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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Steel, will understand why I have a sense of déjà vu this evening—our history goes back a very long time in debating this matter. I listened to what he said with great care, but he was not really denying what my noble friend Lady Masham said. She said that a special change was made to deal with the question of aborting babies later because the child was handicapped. If that is not acting against the bearing and having of a disabled child, I find it really difficult to see quite what is. I have always felt that it is very difficult—we must understand how difficult—to have a badly handicapped child. It is all very well for some of us who have never had that burden to say that other people should take it on. I completely understand that, but I believe that if society is civilised and humane then it ought to do far more to help women in that situation. Many years ago, when I was a local councillor, I remember calling to see a lady who had a badly disabled child—she called him that, although he was 38 years old. What worried her above everything else was who would look after Tommy when she was gone. I thought that quite dreadful and that there ought to have been some way of helping her when he was young, because she said that she was never able to leave him alone. I do not think she had had a holiday after her husband died. There was no one else to look after the boy. She had had a really dreadful life, but that is no reason not to have the child at all. Society ought to help a great deal more. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Steel, acknowledged, a handicapped person is often a great blessing. A handicapped baby can be that, and we can learn such a lot from its courage and smiles. It worries me greatly that we are at the stage of seeming to go further and further down the dateline. In the past few days, I was horrified to hear this matter being discussed on the radio by two professors who were trying to decide whether an unborn child felt pain. I can remember seeing pictures of unborn children being jabbed with a needle while in the womb, and their reaction seemed perfectly visible. It was a definite reaction to receiving a painful jab. The professors could not agree—but which two professors can agree, except the noble Lords, Lord Patel and Lord Winston? In the main, however, experts disagree. The professors said, ““If there is any doubt about the unborn child feeling pain, we can always inject it with something that will stop it feeling pain while it is aborted””. That is an extraordinary way of looking at the issue. We should value our disabled friends greatly and in no way seem to act against them by permitting a later abortion for them than for others. It worries me that we increasingly accept that abortion is necessary and that it will happen. A friend of mine was told by her doctors that she should think seriously about having an abortion because her child was handicapped. She refused to do so and the child was slightly handicapped in one foot, which the doctors were able to rectify over about four years. This matter worries me and I have pleasure in supporting my noble friend.