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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, I strongly support my noble friend. I shall not reiterate her arguments, but I want to raise the issue of the human rights of saviour siblings, on which the Government have been strangely silent. I have always believed that a child is a child is a child and I am fearful that the Government may well lead us down the route of setting up two classes of children: children and saviour-sibling children. On whatever side of the argument we sit in relation to embryology and so on, we should pause to consider what we are doing. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, has just pointed out, once tissue typing begins, a child once created for this purpose will rapidly be seen as a commodity. A child is not a commodity; a child is not a donor; at best a child is a patient. There are serious issues, which do not seem to have been addressed at all in the debates so far, about consent and who gives that consent. Children are children and not organ banks. We must begin to think much more profoundly about the human rights of children, set against the undoubted human rights of parents, their wish to have children and the undoubted hopes of the recipient sibling who wishes to be saved or to have some tissue used to save them. Much to my surprise, this is an issue on which the human rights commentariat—as I think of them—has been strangely silent so far. Few of the usual human rights noble suspects are in their places in the Chamber this evening, but the human rights of the saviour sibling should be very seriously considered by your Lordships.