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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, on having the courage to bring the amendment to the House. In many ways we have had a very moving debate again this evening. We had one in Committee. I would like to add one or two things to the debate. I will try not to be very long. The noble Lord, Lord Steel, pointed out that we are talking about less than 1 per cent, and in the case of very disabled babies much less than 1 per cent, of the total abortions done in this country. My noble friend Lady Williams said that we should have equality in the timing of when abortion is permitted. The very reason we say after 24 weeks for severely disabled foetuses is because the tests cannot be done to make sure that the baby has a certain condition until 24 weeks, and 26 weeks in some cases. Therefore, that means a woman carrying a handicapped baby has missed the time limit that is put on normal abortions of 24 weeks. I said in Committee that we were not talking here about disabled human beings, but about some grossly abnormal human beings; many of those whom I have seen bear little resemblance to human beings. In Committee I mentioned the child with anencephaly that I delivered. It had no brain and a grotesque appearance. I spent some time as a medical student in a hospital that was meant for very severely mentally and physically disabled children. It was the most terrible two weeks I have ever spent in the whole of my career, seeing those poor creatures, some of them a little less affected than the others, and maybe trying to feed someone who could just lie in a cot at the age of 35 or 40 and do absolutely nothing else. We are talking about serious handicap. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, questioned ““seriousness””, and asked how serious should a disablement be. We have heard from two noble Lords how surgery in the womb and outside the womb during pregnancy is being developed. That is wonderful news for those foetuses that can be helped in this way. Some mothers of course choose to go down that road to help their babies in that way, but we should not impose that solution or promise it when it does not exist in all seriousness. I have just one other point to add on the famous cleft palate case that nearly everyone has mentioned. I would like to tell the noble Lord, Lord Clarke, that about 1,000 babies are born each year with a cleft palate. Looking at the incidence of cleft palate among children generally, that means that not many of them are being aborted. The surgeon he spoke of should have the normal number to practise on. People are not having late abortions for that reason. The noble Baroness, Lady Gould, mentioned the disabled students. We heard a moving speech from one of them at a meeting in the other place last week. The important thing about the NUS disabled students is that they are elected representatives. They are not interest or lobby groups; they are elected representatives of disabled people who do not want a woman’s choice to be affected by these considerations. They feel it is the woman’s right to make the decision. Finally, supporting this amendment would mean that every woman in this country who has a severely disabled child would have to carry it to term or perhaps go through the same trauma as a 17 year-old Irish girl recently, who was known to have an anencephalic foetus and was shipped across to here, then back to there, and went through the law courts in Ireland before a decision was finally somehow made that she could have a termination of her pregnancy. Are we going to put all women in this country in that situation if they have a handicapped foetus? I ask the people who support this amendment to have a bit of compassion. They speak as if they are being extremely compassionate and want to save the life of the child. Let us have some compassion for the mother who is carrying these pregnancies too. I do not believe that the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, or her supporters are cruel or inhumane. Of course they are not, yet it would be cruel and inhumane in the extreme to make women carrying seriously handicapped babies go to full term and deliver a child that they know would never have any quality of life at all, even if it survived the birth.