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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

The idea put before us is a good one in principle but I think it has been oversold for three reasons. We already have the Human Genetics Commission, we have the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, we have reports from the Wellcome Institute and we had excellent reports from all our professional and learned societies. About 10 years ago, when Dolly the sheep was born and cloning and stem cells began to be examined, there were more intelligent, incisive and weighty reports on the matter from learned societies in this country than in any other country, and this led to a beneficial change in the law. I support the notion of the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, that Parliament should have a Select Committee because Parliament governs this field—the legislation passed by this House and the other place. The countries listed by my noble friend Lord Alton which have ethics committees are all either deeply religious or totally unregulated, or both. In my experience, the further south and east you go in Europe, the more these committees are dominated by religious people—not that there is anything bad in that, but they can be used to hold back the progress of the law. In the USA, the bioethics commission, it has been alleged, is filled with people who support the President’s view, whoever is the president of the day. Its reports have regularly been ignored and they have been forward-looking. Parliament is ultimately the ethical regulator. This is a country governed by law and that takes me to my final argument, which is that not much can be achieved by a bioethics commission. I speak from my experience chairing the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which is a working office that is open every day. It was always on a Friday afternoon that a parent or a clinician would call. I remember one particular Friday afternoon a surgeon called saying that he had a little boy patient, aged about two, who had leukaemia. The treatment of chemotherapy and radiotherapy was going to start on Monday and it seemed very likely that it would destroy the little boy’s future fertility. The surgeon had had a bright idea. He wished to remove a small slice of the toddler’s testicular tissue while it was undamaged, freeze it, and, maybe in 17 or 20 years’ time, when the boy had, it was hoped, recovered, reinsert the tissue in the hope that healthy sperm would grow. ““Can you please””, the surgeon said, ““give permission for this on the spot because chemotherapy is going to start on Monday?””. In a situation like that, you cannot say, ““This is extremely interesting and novel. We would like to refer it to the National Human Bioethics Commission, which will issue a report in several years’ time and be placed before Parliament””, and so on. It is the law that governs and it has to provide an answer in those situations. I am happy to say that the answer provided by the law was, ““Yes””. The phone rang on another Friday afternoon, and the question from a hospital was, ““We have removed the sperm of a dead man. Can we keep it?””. Again, you have to give an answer that is within the law, as best you can. While a human bioethics commission may do no harm, if it is not used as tool by those who might want to hold back progress—which is possible—I am not sure how much short-term good it can do by comparison with the committees we already have. The choice of members would be extremely problematic and it would demand very skilful chairing. As we are on our fourth day in Committee on this Bill, I need hardly point out to your Lordships that the more experts you have on this topic, the more opinions there are. In the end, by negotiation through Parliament, these things have to be decided within a legal framework. So I would conclude: probably no harm, but possibly; although I am afraid it would not be much good, remembering that it is always happens on Friday afternoon.