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19 Nov 2007 : Column 680
4.17 pm
Lord Alton of Liverpool: My Lords, the topicality of today’s debate was underlined in the headlines in the weekend newspapers, saying that the stem cell revolution has ended the need to use human embryos. I should like to turn back to that question in the substantive part of my remarks, but before doing so I should like also to touch briefly on one point just alluded to by the noble Baroness, that of the prospect that this Bill might be extended to include abortion provision, and to refer to the issue of the welfare of children.
Like the noble Baroness, I do not believe that it would be appropriate for this Bill, which gave no opportunity in committee to consider the abortion question, to extend the Abortion Act 1967. As the author of that Act, the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood, said recently, 200,000 abortions a year are too many. We have laws that have allowed 7 million abortions in the past 40 years, some 600 every day, and thus 200,000 every year. We have laws that allow abortion up to and even during birth on the disabled. Many noble Lords will have seen a recent newspaper story from the south-west region of the country indicating that over a three-year period, some of the babies aborted with disabilities included those with cleft palate, club foot, hare-lip, webbed fingers and webbed feet. They numbered some 100.
These are contentious questions, but even more contentious is the proposal being put forward by Members of another place that this Bill should be used like a Trojan horse to introduce the abolition of the requirement for two doctors to certify an abortion and the extension of the Act to Northern Ireland. Attacks have also been made on the conscience clause, as well as reports that nurses and midwives are being required to carry out abortions. Without considering those issues in great depth and detail, rather as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans indicated to the House a few moments ago, it would be wholly inappropriate to be rushed pell-mell into them.
I think that all noble Lords had great confidence in the way that the Select Committee, chaired so ably by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, looked at the equally contentious issue of assisted dying.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern: My Lords, I should point out that the chair was taken by Mr Phil Willis of another place.
Lord Alton of Liverpool: My Lords, the noble and learned Lord may have misheard me. I was talking about the equally contentious issue of assisted dying in order to make the point that that Select Committee, which inevitably did not reach a conclusion, was nonetheless able to inform the debate by producing weighty documents based not entirely on taking soundings on public opinion, as the noble Baroness just said, but also on taking huge amounts of evidence. It thus informed the debate in your Lordships’ House, and I would argue that before we proceed to any changes in abortion law, the right way
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I turn next to the welfare of children. As my noble friend Lady Deech has said, there are serious concerns about the issue of “saviour siblings” and about the need for a father. The Bill extends the creation of saviour siblings to the treatment of serious disease rather than just life-threatening disease. To deliberately leave it open for children apparently to be created for the sole and explicit purpose of being available to provide any type of tissue at all for an existing sibling is appalling. This is truly dehumanising society, and is a serious development. I am currently awaiting an answer to the Parliamentary Question I tabled to the Minister on this subject, but will he say today where the Bill uses the words,
what “other tissue” means? The phrase in the Bill does not seem to exclude anything specifically. I was deeply concerned to hear these words from Dr Simon Fishel, the managing director of the CARE Fertility Group, who is also an inspector, peer reviewer and external adviser to the HFEA:
Given that the chairman of the Joint Committee, Mr Phil Willis, bewilderingly suggested that autism was also a condition that a saviour sibling might in future be created for, Parliament surely deserves to know what the Government have in mind in extending the definitions from “life-threatening” to “serious”. Also, precisely what in the Bill itself would unequivocally ban the creation of a child to be a kidney donor, for instance? Instead of creating saviour siblings for umbilical cord, how much better it would be if we were routinely collecting umbilical cord and cord blood. Only four National Health Service facilities do this at present, while 98 per cent is routinely destroyed. That would save lives immediately.
I intend to ask your Lordships to amend the Bill in Committee to ensure that harvesting causes no harm to the donor. I would also like all references in the Bill that seek to create a legal fiction around parenthood to be deleted. As the Joint Committee rightly said, to deny to a child that he or she had a real biological father would be nothing short of the state colluding in a deception. An estimated 800,000 children in Britain already have no contact with their father. To deliberately add to that number is downright irresponsible. One of the deepest questions that we ask ourselves is, “Who am I?”. The right to lineage affects us all, and uncertainty over parentage can profoundly unsettle people. The popularity of television programmes such as “Who Do You Think You Are?” illustrates the natural desire to know one’s family history. The guidance of the Oracle of Delphi to the Lydian King Croesus was that to be happy, he must know himself. That is true for us too.
The Government’s decision to remove the reference to the “need for a father” from law and social policy is a huge error. Women should not be interrogated at IVF clinics about their sexual orientation or their marital status and many single women are loving and exceptionally good mothers, but the need for a father,
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Like my noble friend Lady Deech, I urge the Government to delete those references from the Bill.
