Abortion (Disability Equality) Bill [HL]

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 21st October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

First, I pay a heartfelt tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, for his living testimony that disability is as much in the mind as in the body. As others have said, as we have recently witnessed at the Paralympics, many of us so-called able-bodied are indeed rather weak imitations of those either born with, or who later acquire, a physical or mental disadvantage.

Despite the contribution that disabled people make to national life and their human right to equality of treatment, there are, sadly, still huge hurdles in the way of many of them being able to pursue a full, and indeed fulfilled, life. The House does not need me to enumerate the physical barriers, whether access to transport, buildings, facilities or the availability of aids or support required, or the social and psychological barriers—in the minds of others, of course—in terms of expectation or discrimination, to say nothing of the lack of adequate resources to meet their additional needs. Of course, all this is not helped by the Government’s welfare reforms, which I hope the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, continues to rail against within his own party. Indeed, just yesterday in the House the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, said that,

“the Government have not removed the barriers between disabled people and jobs. There is a lack of transport and an unwelcoming workplace. What disabled people need—and I hope that this will be favourable to the Minister—is that all buses should be accessible with audiovisual information and all the taxi provisions of the Equality Act should be brought into force”.

The noble Baroness, Lady Thomas of Winchester, noted:

“Up to 600 disabled people a week are losing their Motability cars because of the harsh PIP reassessment test”.—[Official Report, 20/10/16; cols. 2437-38.]

Therefore there remains much to do, in virtually every avenue of life, to improve the life chances and opportunities of disabled people so that they—and we—can benefit from them achieving their full potential.

However, I have to query whether a Bill, no matter how well intentioned, which could have the effect of forcing some 200 or 300 women a year to carry to full term a much-wanted and planned child, knowing it might not even see the light of day, or live just a few hours or days or face a life of pain and illness, is the best way of moving us further along the line of promoting equality and removing disability discrimination. The BMA, as well as the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare, and the British Maternal and Fetal Medicine Society all oppose the Bill, which they describe as neither “patient nor woman-centred” and which they think is about restricting abortion care, while the Genetic Alliance stresses that,

“abortion on grounds of foetal abnormality is an important component of the options available to a woman who discovers that she has a pregnancy affected by a serious genetic condition”.

As it says, genetic conditions can often come to a couple with no advance warning. Where it is due to an autosomal recessive condition, they are likely to have discovered the risk only during the pregnancy—a shocking, disappointing, often devastating discovery, and frequently of a condition serious enough to cause stillbirth or severe, eventually lethal, neonatal illness. These are voices we should heed, as the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, said, as they come from people who, day by day, deal with the women and children who would be affected by the Bill. In addition, I am sure that they deal with situations which I am certain the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, never meant to cover but which would be caught by his Bill.

We welcome the attention the noble Lord draws through the Bill to the continuing discrimination disabled people face, but this is not the way to improve their lives.