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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, might I bring some information to this debate? For eight years, I chaired the Human Genetics Commission; I stepped down only last November. It is now chaired by Sir John Sulston, who was my vice-chair. He was the head of the British end of the genome project and you could not meet a more ethical scientist. I remind your Lordships that the commission has on it the very kinds of people whom the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, spoke of; we had medical practitioners, research scientists, genetic counsellors, ethicists, moral philosophers, members from the Consumers’ Association and people suffering from a disability. We had a consultative panel of 100 persons, all of whom had genetic disease or genetic propensities within their families. The whole business of bioethics therefore stretches beyond the issues that we have been debating on this Bill. Your Lordships should understand the ecology of the advice given to the Government on ethics. What is interesting is that, while the ground is rather divided in this country, it is covered. The HFEA, for example, deals with the issue of gender selection, whereas the Human Genetics Commission advises on issues such as the ethical oversight of the police DNA database. Our commission has been advising the Government on the improper use of genetic information; because of that, a criminal offence was created to prevent people from stealing DNA and misusing it. We produced many of the kinds of papers that the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, spoke of. For example we produced a paper on over-the-counter testing, where there are real issues of ethical implication. We also produced work on genetics and reproductive choice, and the possible overuse of testing without parents having an opportunity to refuse some of the tests on offer. I mentioned that there are ethical issues beyond those being debated here. Bodies exist to advise the Government, after considerable debate and consultation with the public. Indeed, we travel around the country so that our meetings are not confined to London. I had the experience of going to the United States to visit, at its invitation, the White House committee on bioethics. I went with the then chair of the HFEA, Suzi Leather. It was interesting because together we had basically covered the same ground as that committee. However, the experience was most depressing because, to some extent, that committee could not get beyond the primary debate. In the end, the right-to-life debate was the only debate, which hampered the opportunity to have the kind of debate that we have seen taking place in this House over these past weeks. Given my background, that whole debate reaches deeply into my heart. I feel that issues about life and those fragile boundaries that the noble Baroness mentioned need to be decided in the public domain, ultimately by elected representatives in Parliament. In visiting and meeting bioethics committees, I was concerned at the way in which almost inevitably those issues became politicised. So let us have our politics out in the open. I am unhappy about subcontracting ethics to a group of ethicists. That forgets the fact that franchising out ethics to a set of eminent personages somehow takes ethics away from the rest of us. If we want to have an ethical society, we must all be our own ethicists. Watching the bioethics committee in the White House at work was seriously depressing. All groupings want to be represented; you end up with all the major churches and many other groups insisting on representation. I am sure that everyone involved is profoundly moral, but in that situation, ultimately, the debates become privatised. It is important that we try to find better ways of having these debates publicly. That may mean putting more money into the Human Genetics Commission. When I stepped down, I had my sort of debriefing meeting as a former chair, who had been asked to stay on time after time until it became a bit too long. I said that it might be better to bring in some of the ethical issues that had been with the HFEA. I felt that there was a discomfort in some of those issues being with the HFEA, which is seen by the public as a regulatory body. It is confusing to have the regulatory function and an advisory function on ethics combined. Perhaps one body could do that, in the form of the Human Genetics Commission. However, to start setting up a bioethics commission and to have a contention as to who should be on it and who might be represented on it will inevitably lead to a politicisation that I think we should avoid. I return to my submission to this House, which is that we are all ethicists.