New Bill of contradictions dehumanises parenthood
Lord Alton, November 25 2007
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill now before Parliament is riven with contradictions and anomalies.
I welcome, for instance, its proposed ban on sex selection in IVF, but why is there no concomitant ban on gender abortions or abortions for rectifiable cosmetic reasons – such as cleft palate or webbed fingers?
Why does the Government make such a case for “the right to a child” – parenthood at any price – while saying so little about the needs of a child; and why do they do so little to promote adoption?
Why does the Government drone on about the desirability of social cohesion while simultaneously proposing a law which excludes men from the upbringing of children and even tries to pretend that the father never existed?
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 which we ask ourselves is ‘who am I?’ The right to lineage affects us all and uncertainty of parentage can be profoundly unsettling. The guidance of the Oracle of Delphi to the Lydian king, Croesus, was that to be happy, he must know himself .
With the full connivance of British law we will no longer know ourselves or be able to answer the question, ‘who am I?’.
Instead, the dignity of human procreation and the distinctly human relationship between one generation and the next will turn children into accessories. This ‘parenthood at any price’ is in danger of making procreation a clinical, cold deliberate act devoid of any sense of embrace; just an exercise in self replication and definition.
The feminist Lisa Mundy, in her new book Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction is Changing Men, Women and the World tries to move beyond the debate about “yuppie eugenics” but the stories she tells reveal the nature of designed pregnancy.
A couple argue about what height their egg donor should be; another provides a score list based on looks, educations, IQ and sporting interests. She looks at the difference between donors and surrogates and talks of a poverty- driven “breeder class” of poor women, who become surrogates, and she asks, where is the social justice in this?
Reproductive technologies are used by people desperate to have a child related to at least one parent. But we are also told that “love, not blood, makes a family.”
Why the need, then, to screen out donors from particular backgrounds, or with particular aptitudes? Why do we not make more of the possibilities of adoption? In a country where only handfuls of babies are available for adoption, why do we not encourage this, instead of the 600 abortions that occur daily?
Mundy puts it well when she describes the paradox thus: “In the age of the genome, the message is that genetics are paramount in the formation of your child – and yet at the same time genetics are nothing in the formation of your relationship with your child.”
That more and more people are struggling with their relationships and with the desire to know who they are is illustrated by the creation of websites such as Donor Sibling Registry (DSR). This database enables parents to make contact with the anonymous donors who supplied half of the genes of their offspring; children can search for their unknown genetic parents; and families may make contact with genetic half siblings with a donor in common.
Some donors have over 30 offspring.
Separating parenthood from these debates about genetics is a huge error. The Government announcement “to remove the reference to the need for a father” from law and social policy is an even bigger one.
The former Government Minister, Labour Peer, Lord Warner, said the decision was the result of pressure on the Government: “I know the power of some of the lobbies that have argued on it. However, children are not accessories to adults’ preferences.”
That “power of the lobbies” has resulted in a Bill that provides a mechanistic and dehumanised framework for bringing children into the world, one which deserves to be sent back to Gordon Brown and his ministers.
These ill-conceived ideas often begin in the self-congratulatory committees and so-called watchdogs, excluding from their membership and counsels anyone who would challenge their fundamental assumptions.
The distinguished human rights lawyer and Labour peer, Lord Brennan QC, has argued that, instead of such charades, alongside the regulatory authority we need a parallel “balanced” National Bio-Ethics Committee. This would both shadow the regulators and comment authoritatively on the bio-ethical dilemmas which occur on an almost daily basis.
Instead, the politicians have suggested yet another mirror image of themselves, recommending that an exclusively parliamentary bio-ethics committee be established.
Neither the Willis Committee – which examined the Embryology Bill in draft – nor the Science and Technology Committee – which looked at late abortion – were a good advertisement for such a body.
The lamentable failure to consider the moral status of the human embryo and examine the ethical, judicial, or even the full range of scientific issues associated with abortion, shows how inadequate a parliamentary caucus can be.
Something far weightier and less tied to political, scientific or vested interests is needed.
When the Willis Committee met, 11 organisations opposed to the Bill were shunted off into one short evening session and, by contrast, four journalists were given more time to air their views than the opposing organisations.
Despite evidence given by Professor Neil Scolding, a neuroscientist from Bristol, that “the whole perspective on embryo experimentation has changed” the Willis Committee signally failed to examine the huge scientific advances which now make experiments on human embryos redundant.
Instead of calling for animal human hybrid embryos and ‘saviour siblings’ they would have done better to spend their time looking at the advances in adult stem cells. If, for instance, there was a large enough cord blood bank in the UK it should be possible to find a suitable cord blood match for needy children without creating designer embryos.
In the recent Queen’s Speech debate in Parliament, Baroness Deech, who chaired the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority from 1994–2002, argued that “the more that could be left to the regulator,” the better; and that a national body asked to oversee the ethics would find it impossible to “reconcile the opinions of those who would stop all embryo research and those who would go along with the regulatory framework.”
If we could at least hear those views and allow honest debate we might then have greater cause to say that Britain, as she puts it, “is the world leader.”
It surely couldn’t result in worse legislation than that which is now proposed.