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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, for interrupting him from a sedentary position. However, I was deeply concerned that a lawyer, above all, should say that which is not legally correct and which he must know is not legally correct. Civil partnership is not marriage. That was made explicitly clear by the Government during the passage of the Civil Partnership Act. Indeed, if they had declared it to be marriage, it might not have been passed by this House. It is a very great pity that the noble Lord should have said something which, as a lawyer, he ought to have known was not true. The noble Lord also said that the campaign for responsible fatherhood was lost a couple of generations ago. If that is true, then let us fight the campaign again and win it. Let us not simply say, ““It’s gone, it’s lost, forget it, it’s a new world””. The noble Lord also said that science could change ethics. No, my Lords, science cannot change ethics. Ethics are ethics, morals are morals. What is right is right, what is wrong is wrong, and science cannot change that. If that were so, we would be living in a morass, in a world of moral relativism. If there is one thing that is going wrong in the world at the moment, it is that we are losing sight of the immutability of certain rights and wrongs and ethics. We are all citing personal experience, and none more so than the noble Lord, Lord Winston. I would have been happier about some of what he had said had he not described those of his team who had disagreed with him as prejudiced. It might just have been that they took a different view from him. They might even have considered him prejudiced. It is possible. We have to be careful not to allege that those who take a different view from us are doing so out of prejudice, when they may be doing so from a moral standpoint or from their experience of life. I should say that I have been a single parent—albeit not for very long—after my youngest child was born and my wife was desperately ill. I found myself cast in that role for some months, with a newborn babe, a five year-old and a seven year-old. Do not tell me that single parenting is difficult. I know that well enough. This at legislation—and particularly this part of the Bill—is about those circumstances in which a child is conceived by IVF through the use of technology that has been licensed by the state. Therefore the state has a responsibility of fatherhood. The child would not have been conceived without that. Indeed, those technologists involved in the conception have a responsibility of fatherhood too. We are tending to forget that. Under those circumstances, there is no doubt in my mind, that, in general—and I emphasise, in general—a child’s life prospects are better if it grows up in a family, with a father and a mother, than if it lacks either of them. In general, these are indisputable facts. Of course, there are exceptions. There are thoroughly bad fathers, thoroughly bad mothers and extraordinarily good single parents. Of course, there are. However, we can only deal with it in general terms. The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, implied, that this Bill, as drafted, tends to marginalise fathers. That is true, but it is not the worst of it. This Bill concentrates so much on the alleged right of a mother to have a child that it forgets the right of a child to have a pair of parents—a mother and a father. As for human rights law, do not children have human rights? Does not an unborn child have rights? Indeed, perhaps one could extend it to the concept that a child not yet conceived, has a right? I think it does. It has a human right to a father and a mother. We should ensure that we do all we can to see that that is carried through. Amendment No. 108A rebalances the Bill, not so much in favour of mothers, or of fathers, or of parents, but in favour of the child. Surely, it is to the child that we owe the responsibility, as it is under this legislation that the child will be conceived. Therefore, collectively, we are, in that sense, its parent.