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12.10 pm
Mr. Robert Key (Salisbury): Only two of the Members present took part in the debates during the passage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990. It is a pleasure to see my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Mrs. Winterton) in the Chamber. It is noteworthy that she and I took opposing views then, and we shall do so again today. It is important for the House to have some continuity in its arguments.
One argument that always worries me on such occasions is the postbag argument. My postbag has not bulged with letters on this subject: I have received only 34 from my 100,000 constituents although, of course, I pay extremely careful attention to their views. We need to be rather careful in this context--perhaps we should also refer to the e-mail postbag and to confrontations and
discussions in the street. If we are talking numbers, it is important to recognise that, at the height of the debate, 17 out of 659 hon. Members were present in the Chamber, and not one represented a Scottish or Welsh constituency. Should we take that as a guide to the strength of the House's opinion on the matter? It is also significant that precisely nine hon. Members are present at the moment, including you, Mr. Deputy Speaker.The various issues that we have discussed include the rather interesting assertion that science should not press ahead of the body politic. Well, Aristotle would have had something to say about that, as would Galileo--the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Dr. Brand) pointed that out--and Darwin. I was a member of the Medical Research Council in 1990 and during the gestation of the 1990 Act I recall discussing with the most distinguished scientists in the land the impact on public opinion of the legislation, which the Conservative Government knew was necessary. The argument was about how much should be included in the legislation, how far it should go and whether the country was ready for cloning.
It is nonsense to argue that cloning was never considered during the passage of the 1990 Act--of course it was. I recall a distinguished scientist saying that it would take 20 years before we started talking about therapeutic cloning. He was wrong--it took 10. The Government of the day made the informed judgment that it was not appropriate at that stage to go quite as far as we are now being asked to go because scientists were years ahead of the body politic and of public opinion--they always have been and always will be.
As a veteran of that debate, I recall that I said that the scientists would return to Parliament. Scientists are, largely, very responsible people. They know that they have to operate within the law and that laws quickly become outdated. They must come clean and say, "That provision simply does not apply any more. We have gone further and discovered more." That is why they are back today.
The debate 10 years ago was full and fierce in Parliament and outside, and it has continued over the years. Questions about embryology in various guises were, at least in my constituency, general election issues. They were minority issues, but they were important to the people who raised them in 1992 and 1997, so I cannot accept the argument that the nation is only just waking up to them and that we need much more time to consider them. We have been discussing them for a decade. Anyone who is remotely interested in the subject, whether from a moral, religious, ethical or scientific point of view, has had ample opportunity to argue for that.
Last summer, the debate started again, in the context of the Donaldson report. I did not mind that it was published in the middle of August. It gave us a nice long period to read the darn thing, to think about it and to discuss it while the House was not sitting, rather than having the five-minute wonder of an instant statement, 30 to 40 minutes of questions to the Minister and then saying that Parliament had done its job. I do not doubt that it was convenient for the media manipulators in the Government, too, but I do not read into that a conspiracy theory.
Given that we will have at least six months before we are asked to come to a decision following the publication of the Donaldson report, it is extraordinary that anyone should accuse the Government of rushing Parliament into
the discussion or debate. I have read carefully, for example, the background paper dated 16 August. That seems pretty close to the publication of the Donaldson report. By 16 August, the Church of Scotland had reached its moral and ethical conclusions, which it circulated. I am grateful to it. It has done much good work, but I was surprised that its background paper should say:
- We welcome the Government's decision to put these questions to a free vote, but the autumn is too soon. It is clear from surveys and experience that few of the general public or MPs at present understand these complex issues. It will therefore need a far wider public discussion before Parliament should put it to the vote. A recent House of Lords report highlighted the need, in these post-GM days, of a close public involvement over biotechnology decisions. These issues are too large and too far reaching to be scrambled through by a rushed parliamentary procedure.
