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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, I will be very brief. I support government Amendment No. 108 and oppose the other amendments not because I do not believe that a father is important in the life of a child; I very much do. I am familiar and agree with most of the research to that effect, but I gently suggest that it is not relevant. Today's debate is not about the virtues of a particular form of family. We are looking at this legislation and seeking to pass amendments in order to determine the interface between a clinician, as my noble friend Lord Winston said, and a prospective patient seeking treatment. Let us suppose that amendments other than the Government's amendment are passed today. What will happen? Heterosexual couples remain unaffected. We are obviously not going to prohibit the rights of single women and gay and lesbian couples to have fertility treatment because they already have that treatment and almost everyone has said that they expect and wish that situation to continue. The likelihood of single women or indeed a gay couple re-presenting themselves to the clinician as part of a heterosexual couple is impossible unless they are manipulating the legislation. So what have we achieved should we pass any of the amendments other than the government amendment? Heterosexual couples, single women and gay couples continue as before. However, we were told in several of the contributions today, which I respect, that we would be sending out a signal. What does that mean? It has come to me in the course of the debate that we do not expect the world to be any different. We do not expect to change anything, but we feel better because we have put our views on the face of the Bill. That could be empty, bad law or rhetoric, but it would also do something else. It would send out a signal, which is what worries me most. The signal that would be received by the children mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne—the one child in four currently in a family without a father—is that we believe those families are inferior and those children are second-class children. As a result, we would be stigmatising them in the name of some family form that we wish them to have, but that they do not have, and cannot, as children, choose to have. Is that what we want to do? To stigmatise children with an amendment that will have no practical effect on any presenting client, but will impact on the children that may result. I cannot believe noble Lords want that to happen. I hope, as a result, that noble Lords will support the Government’s amendment, which responds to the feeling of this House in Committee, but reject the other amendments.