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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

It is always difficult to know exactly what one thought earlier in our consideration of these things. I felt, as I think the committee as whole did—probably including the noble Lord, Lord Winston, at the time—that ““life-threatening”” had in it the idea of a condition that would certainly be very apt to shorten the life of the child in question. This was not quite broad enough to cover a situation in which a disease might accompany a person throughout their life, having a very detrimental effect on it and restricting it without shortening it. We substituted ““serious””, which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, criticises. I would be extremely glad to hear his suggestion of what should go in its place. No doubt I will have the opportunity to do that in due course. This is not an easy matter. I think that we in the Joint Committee were all of the view that this had to be pretty weighty. One does not do this kind of thing for trivial reasons. It has to be for some pretty important reason. For the reason I have explained, we felt that ““life-threatening”” fell short of the possibility of allowing the consideration of illnesses which might continue for the whole of life yet be extremely restrictive on that life. If ““or other tissue”” means more than umbilical cord blood stem cells and bone marrow and is an additional phrase, the paragraph will, in effect, amend the Human Tissue Act by giving a power which, until the Bill comes along, will not exist in respect of a saviour sibling. If that is correct, the House authorities may want to reconsider whether the Human Tissue Act is brought into this Bill sufficiently to enable my noble friend Lord Jenkin of Roding and the Joint Committee as a whole to succeed in their wish to have that Act seriously amended, to deal with the difficulties that the Royal College of Pathologists has identified in its working. If that is right, this may be a way of handling it. This thought occurred to me in the course of the discussion. We, or certainly I, felt that allowing a testing for the purpose of seeing whether an embryo might be beneficial to another member of the family—I suppose the purpose of such a test is to select an embryo—was something the authority should have the power to license.