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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

I shall make two points, but as a preface to them I shall say that I strongly support the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, and I was greatly taken by the arguments used by my noble friend Lord Howe in his lucid exposé of the dilemmas that face us when legislating in this area. My first point is that this place should legislate only about those things that we can define. It is not that I distrust the courts of the future to help Parliament out or that I am fearful about what some future agency might do, helped on by regulation, to alter things. However, during yesterday’s Committee we had a good example of this. The noble Lord, Lord Darzi, who is in his place, explained that it is very difficult for some of the greatest figures in the medical world to agree a definition of an interspecies embryo. He read out a letter about that. That made me very uneasy because we were discussing legislating about something that the greatest medical brains in the country could not define. Today, the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has brought to the attention of the Committee saviour siblings and the misuse of the word ““donor””. A saviour sibling cannot, by definition, be a donor so as presently drafted the Bill uses highly inexact language. I fear that we shall have to struggle with these fiendishly difficult matters of definition if we are to proceed usefully in this Committee and if great trouble is not to be caused on Report. My second point is the noble Lord, Lord Alton, is right to say that medicine cannot and should not proceed in a moral vacuum. That point was also strongly made by my noble friend Lord Howe. He referred to the borderlands, the uneasy frontier land, between what is ethical and what is not. This cannot be a morality-free zone. For fear that noble Lords may think that I am speaking from a draft helpfully provided by the Roman curia, I have a number of friends who I would describe—one in particular—as high-church atheists. They strongly disbelieve in religion, but they also feel strongly about the moral impropriety of these steps and about going over the frontiers that my noble friend Lord Howe so accurately described.