Reproductive Technology

Estimates 2006-07
Department of Health

Robert Key (Salisbury, Conservative)
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his clarification. The problem is that reproductive technology is moving way ahead of us as legislators. That was always going to happen. I remember saying in the Chamber during the Third Reading debate on the 1990 Act, "They will be back." I am quite surprised that it has taken the scientific community and the Government so long to come back to the House. I support the Select Committee's call for parliamentary oversight and a new parliamentary Standing Committee on bioethics. Only then will all sides have the chance to be heard and will there be an opportunity for the evidence to be weighed.

I wonder how many Members and how many of our constituents are familiar with the complexities of reproductive cloning, hybrids and chimeras, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, embryo splitting, parthenogenesis, cell nuclear transplants, sperm sorting and haploidisation. Those things are happening around us, for our constituents, in our constituencies, every day of the year. They are real. They are happening today. We cannot ignore them. We cannot say that we wish that they did not happen, because they are happening.

For that reason, I was surprised by the announcement from the Vatican last week, as reported in The Daily Telegraph. The headline was:

"Vatican vows to expel stem cell scientists from Church".

When the Committee visited the Vatican, it was a huge privilege to be invited to visit the archbishops and bishops and their medical advisers and experts, who did us great courtesy and showed us great respect, as we did them. They will be reading this debate—if not watching it in the Vatican. I would like, therefore, to put on record my thanks to them for putting up with us when we challenged them with some very difficult ideas—perhaps of a nature with which they were not familiar. Perhaps they were not used to being confronted by parliamentarians, because the politics of Italy are different and the role of the Church in Italy is different.

I am sorry that the Vatican made that announcement last week and that Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo said, in an interview with Famiglia Christiana, an official Vatican magazine:

"Excommunication will be applied to the women, doctors and researchers who eliminate embryos"

and to the

"politicians that approve the law."

I therefore commend the courage of the Italian senator, Paola Binetti, a member of Opus Dei and a prominent campaigner for Catholic rights, who said:

"I am upset and stunned,"

and continued:

"It is a mistake to give out the idea that God is angry with Man because he is not in agreement with him."

I agree with that. The Vatican's reaction looks a bit like panic.

I want to make a few comments about the question of so-called eugenics and designer babies. The whole argument is tainted by our memory of the appalling atrocity of Nazism and all that happened then. The word "eugenics" is Greek and simply means well bred and well-being—a good baby. Of course, that is not how it is usually applied. Surely there is a great difference between seeking to create a child with particular characteristics such as blue eyes—or a child who is sporty or musical—to make a master race, and trying to filter out the damaging parts of this fragile human life where that is humanly possible. I have wrestled with that problem for years.

I recall that when the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill was going through the House in 1989 and 1990, I asked my bishop, John Baker, whether he would help. On 20 February 1990, he wrote this to me:

"Where nature itself spontaneously aborts a good many embryos in these very early stages of life, it is hard to feel that to do so deliberately for good reason is contrary to God's own mind, so far as that is revealed in his created order. Moreover, if we are to be realistic, we human beings are not spiritually, psychologically and socially all so marvellous that we can promise the spina bifida or cystic fibrosis sufferer a quality and fulfilment of life that will make the burden of their sufferings worthwhile. On the whole if you can choose to launch either a life without these such handicaps or one with them, it seems morally better to choose the former. Many parents must pray for a disease-free child; when we are given the power to bring that about ourselves, what does it say about our prayer if we refuse to use that power?"

That puts that argument rather powerfully, and it is as true now as it was.

It is very important, therefore, to be careful when we are talking about designer babies to be clear that we are not talking about designing something to our own wish or to our own vision of a perfect child, but using science, which in my view is God-given, to enable us to use our brains to stop suffering as far as we may. I also feel—the hon. Member for Bolton, South-East(Dr. Iddon) said this eloquently, and I agree with everything that he said—that within the law, families should make decisions on their reproduction and not the state. The state does have a role, but we need to rebalance the arguments.

Finally, I want to say a quick word about abortion, because we cannot ignore it; it is part of the issue, and our report said what we thought we should be doing about it. If we want less abortion, we must look very carefully at the figures. Of the 185,000 abortions a year, just 124 occur after 24 weeks. If we are seeking to reduce the quantity of abortions in this country, does it make sense to vilify the tiny number of extremely vulnerable women in the most difficult and terrible circumstances who are in that category, and to say that they are somehow doing something unspeakable? I think not.

Let us look at the other end of the scale, too. Frequently we are told how awful it is that there are so many teenage pregnancies. I asked the Office for National Statistics for the figures, and in my constituency in the past 10 years the number of abortions among girls under 16 was 14. The ONS refused to set the figures out by year because it said that that would break confidentiality. We are talking very small numbers. The highest proportion of abortions in this country are performed on single women and those who have had abortions before. Perhaps that is where we should be considering education; something is wrong there. The hon. Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Geraldine Smith), who, sadly, is no longer present, used the word "Frankensteins", but the proportion of abortions on the grounds of chromosomal abnormality is one third of 1 per cent.—that is all. If we want fewer abortions in our country—and, God knows, I am sure we all do—we will need more human reproductive technology and much more education.