Those who are ill and in pain cannot wait. We should not be dilatory, but what causes concern to our constituents? I have had 34 letters--28 against and six for--on extending cloning to therapeutic cloning. I shall list some of the arguments as to why I should not support the proposal. People felt that human cloning was degrading. They said that we should use adult cells. Someone said that there was no basis in science for denying full protection to the foetus. There was the slippery-slope argument. I was told that we should not allow "farmed for organ tissue". I was told that it was abortion. I was told that there are other ways of dealing with the problem. Someone said, "This will legalise cloning." That person was 10 years out of date. Others said that it was "cannibalisation". Someone said that it was abhorrent to God's law and human morals.
Then there are those in favour. A lot of constituents with particular diseases are in favour. We have all received passionate letters from individual constituents. We all have many constituents with such degenerative diseases--there are thousands in each of our constituencies. Some of the letters that I have had opposing the proposal are somewhat lacking in compassion for their friends and neighbours, whom we all know.
The medical charities cannot all be wrong. There are about 100 of them; they are members of the Association of Medical Research Charities. They include the Alzheimer's Disease Society, the Arthritis Research Campaign, the Breast Cancer Campaign, the British Heart Foundation, the Cancer Research Campaign, the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association, the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, Inspire--of which I am a patron, and which is located at the Duke of Cornwall spinal treatment centre in Salisbury--the Marie Curie Research Institute, the Migraine Trust, the Multiple Sclerosis Society, the Parkinson's Disease Society, the Psoriasis Association and the Royal National Institute for the Blind. Those are all everyday charities. They cannot all be wrong in believing that the proposal is the right way to go.
I felt that it was not appropriate for the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris) to introduce a subject of this gravity as a ten-minute rule Bill. I attended the debate throughout and listened to both sides. I did not vote and I was not alone; less than a quarter of Members voted on that day.
Inevitably, constituents have offered me conflicting advice. Some have written from specific moral or religious standpoints, while others have shared their personal experience. That places on me and on each of us a heavy responsibility to come to an informed judgment.
I have listened to many people. I have listened to pressure groups, to charities, to different Christian views and to moral philosophers. I have my own religious, moral and practical views, based on my active membership of the Church of England and on the challenges faced by my wife and me on the birth of our first child, who died of a rare genetic disorder after only a few days with us. I thank God that we went on to have three strapping children as a result of the genetic counselling that we were given at the time and of the advances that were no doubt made.
Thus our advisers are many, but hon. Members can reach only one view and we can each cast only one vote when the time comes. The practical benefits of supporting the Government's recommendations are easy to follow. As I have said, our constituencies include thousands of people, whom we know personally, who could benefit--and, if they could not, someone younger could. The Minister and others have put the medical arguments very clearly, and I shall not repeat them.
Whatever the science involved, the love that makes a child is miraculous and awe-inspiring, but when does a life begin? I take the traditional Christian view that human life is a continuum, and it does not start at the moment of conception. Apart from being the logical scientific and evolutionary view, that is also the philosophical tradition of Christians. Aristotle believed that an intellectual soul could exist only when a recognisable human form had grown at 40 days, at least, for a male, and I regret to say that he believed that it was 90 days for a female. St. Gregory and St. Augustine preached that view, as did the Celtic Church, and it was entrenched in canon law in the Catholic west and in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas. In 1869, Pope Pious IX published a papal bull, which remains the basis of Roman Catholic teaching today, asserting that human life, body and soul, starts at the moment of conception. As a Protestant, I find it strange to point out that the Catholics are the revisionists in this matter, but that is the fact.
Of course, it is only in the past 50 years or so that we have known enough to make judgments based on scientific fact. I am completely convinced that not everything that can be done by science should be done by science. That is where Parliament becomes involved, representing the conflicting views of our people and adjudicating on how far science should go. The moral arguments for and against permitting research using human embryos turn on the status accorded to the pre-14-day embryo.
- Is the fact that, under certain circumstances, they may develop into human beings sufficient to make us regard them now, at the stage they are at, as full human beings--in which case of course they should be protected from exploitation and certainly from being used as research material, just as other human beings, including children, should--or is the fact that they have no human attributes, and if left in the laboratory, no chance of acquiring such attributes, enough to allow us to treat them more as human tissue than as human persons?
