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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 131: 131: Clause 24, page 21, line 2, leave out ““has the same meaning as in section 31”” and insert ““means— (a) an individual as defined in section 31, or (b) where no request under subsection (2) has previously been made, a child of such an individual;”” The noble Earl said: My Lords, I return to an issue I raised in Committee about the right that the Bill grants to a donor-conceived person to make a request to the registrar for identifiable and non-identifiable information about his or her donor parent. This right is entirely appropriate and worthy of our support. In Committee, I raised the question of whether this right should be extended to a child of a donor-conceived person in certain circumstances. There could be a situation in which a woman with children of her own discovers that she was donor-conceived, but dies before she has the chance to make an information request. In those circumstances, there would appear to be no means for anyone at all to obtain the relevant information from the authority. I maintain that the child of a donor-conceived person has a very strong claim to that same information, not simply to satisfy his curiosity but to enable him to discover any information about heritable illness, about which his dead parent would have had a right to know. He also has a direct interest in wanting to avoid entering into an intimate relationship with a close blood relation. I have reworded my Committee amendments so as, I hope, to avoid the unwelcome possibility flagged up by the Minister that it could give rise to a request for information from all the children of a donor-conceived person, as opposed to just one of them; my intention being that the right to make an inquiry should be extended only once, either to the donor-conceived person or to a child of his. I believe that the Bill as currently drafted is unnecessarily restrictive and I hope that the Minister will look at the amendment more favourably than she did before. I beg to move.