Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority/Human Tissue Authority

Baroness Williams of Crosby Excerpts

Tuesday 1st February 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Baroness on securing and introducing this debate. One thing that she pointed to, which concerns many of us, is the extent to which there are huge commercial pressures in this field, which have led in other countries to an almost complete abandonment of what one might describe as the ethical limits that are widely understood in the medical profession. With an issue such as whether a grandmother’s frozen eggs should be used for the purposes of fertilisation, one has to say that the difficulty in reaching a proper conclusion rises daily.

I wish to raise the issue of inspection and the issue raised by my most admired poacher on the question of medical research. First, there clearly has to be some inspection of the clinics that fall under the HFEA. I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us his view of how that inspection will function. It may be more limited than it used to be, as the noble Lord, Lord Winston, and the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, said, but it must be maintained at the level of day-to-day practice. It is very important that that should be so in order that patients can have some sense of the safety of the enterprise.

On the much bigger issue of medical ethics, raised by the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, we are looking at a tremendous multiplication of the issues around ethics and the massive advance of life sciences. I accept that that cannot be dealt with by the HFEA, with its rather limited terms of reference. We must try to bring together a much more significant body to look at the whole issue of the relationship between ethics and life sciences. In that context, may I sweeten that pill by suggesting to the Minister that one way in which one could develop the great idea of a great society would be to look at a marriage between a body that had status in government terms with the other great bodies that look into these matters—the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, the Royal Society and others? In that way, one might get a genuinely wide spectrum of opinion, including great scientists and ethicists, on the issues that now confront us with life sciences. I believe that, unless we do that, we will quickly run into real problems where dogmatic forces take up resistance to any advances or other dogmatic forces look at the commercial elements as the way to guide our consideration of biological and biochemical ethics in future years.