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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My noble friend Lord Patel has just said that there should be the strictest safeguards. He has also said that we should not proceed to incorporate these amendments as a light undertaking. He has recognised the seriousness of what is proposed in these amendments. Like him, we all want to see cures for the sorts of diseases that he has just enumerated. However, the Committee also needs to consider whether this is the right way to do it. These amendments in the name of my noble friend would overturn most of the current prohibitions and would enable gametes and cells of non-consenting children to be removed from their bodies and used to make interspecies embryos or human embryos for research. Proposed new paragraph 12A(1) would permit all types of hybrids specified in new Section 4A of the 1990 Act to be made from these children’s gametes, including true hybrids at new Section 4A(5)(a), interspecies cloned embryos at new Section 4A(5)(b), human animal transgenic embryos at new Section 4A(5)(c), animal human chimeric embryos at new Section 4A(5)(d), and such other things as may be specified in regulations at new Section 4A(5)(e). It would also permit human embryos, including cloned human embryos, to be made from their gametes and cells. These could be made from the gametes and cells of non-consenting children for research, using them in combination with human or animal eggs. These interspecies or human embryos could also be stored and used without consent. That is the issue on which my noble friend and I will part company. It raises a number of objections on which the Committee will want to reflect. For instance, later in life, a non-consenting child might feel considerable antagonism that their gametes and cells were taken and used to create interspecies embryos without consent. Whatever the benefits that may be cited, where is the principle of autonomy that is so frequently cited in other debates in your Lordships' House? I can imagine the anger of a young adult who felt that their very personhood had been violated and sacrificed to a supposed greater scientific good. For example, how would a teenage girl feel if a true hybrid had been made between her eggs and animal sperm? Alluring scientific possibilities should never be allowed to corrode our sensibilities. Seeking Patients’ Consent: The Ethical Considerations, produced by the General Medical Council, describes how a young person can be treated as an adult and can be presumed to have capacity to decide at 16. My noble friend referred to that. Therefore, one must assume that Amendments Nos. 50 and 54 are intended to exploit the potential inability of young children under 16 years of age to provide informed consent. The same document provided by the GMC also states: "““Where a child under 16 years old is not competent to give or withhold their informed consent, a person with parental responsibility may authorise investigations or treatments which are in the child’s best interests””." On the basis of existing empirical evidence, how can the creation of an interspecies embryo necessarily be stated to be in the best interests of a non-consenting child? Let us not forget that the purpose of these amendments is restricted solely to research rather than to clinical treatments that have already proven their worth and might be used in the interests of the child. My noble friend Lord Patel stated in our debate on 3 December how producing satisfactory results was too high a hurdle. He made those comments on Amendments Nos. 7, 44 and 46. My amendment said that, "““the research method proposed is most likely to produce satisfactory results””." My noble friend said: "““That is too high a standard for any research project””.—[Official Report, 3/12/07; col. 1544.]" Again, that opens a clear difference between my noble friend and I on those previous amendments, as well as this one. This amendment would allow human embryos to be made using gametes or cells from a child without their consent. How would the non-consenting child feel in later life once they realised that they were made a mother or father at an age too young to give consent, even if the embryo was destroyed by 14 days? Not many of us would want to know that our gametes had been taken, without our having any understanding of it, to make interspecies embryos or human embryos on our behalf and without our consent. No one has the right to take that decision on behalf of others. I feel that this is going too far. There are echoes here also of an application made more than a decade ago by an Edinburgh scientist, Roger Gosden, who sought permission from the HFEA to use the eggs of aborted baby girls for fertility treatments. The HFEA did not demur. It embarked on a public consultation on whether a little girl would be aborted and then robbed of her eggs from her ovaries. A woman is at her most fertile at 20 weeks’ gestation, when she has 5 million eggs in her womb, 4 million of which are shed naturally before birth. An aborted girl could be seen as a rich source of organs and tissues. You can face a prison sentence for stealing the eggs of certain rare