I turn to the issue of embryology. I want to challenge the provisions in the Bill that will add to the 2 million human embryos that since 1990 have been destroyed or experimented upon. The new Bill goes even further, permitting the creation of hybrid animal-human embryos. Many of us have previously pointed to the futility and lack of progress of embryonic stem cell research, but the argument has now shifted to the new methods for producing stem cells with the same potential as embryonic stem cells. Those committed to human embryonic stem cells now have no excuse to work with—that is, to destroy—embryos for the purpose of deriving new or patient-matched pluripotent cell lines. Last Saturday Professor Ian Wilmut, who famously cloned Dolly the sheep, declared cloning work with human embryos needless. He said:
“The work which was described from Japan of using a technique to change cells from a patient directly into stem cells without making an embryo has got so much more potential”.
However, the justification given for this new Bill in the recent Queen’s Speech was that we have to,
It is clear from what Professor Wilmut said that interspecies cloning is not the way ahead.
As yet, no therapies anywhere in the world use embryonic stem cells. Strikingly, an editorial in NatureBiotechnologyin 2005 stated:
for which there are no moral hazards. It continued:
“One estimate is that there are currently over 80 therapies and around 300 clinical trials underway using such cells”.
When I divided the House on this issue in 2001, many of those who voted for embryonic cloning, and who will vote for animal-human hybrids, did so out of a genuine humanitarian desire to help those who suffer from disabling diseases. The state of stem cell research led them to believe that they had to choose between the ideal of helping to cure disease and the equally cherished belief of many that it is unconscionable to destroy nascent human lives in experimentation. Six years on from the hype of 2001, not only is it clear how the hopes of the desperate have often been cruelly and falsely raised, not least by the scandal of fraudulent cloning claims, but it is apparent that the supposed ethical dilemma may have been rendered redundant. In June 2007, three separate publications heralded the successful creation of embryonic-like cells from adult stem cells. This allows for the creation of a middle ground in the debate. Ethically uncontroversial stem cell techniques are where the future lies.
In the House of Lords debate in 2001, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, the then Minister, said that,
- “the 1990 Act already provides the answer to the question of what happens if and when research into adult cells overtakes research using embryos: embryonic research would have to stop because the use of embryos would no longer be necessary for that research”.—[Official Report, 22/1/01; col. 120.]
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It is no longer necessary. I hope that, instead of ending the unnecessary destruction of human embryos and advocating the creation of animal-human hybrid embryos, we will agree to that simple test—let us call it the Hunt test—which I will seek to move as an amendment in Committee; that is, licences will not be granted unless applicants can prove that no alternative is available, and applicants should have to demonstrate that embryos from no other species could be used for the same purpose and that their proposals are well founded and based on prior work from other species. In these controversial areas of embryology, child welfare and abortion, the House should proceed with great care and be prepared, if significant improvements are not made, to reject this Bill outright at Third Reading.
4.27 pm
Lord Jenkin of Roding: My Lords, like the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, I was a member of the Joint Committee. I join him in saying that pre-legislative scrutiny of what is by any standards a complex and controversial Bill has proved its purpose.
Perhaps I may refer briefly to two matters that are not in the Bill. The first, the amalgamation of the HFEA and the Human Tissue Authority into RATE, has already been referred to. From the very moment that the merger was announced, I thought that it was a rotten idea—I am on record as saying it. The idea survived for some three and a half years, but the Select Committee, and the evidence that it heard from almost every witness who referred to it, has put paid to it. I hope that the Minister will give a firm assurance that no attempt to resurrect RATE will be made. One reason for rejecting the proposal which certainly impressed me was that to treat human tissues and embryos as though they were equal entities, which the original title of the draft Bill and RATE would have provided for, would seem to devalue the importance of the embryo. Therefore, I am glad that that provision is not in the Bill.
However—this is the second matter to which I wish to refer—one of the consequences of that is that what the Select Committee recommended about amendments to the Human Tissues Act, I am now firmly advised cannot be done, because of the terms of the Long Title of the Bill. This is a very great pity.
We were told by some witnesses that the way in which the Human Tissue Act is drafted, with its reference to anything containing cells, means that, for instance, blood and human faeces and urine, even if taken from living people, are all subject to the legislation. In Scotland, they do not do that; they make it perfectly clear that the equivalent of the Human Tissue Act applies only to the products of post-mortems. There are some 200 million instances in England per annum because of the ridiculous definition that crept into that Act, compared with 140,000 post-mortems. We cannot deal with that in this Bill. I hope that the Minister can tell us when the Government will introduce legislation to put that right, as well as the other points that were drawn to our attention, principally by the Royal College of Pathologists. If noble Lords want the details, they are in paragraphs 106 and onward of the Joint Committee’s report.
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On some of the issues that we are now being asked to consider, a third issue that is not in the Bill but has been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, is abortion law. I was astonished to find that we can expect—perhaps not in this House but certainly in the other place—amendments to the existing abortion legislation. The Select Committee simply had nothing whatever to do with that; it was not in the Bill and not part of our terms of reference. Why have we ruled out human tissue reform when we will have to discuss abortion reform at some stage? It is because the existing law on abortions, dealing with late abortions and the time limits, is to be found in the 1990 Act. Of course, because we are amending the 1990 Act, hey presto, we can discuss abortion. There is something wrong with our rules that make this distinction, but it is not for me to recommend what should be done to put it right. This Bill, with human tissues out and abortion in, seems a very strange way in which to proceed.
