Conscientious Objection (Medical Activities) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord McColl of Dulwich and Baroness Tonge

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 23rd March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tonge (Non-Afl)]

Will the noble Lord define what he means by “facilitate”? The amendment refers to someone “participating in a hands-on capacity”—that is the person who is actually going to do the abortion. The secretary who makes the appointment facilitates the abortion.

[Lord McColl of Dulwich]

Facilitate means a great number of different things, but the 1967 Act did provide—

[Baroness Tonge]

My point is that if a secretary in a hospital or a clerk who was involved in this service had a conscientious objection to abortion, would he or she see it as facilitating the abortion? Is that what the noble Lord is referring to? Because it applies to everybody.

[Lord McColl of Dulwich]

If she has a conscientious objection to it, then she should not be obliged to do it, because the 1967 Act specifically said that people did not need to do it. Acts of Parliament should not force people into doing things against their conscience—that is not the function of Parliament.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord McColl of Dulwich]

I am delighted to be interrupted. A debate is about toing and froing, and there is not enough of that.

If we use the law to impose an approach that is intolerant of conscience, forcing some people out of the medical profession and, effectively, dissuading others from joining it—that is an important point—many people will suffer as a result. We are already short in recruiting new doctors and these amendments are the last thing that we need. In the medical profession, the greater our overall capacity, the greater the capacity to provide abortions and, as we are trying to say, there are plenty of people without conscientious objections.

On the suggestion that we should adopt the amendments because they reflect what the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale, suggested in the Doogan judgment, we have mentioned, first, that we do not have to be constrained by her judgment; we are at liberty to come back and change the law, if it is the will of Parliament. Secondly, in the noble and learned Baroness’s judgment, she recognised that there are two potential ways of interpreting the intention of Parliament with respect to conscientious objection: a broad way and a narrow way. She said that,

“a broad meaning might cover things done in connection with that treatment after it had begun, such as assigning staff to work with the patient, supervising and supporting such staff, and keeping a managerial eye on all the patients in the ward, including any undergoing a termination. A narrow meaning would restrict it to ‘actually taking part’, that is actually performing the tasks involved in the course of treatment”.

She concluded that,

“the narrow meaning is more likely to have been in the contemplation of Parliament when the Act was passed”.

We are trying to change the law so that it is quite clear that that is not so, and we have every right so to do.

This Bill is timely and it is a liberal measure that should get the support that it needs. By contrast, the amendments are deeply mistaken, for three reasons. First, they will hurt the service providers by imposing an ugly uniformity that will result in many more cases of people such as Mary Doogan losing their job. Does the noble Lord, Lord Steel, whose Bill it was in 1967, agree that the decision in Glasgow to sack Mary Doogan because of her conscientious objection to being involved in an abortion was the right decision? She was a wonderful midwife and had done more than 5,000 deliveries. She was a very valuable member of the team. Does the noble Lord think that was the right decision?

[Baroness Tonge]

My Lords, I was unable to speak at Second Reading and I apologise for that—I was at a family funeral, as it happens—but I feel strongly about this issue. I qualified in 1964. I was a medical student and a junior hospital doctor in the days before the Abortion Act of the noble Lord, Lord Steel. I remember well the gynae wards and the women who had had unsafe, septic abortions. Some of them died. In the early 1970s, I was working in Birmingham in general practice and family planning, when the professor of obstetrics and gynaecology refused to have anything to do with the new Abortion Act. The noble Lord, Lord Winston, might know more about management in those days than I do but, because the professor was in charge of what his department provided, he absolutely forbade abortion to take place in that department. Perhaps the noble Lord remembers him.