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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, I have in mind the provisions dealing with family life, as the noble and learned Lord will well understand. The noble Lord, Lord Darzi, made it very clear, as I understood his speech, that the Government’s view is that what would be in the law if the amendment to the amendment were carried would be discriminatory against same-sex couples. I was about to make a very personal observation, and with some trepidation. I do so with the consent and indeed the encouragement of my middle daughter, who lives in a same-sex couple. I do not know how many of your Lordships have the privilege of being the grandparent—of course this place is full of grandparents, and great grandparents—of a child or children from a same-sex couple. I have one and eight-ninths grandchildren, if you see what I mean, from a same-sex couple. The daughter in question, my middle daughter, is a solicitor, and her partner is an accountant. They are—if they will forgive me—as square as a box. They live in a provincial town in England, in a splendid semi-detached house with double-glazed new windows and a Vauxhall Zafira sitting in the drive. Their child, my grandson, is the picture of health and his parents are morally exemplary. They happen to be married to each other through a civil partnership and they are both female. I hear the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, unhelpfully muttering from a sedentary position. I do not expect to persuade him, and I am sure that he will do me the politeness of giving me a quiet and fair hearing. I do not give way to him now, I am afraid—not to such an intervention—because he will have the opportunity to speak if he wishes to do so. My daughter and her partner became parents by going to a well run, highly respected fertility clinic. Their second child will be a full sibling of their first child, my existing grandson by that marriage. The child is clever and articulate; I suspect that he may be the brightest of my grandchildren, but do not tell the others. My daughter and her civil partner have many friends who have been through the same process, and I have met several of them. They are typical of such couples: respectable, decent, honest and rather squarer than the prejudices held by many about such couples. They abhor the idea of people going on the black market to dishonest fertilisers—sperm donors—who already exist in this country. I know from pretty reliable anecdote that there are people in London who are prepared to be sperm donors informally, in their bathroom or kitchen, in the most disgusting way. They are unregulated, the health risks are enormous, and they can be accessed via the internet. If same-sex couples like my daughter and daughter-in-law are driven on to the black market for sperm donors, we will have a health disaster on our hands. But they may well feel driven to do that if the law is drawn in the way suggested in the debate, certainly in the last speech and in the eloquent opening speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, introducing the amendment to the amendment. I urge your Lordships to hold back from imposing what are really old prejudices, however conscientiously felt, on the modern world of civil partnerships. To those of us who have walked in and out of prisons, in and out of courtrooms whether as advocates or judges, who have been Members of the other place and have had large numbers of people coming to see us week after week privately about their personal problems, I say this: in the real world, what is offered by conscientious same-sex couples probably exceeds in quality the majority of what is offered even by heterosexual couples. There is no reason to discriminate against them. So I invite noble Lords to remember that we are in 2007—