainly, Parliament needs to be guided by the evidence; and there is some evidence that the presence of a second parent rather than the gender of that parent counts more in terms of a child’s welfare. At the same time, many of us are instinctively uncomfortable with the notion that the presence or absence of a father in a child’s life should be completely irrelevant to any assessment of its likely welfare. Again, I have no doubt that this is a matter which in Committee we shall wish to explore thoroughly. Equally difficult are the questions surrounding the definition of parenthood where a child has been donor-conceived. The concept in the Bill of parenthood as a legal responsibility, rather than a biological relationship, is one that many find unacceptable. Personally I have yet to be persuaded that what the Bill proposes is misconceived. The laws around adoption already provide a model in this area. In the normal way, a child regards as his parents the people who nurture and bring him up. A different question arises, however, over a child's right to know about his or her genetic origins. At the moment, the Bill merely gives a child, when adult, the right to inquire about them. My noble friend Lord Jenkin of Roding was absolutely right: we need to ask whether that is enough. The issue of what information should be included on the birth certificate of a donor-conceived child is one about which the Joint Committee was considerably exercised; and I believe that in Committee we need to confront that issue. Not all the other issues of importance in the Bill have been referred to in any detail: for example, the rules that should apply to saviour siblings—although the noble Lord, Lord Alton, spoke about that— storage times for embryos and the difficult issue of the storage of gametes on behalf of someone lacking mental capacity. Our Committee deliberations will no doubt make up for that. For now, I think it is right for me to end on an upbeat note by congratulating the Government on bringing this Bill forward. Whether Parliament accepts it in its entirety is a question for the future. However, the Government can take credit for their assiduousness in shaping proposals, consulting on them, listening to views and bringing them forward in their final version for our consideration. That measured process bodes well for our deliberations, a process to which I, for one, look forward.