I turn to one matter that has been mentioned by a number of people and one other matter that has only been touched on. In the Joint Committee, we set out what I can only call the repeated tergiversations of government policy on human animal embryos. I refer to paragraphs 152 to 154 of the report. The Joint Committee unanimously described those tergiversations as “extremely unhelpful”—and I can only add to that. At the time when we began to consider the matter, the White Paper said one thing while ministerial letters said another.
Finally, we were left with the position that cytoplasmic hybrids, sometimes called cybrids—although I like the other expression used this afternoon—and true hybrids were different things. The committee could see no difference whatever, and we regarded the Government’s distinction as,
What do we find now? In the Bill, the Government have accepted that position. We have come full circle, and all those entities are now to be regarded as within the competence of the regulator and permitted subject only to regulation. The point has been made, but I emphasise again that the safeguards built in to that—the 14-day rule, no implantation and so on—stand and are statutory and provide the main barrier against abuse. This last change of view by the Government is welcome, but one has to say that it was a tortuous way in which to get there.
I recognise that there are strong views—we have heard some of them this afternoon—about joint human and animal embryo research. We heard about that at some length, as the right reverend Prelate will remember, at the evening forum, where we met representatives of a lot of the bodies that advised us and gave us their views on these issues and I am sure that I am not alone in having had a great deal of correspondence on the issue since then. Having said that, I am persuaded that the view put forward by the Minister this afternoon and by our scientific advisers—particularly the Medical Research Council, the Royal Society and the Wellcome Trust—is correct: this work is necessary for the advancement of research. This is not only blue-sky research to try to unfold the mysteries of life, which
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I have two minutes to deal with the other issue, and I want to talk about the children born of donor conception. We heard some interesting and moving evidence from some of those who fell into that description. There are a bewildering number of provisions in the Bill to deal with parenting and so forth. My concern is about the right of a donor-conceived person to know his or her genetic origins. Do they have a right to be told? Is there a duty on parents to tell? What should go on the birth certificate? One point that was made to us was that, if a person is conceived by donor conception and the birth certificate shows someone else as the father—perhaps the husband of the wife—is not the state conniving in a deception?
We examined these problems at some length—it is all in the report—but we said that we recognised that these are complex issues. We called on the Government to give urgent attention to addressing this and to come to a conclusion. The Government said in their response that they are reviewing the position. That is not enough. We know what that means in Whitehall-speak. We are entitled to ask the Government to come to conclusions on these issues in time to be able to table amendments to the Bill. I hope that the Government will be able to reply to that.
4.38 pm
Baroness Williams of Crosby: My Lords, I am conscious that the Bill has been given the most careful overview and pre-legislative scrutiny, and I begin by echoing the remarks made by the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, when she said that this Bill is a remarkable example of the attempt to involve the legislature in great detail in the drafting of a Bill. Although there are aspects of the Bill that I cannot pretend to like, it is a remarkable example of how the legislature should be brought in to the drafting and scrutiny of Bills to a much greater extent than is generally true. We all know that there is a great deal of ill-drafted and ill-thought-out legislation and this Bill is a remarkable counter-example of how to involve people in the deepest discussion on a matter of such complexity and importance.
I was not on the Joint Committee and I have been struck by the remarks of those who were who have obviously thought very deeply about this, so I shall restrict my remarks to four particular points, the first three of which I will end by asking a direct question of the Minister, because they directly affect the Government's intentions.
The first thing that I want to mention goes back to the debates that we had in this House in January 2001 at the initial stages of our discussion of embryo cell research, when two Members of this House—I believe that the other Member will speak about this as well—raised on more than one occasion the success of adult stem cell research and the indications that adult stem cells had two great advantages. They are pluripotential—as embryo cells can be—but, more importantly, they are
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One reason for the superior view taken of adult stem cell therapy was due to the strongly argued case in the scientific community—this was partly fired by the sometimes ignorant opposition in some circles towards embryo cell therapy—that it was the superior way to go. So the first question I ask the noble Lord is: have we now put behind us any bias between these two different kinds of research? Exactly what financial support has been given for adult stem therapy, and with what results, in the nine years since we discussed this matter?
One of the reasons I am so concerned about this is because at that time I raised the case of a researcher, Dr Abuljadayel, who was unable to get her work on adult stem cells printed in any major scientific publication in this country. That troubles me a great deal. As it turned out, she had a very important contribution to make. As I say, she could not get her work published in any major scientific journal and was able to do so only when her professor at Cambridge agreed to associate his recommendation with it. That troubles me and I would like an assurance from the Minister that we shall look with open and unbiased attitudes at the different therapies that can be useful. From those in this field whom I have spoken to my understanding is that so far embryonic cell research has not produced any remarkable therapeutic results although it has challenging possibilities in the research field. The Minister may be able to say a little more about that.
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