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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, I have considerable sympathy with the intention underlying the proposal set out in the amendment. My only concern is that this part of the Bill is particularly concerned with protecting the programme of pre-implantation diagnosis relating to genetic disease. For example, as I said at Second Reading, the most severe form of muscular dystrophy, the Duchenne type, is manifest in boys and is transmitted by clinically unaffected females or carriers. One can now identify the carrier by various genetic techniques. If one can obtain from that carrier woman an ovum, have that fertilised in vitro by the husband's sperm and allow the embryo to develop to the 16-cell or blastocyst stage, it is then possible to take out a single cell from the part of the embryo that will produce the membranes of the placenta, preferably, and identify whether the gene responsible for that fatal progressive disease is present. If it is, we can allow the embryo to degenerate, as many do in the course of normal human fertilisation. If the gene is not present, we can implant it, thus allowing these women to have normal, unaffected babies. That is the programme of testing embryos. My concern about the use of the phrase ““embryological techniques”” is that it embraces a much wider field of embryology, which is concerned with the whole process of development of the embryo into ultimately a foetus and so forth. I wonder whether that broadening, by the use of that particular phrase, is too great in this context. However, it is important for individuals to be trained in the testing of embryos for the purposes that I mentioned and in the techniques of storing embryos. That is important, but I thought that I should mention the personal reservation that I have about the use of the phrase ““embryological techniques””.