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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, I would like to agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis of Heigham, but I am afraid that I do not. Anyone who ventures into the field of abortion—I have never particularly done so before—is treading on very tender ground. Since the days when the noble Lord, Lord Steel, introduced his Bill on abortion, which was deeply controversial, there have been lots of abortions, to such an extent that some people almost regard abortion as a choice. That was the word of the noble Baroness, Lady Gould of Potternewton: we have a choice. These abortions have gone on and, as far as I understand it, the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, says that you cannot have an abortion after 25 weeks. At the moment you can have an abortion up to the point when the child is born. When does that child become a human being? Is it the point at which it comes into the world, because that is the moment when it becomes, as it were, a free human being? It is the same child that was in the womb the day before. Is it really justifiable to say that that child is wrong and, therefore, we ought to abort it? We all want to have perfect children, perfect lives and perfect health, but it does not work out that way. I am apprehensive, and always have been, about the wisdom of abortions at an early stage, because you are destroying some form of life. I am deeply apprehensive about it at a later stage, because it is very difficult to tell when that child is a foetus and when it becomes a human being with a soul. Aborting children—and I have no experience of this other than seeing pictures—can be pretty grisly. Destroying human beings, even if they are in the womb, is a terrible task to take on. I hope that the amendment will go through, because I do not think it right that human beings should decide at one moment that this child, who is a human being, should not be born.