Civil Partnerships, Marriages and Deaths (Registration Etc.) Bill

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 18th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, and Tim Loughton for bringing forward this Bill. It covers a large number of areas. I will begin with pregnancy loss, an area that I wish to talk personally about, and then cover the others. I start by thanking my noble friend Lady Benjamin for her very moving speech. I also thank the Mariposa Trust, the Miscarriage Association and Sands, the stillbirth and neonatal charity, for all the work they do with parents who face baby loss.

My eldest child would have been 41 this year. I remember, in my early 20s, having a miscarriage in a public toilet in a castle in the highlands of Scotland. When I finally got to see a doctor two days later, the only response was, “Oh, well you’ve had an abortion”. What they meant was a spontaneous abortion, but, for any woman who suffers miscarriage or baby loss, the inconsiderate use of terminology by medics can be very traumatic. It was unfortunately not my first miscarriage; like my noble friend Lady Benjamin, I had recurrent miscarriages. I will come on to why the registration is important for reasons other than the care of parents and the recognition of the loss of a baby.

There is an issue for me with Clause 3(2), and the definition of pregnancy loss as,

“when a person’s pregnancy ends and, after being parted from the person”.

I will explain. My fifth miscarriage came when I was carrying twins, in my middle trimester. I was seen by a doctor because, by then, everybody knew that I had trouble having babies. I was seen and scanned and, after two weeks, the sonographer said that there was a problem. I was extremely lucky that my consultant, the wonderful Lesley Regan, decided to come and have a look herself. Had she not done so, we would not have known that I had another twin sitting behind the first baby who had died. Lesley said to me, “She is waving for attention; we need to do something about this”. I then spent two and a half months on my bed, unable to move. Slowly, as we became confident that I had retained my other baby, I was able to start my life again. Yet under the terms of this clause, I did not lose the twin who had died until I gave birth to my other daughter, and it would have been classed as a stillbirth. That was not the case. I fear—in fact I know, because I have talked to other parents who have lost one of their twins—that this is a real issue around how you manage what has happened. I am concerned that the definition here is too strict; it may miss cases out and may not be helpful.

Interventions nowadays mean that parents know when they are pregnant much earlier than those of us in my generation did. Scans are available from eight or nine weeks or, if you have had problems, as soon as your pregnancy is confirmed. That is why the relationship that mothers, fathers and other family members have with the baby pre-birth is completely different. The arbitrary figure of 24 weeks for the definition of stillbirth and the recognition of baby loss is a real problem. I know this as the grandmother of twins who were born at 29 weeks; throughout the pregnancy, there were warnings that one or possibly both would not make it. Therefore, while I accept the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, that the matter of whether registration is chosen should be discretionary, the discretion must always remain with the parents. It is vital that that happens.

I have one extra concern. Lesley Regan came to believe that there were causes for multiple miscarriages. My cause—which we did not know at the time because nobody then understood it—was autoimmune disease. I am now on my fifth autoimmune disease, and recurrent miscarriage was one of them. I am sure there are other illnesses that are not obvious which cause miscarriage and baby loss. The point of registration is that there is then a burden upon the medics to track miscarriages and at what point they have happened.

I mentioned the slightly cavalier treatment that I had after my first miscarriage because I am afraid that it still happens today. There are still doctors who pat women on the leg, as I was, and say, “Get up and get on with your life; you will be able to have another baby”. Actually, there may be an underlying cause that needs to be looked at.

On stillbirth, I completely accept my noble friend Lady Barker’s important point about the duty of candour for obstetricians and gynaecologists, but, frankly, we have had too many scandals where departments have not looked after mothers and babies and there have been baby losses. The helpful part of having a coroner is to identify bad practice and bad processes where a body outside the NHS needs to be able to identify it.

On marriage registration, I was delighted to hear my noble friend Lady Scott taking us back in history, because it is important to understand why our paper systems exist—and it would not be the House of Lords if we did not go back to 1538 and Cromwell and his parchments. However, we need to change the technology, and I am grateful to my noble friends Lady Scott and Lady Barker for pointing this out.

I also agree strongly with the noble Lords, Lord Cashman, Lord Collins, Lord Lexden and Lord Hayward, and my noble friend Lady Barker that the issue in Northern Ireland is totally unacceptable and needs to be dealt with.

My noble friend Lady Featherstone put on record the story of why civil partnerships were not made accessible to heterosexual couples. The couple who were determined to make this happen, Charles Keidan and Rebecca Steinfeld, went everywhere that they could to campaign, including to the courts and to the Supreme Court for a judgment in 2018. They and more than 3 million unmarried opposite-sex couples now have the opportunity for their relationship, which is profound, deep and interdependent, to exist in law at the level that they want it to. I commend their campaign and those who worked with them to make that happen. I wonder if that is where we need to go with the Northern Ireland issue; it may take going through the courts to resolve it.

Further on the reform of civil partnerships, I have now been to a number of weddings confirming civil partnerships, and they are the most moving arrangements that I have ever seen; my noble friend Lady Scott was right to describe them as a hidden gem. I put on record my thanks to all the celebrants of those occasions, both formal registrars and those who have trained to carry out these moving ceremonies, which 100 years ago we would never have thought of as possible in our society.

As others have done, I want to say that there are some minor points here that I hope the Minister has heard and which we might be able to deal with, whether by amendment or by the Government accepting them. The most important thing is that the Bill progresses, and smoothly, because we need it in law. It would help a lot of people and make them happy, but it would also help those who are deeply unhappy to recognise and come to terms with the loss of their children.