I share the view of the former Archbishop of York, John Habgood, who has argued that the value that we attach to the lives of human beings--a value that is the root of all morality--increases as human life develops, and that we are therefore entitled, morally, to hold the life of a recently fertilised egg as less to be protected than that of a foetus at a later stage or a baby when it is born. The Archbishop argued that not only is that morally acceptable, but that it is in fact what we do.
Nature is profligate. We do not mourn for wasted sperm and eggs, alive though they are; nor for the three quarters of fertilised eggs that are lost before implant, half of which are genetically impaired. As the Bishop of Oxford has said,
- If every fertilised egg was indeed a soul, that is, an immortal spiritual reality created independently of the biological process, then, according to these figures, three quarters of heaven would be populated by souls that lived for less than a week. This does not seem congruous with what we know of a God who has chosen to create persons through a process of development.
- We are not nothing but our genes. We must recognise that we are conscious beings able to form our own purposes, with powers both to understand and to control the laws of biology, as well as of physics. It may be our moral duty to scrutinise, criticise and regulate the projects of biological scientists in the light of our concept of a common good. It cannot be our moral duty to repress and prohibit altogether the exercise of their inventive and creative genius.
- It is good that we can interact with nature, as God's co-workers, in bringing about the health which he wills for humanity and those healthy children that he desires.
I should like to explore the concept of scientists playing God. In the Reith lecture broadcast earlier this year, Prince Charles spoke for many when he rebuked biological revolutionaries for drawing us into areas that
- belonged to God and God alone.
To me, such strictures are not wholly sufficient, because part of what it is to be human is that, unlike other animals, we can change the way things are, and we have always done so. We have tamed nature to a great extent for our own needs, just as we have tamed and domesticated other animals so that we can milk them, eat them, clothe ourselves in their skin or wool, ride them, drive them and race them for our pleasure and profit. For the sake of all those purposes, we have over time genetically modified the plants and animals that we have used by selective breeding. If we left nature alone, we would be not even savages, but back with our ancestors the apes. We are necessarily separated from nature. If that were not so, we would have no moral law, no aspirations and no interest in the common good.
To argue that something is morally wrong because it is unnatural has always been common enough--we need think only of the designation of homosexuality as an "unnatural vice." The 18th century Scottish philosopher, David Hume, said that it is really no argument at all, for the word "natural" is fatally ambiguous, being opposed sometimes to the miraculous, sometimes to the unusual, and sometimes to the artificial. The concept of nature, especially since the late 18th century in the days of Rousseau and the beginning of the Romantic movement, exercises a curious fascination for us all. We have discovered in nature our deepest longings and our highest aspirations. I recognise that, for many, nature has come to stand in for God, providing them with a foundation for a secular religion.
We are uneasily aware that our lives have moved far away from the primitive, and even from the relative simplicities of a pre-industrial world. Now, in a largely secular world, the boundaries that gave meaning to life even into the 19th century seem to be breaking down. The breach of those boundaries induces what I can only describe as panic, which makes us cling to props and planks, and to apparent certainties by which we hope to save ourselves. If we are not careful, we become fundamentalists hanging on to a few dogmas that we do not intend to examine and which we will not give up. Those who demand that we should do only what is natural are fundamentalists. Hence, the constant attacks on biological scientists for playing God.
If we are to prevent ourselves from being swept along on this emotional tide, I believe that, rather as the British philosopher Bishop Butler told us in the 18th century, we should sit down "in a cool hour" and consider our human nature, our human capacities, how we aim both to control our own lives and to ameliorate the lives of others, and how, being human, we are able to form aspirations and imperatives of our own.
If we can hold out hope for some alleviation of the miseries of diseases such as Alzheimer's, then, being human, we have a duty to do so. If that involves cell transplant or genetic manipulation, let us pursue such goals. Let us recognise that, in changing some genes in some human beings, we are not changing human nature.
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