In Vitro Fertilisation: 40th Anniversary

Earl of Selborne Excerpts

Thursday 13th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Selborne (Con)]

My Lords, I join other speakers in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, for giving us this opportunity to review the progress of IVF over the last 40 years. Previous speakers have reminded us of the timeline of the developments, from Louise Brown’s birth in 1974 to the commissioning of the Warnock report, of which my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay reminded us, and of course the passage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, with my noble and learned friend again playing a central role. We then move on to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology (Research Purposes) Regulations 2001 and the more recent debates on mitochondrial donation. The most recent date in this timeline is when the regulator gave permission for the use of gene editing in research in 2016. It is to that subject that I want to devote my remarks today, looking forward rather than back to the timeline of the last 40 years.

The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, referred to the very informative Nuffield Council on Bioethics report, Genome Editing and Human Reproduction, which came out in July this year. This should be read in the context of its previous report of 2016, Genome Editing: an Ethical Review. We should be grateful to the council for these detailed reviews of the ethical issues arising from interventions which are becoming ever more feasible in a research context and for which, at some future date, legislation will be required, whether to enable or to restrict its application in clinical practice—if one were a betting man one would say it would have to do both, in fact. The debates we had in 2015 on mitochondrial donation demonstrated how important it is—however well-intentioned and desirable the objectives may be—for these new technologies, which allow precisely targeted alterations to DNA sequences, to be the subject of wide debate, both in Parliament and more widely in society as a whole, before any legislation is contemplated to allow the new technology to move into clinical practice.

Gene editing without doubt has the potential to reduce the prospect of a future child inheriting a genetic disorder. Of course, there are also potentials unrelated to the avoidance of medical diseases and disorders. These give rise to completely different ethical and value considerations. I repeat that in the United Kingdom, since 2016, genome editing has been approved for use in research but remains illegal for reproductive purposes. It is difficult at present to predict with any confidence whether the cases in which we might influence inherited characteristics by genome editing will one day be widespread or relatively rare. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics helpfully identifies three kinds of closely related concerns in anticipation of the arrival of prospective new technologies. Again, this is very familiar to your Lordships because we have had these debates on mitochondrial donation and other areas where new technologies change the potential.

The first concern is that we sleepwalk into a new order as a result of technological momentum arising from pursuing the aims of science without an adequate consideration of their broader social and moral context and implications. The second concern is over function creep, whereby a technology expands its repertoire to encompass closely associated purposes, often for reasons of economic efficiency. There can often be benefits, but there may also be underlying values that need to be properly considered. The third concern is that the introduction of a new technology will lead us on to a slippery slope: we may see dangers ahead but can find no plausible reason, once an initial, innocuous application is conceded, to resist this expansion into more controversial areas.

The Nuffield Council’s conclusion, as the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, reminded us, as to whether human genome editing would ever be ethically acceptable is that interventions of this kind to influence the characteristics of future generations could be ethically acceptable if, and only if, two principles are satisfied. The first is that such interventions are intended to secure, and are consistent with, the welfare of a child who may be born as a consequence. The second is that such interventions would uphold principles of social justice and should not provoke or exacerbate social division or marginalise or disadvantage groups in society. Of course, that encompasses a very wide concept and calls for a broad, inclusive societal debate concerning the desirability of such interventions. The debate we are having in this House on the 40th anniversary of the first baby born using IVF is an appropriate opportunity to draw attention to the need for genome editing’s role in the field of human reproduction to be the subject, in coming months and years, of just such a wide-ranging debate, not least in your Lordships’ House.