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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, we have heard a series of distinguished speeches, which have been hugely educative, but perhaps I may take the House back to what I take to be the main thrust of Amendment No. 8. I am warmly supportive of the amendment. I also believe that I understand, I say with great temerity, why the noble Lords, Lord Patel and Lord Winston, concentrated on some of the major parts of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Alton, but not on the point that he was seeking to make. I understand that the thrust of Amendment No. 8 concerns the mixing of human and animal matter and whether that is called an interspecies embryo or a human admixed embryo. That seemed to be the point that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, was making. Perhaps he somehow hid that thrust within the many other interesting things that he had to say, and which drew from the noble Lords, Lord Patel and Lord Winston, the hugely instructive material that they produced. However, it seemed to me that neither of the two noble Lords addressed the ethical admissibility of interspecies embryos. Although they made a case for the need for the work that they and many others are doing, they did not address that question. I think that that was the question that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, was trying to put before us, and that is the plain meaning of his amendment—which, as I understand it, seeks to remove the six words, "““except in pursuance of a licence””," and which would leave new Section 4A(2)(c) as a negative. My view and the view of many others, including many who have written to us from all kinds of philosophical and religious perspectives, and the point that I think the noble Lord was trying to make, and he used this language, is that the use of such interspecies embryos—such human admixed embryos, with the mixture of human and animal matter—crosses a fundamentally important line. It is a fundamentally important line on which I had understood the 1990 legislation was predicated. However great the advantages of crossing that line, we human beings have mostly judged—both out of the major religious traditions and for other reasons, too—that a unique status and respect must be afforded to the human being, the human embryo and human reproductive material. The point at issue is not one of those made by the noble Lords, Lord Winston and Lord Patel, it is whether Parliament should permit that line to be crossed. I understand that the purpose of this amendment is to test that view. My own judgment is that it is a view that I should support.