birds in Britain. Are birds to have greater protection in law than children when it comes to taking their gametes? The noble Baroness, Lady Knight of Collingtree, and I tabled an amendment in another place to a criminal justice bill and successfully outlawed what I described as contemporary grave robbery. That a child should have an aborted foetus as its mother, and the aborted girl’s mother as its grandmother, struck many members of the House of Commons as obscene and certainly not an auspicious start to life. However, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority had a public consultation over that issue. These amendments do not seek to create life beyond 14 days and, in that sense, are obviously different from the proposal that had been placed before the HFEA by Roger Gosden—but we should not seek to create life in that manner at all. Obtaining gametes, especially from a girl, is not like giving blood. The procedure needs to be spelt out in full and any attendant risk, present or future, should be made clear to your Lordships while we debate the matter. I hope that the Minister, when he comes to reply, will tell the Committee very clearly how exactly one would get the gametes from these infants and children, especially how one would obtain eggs or ovarian tissue from a teenage girl of reproductive age. That should be described in ordinary, everyday language so all of us can understand what the procedure would be. Furthermore, would the procedure involve a general anaesthetic, and would that involve a risk? Would there be any risk to the girl during any of the surgical procedures? My noble friend said on Amendment No. 62: "““I should like to see a greater degree of patient safety being promoted in all aspects of medicine””,—[Official Report, 3/12/07; col. 1592.]" and I entirely agree with him. We need clarification on that point. The noble Lord, Lord Winston, will speak next, I think, and help to illuminate our proceedings. I want to know whether we can guarantee that there will be no possible risk of future damage to the child’s own reproductive system. On a related subject, I ask the Minister whether there is an error in new paragraph 9 in Schedule 3, in line 12 of page 63 and line 2 of page 64. Can he explain the relevance of ““donor”” with reference to ““child donor”” in that paragraph? Is that paragraph specifically related to the storage of gametes of children who may be ill or undergoing some medical procedure, such as chemotherapy, that may render them infertile, with the intention of storing their gametes to enable them to have their own genetic children later in life? That would seem perfectly reasonable. Is the purpose broader, to include donation as implied by ““child donor””, and if so can these other purposes be explained? Is ““donor”” intended to mean ““patient””, in which case could that be rectified, otherwise the meaning of the term could be considerably expanded in practice? If the word is intended to mean ““donor””, does that mean that the child is intended to be an egg or sperm donor for somebody else’s fertility treatment, or to provide eggs or sperm for research without their consent? Finally, let me return to an issue raised earlier in our Committee. Why exactly do we need to do these things? We create embryos under any number of guises when alternatives exist. Yet, even if there were no alternatives, to create interspecies embryos from non-consenting children is going too far. Only last week, Bob Edwards of Louise Brown fame commented at the end of the HFEA annual review about the need for welfare of the child to be the priority. In passing, he questioned the wisdom of the HFEA being involved in sanctioning the creation of hybrids. Doubt was cast earlier on the figure I cited of 2 million human embryos destroyed or experimented on since the passage of the 1990 Act. A lesser figure of 82,955 was mentioned, but that is in connection with the number of embryos donated for research. The figures are in a parliamentary reply given to me on 28 June by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, at col. WA 159. The number of embryos created involving fresh, non-frozen embryos is 1,940,576, with just 3.4 per cent resulting in live births from a total of 66,715 treatment cycles. Since 1991, 76,462 embryos have been created in treatments involving frozen embryos, with 13 per cent resulting in live births from 10,040 treatment cycles. Therefore, more than 2 million embryos have been destroyed or experimented on since 1990. I also asked why no data were held on embryos created using cell nuclear replacement or therapeutic cloning. The Minister replied that the HFEA, "““does not routinely collect data on the number of embryos created using cell nuclear replacement””,—[Official Report, 28/6/07; col. WA 159.]" technology. Such data are kept by the local research project. Surely they should be made available to the HFEA and Parliament. If Amendments Nos. 50 and 54 were agreed to, would we collect data on the gametes and cells taken from non-consenting children or would that, too, become so routine that we would not feel the need to do it? I hope that the Committee will not incorporate these amendments into the Bill.