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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, I regret that, because of circumstances completely beyond my control—rain and trains—I was unable to be here for the first amendment. However, I would like to speak to this amendment which is extremely carefully and well-worded. One of the difficulties that we have is that the law lays down a black and white division between what you can and cannot do and in medicine we deal in shades of grey right across the spectrum. I will confine my remarks about this amendment to saviour siblings, although I think it applies equally well and is needed just as much at other points in the Bill. The difficulty is that what is serious to one person is not serious to another. Medical science is moving on very rapidly and we are now making legislation that we will not revisit in the near future. I will use as an example a condition for which at the moment there is no talk of saviour siblings, so this is blue-sky thinking—psoriasis. Overwhelming psoriasis that affects the whole of a person's skin can be a devastating skin disease, but can amount to a few plaques on a person’s elbows and knees. That disease has responded dramatically to the new biological drugs, which suggests that it may be possible in the not-too-distant future to use stem cells in some way in an infant who clearly has that terrible disease. But you have to define how bad it is to warrant a saviour sibling. You will have to be able to say that it is not just ““serious”” but ““life-threatening”” as well. Are you going to create a life because it may be a more convenient way of treating the disease, even though there are other ways of managing it, which may be expensive? The other difficulty with ““life-threatening”” is that you cannot wait until the child who is ill is actually dying: you need to think about the saviour sibling concept earlier. The amendment addresses that neatly and beautifully. Without it, I fear that the line may shift and shift until there is increasing pressure to go for aesthetic biological perfection rather than being able to accept the broad spectrum of humanity. Surely, we should only be considering saviour siblings when a condition really is life-threatening and there is strong evidence that without a saviour sibling the child will die.