Hormone Pregnancy Tests

Hannah Bardell Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

It is such an honour to sum up this humbling and moving debate. I commend all Members who have contributed, particularly the right hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning), and the Clerks, to whom he rightly paid tribute, who drafted the motion. I also commend the hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi), who has fought tooth and nail for the victims of Primodos, as has Marie Lyon—she is a modern-day hero as far as I am concerned.

Like other Members, this case was one of the first that came to me after I was elected in 2015. My constituent Wilma Ord, who took Primodos in 1970, is in the Public Gallery with her daughter. Kirsteen was born with a range of birth defects, including profound deafness, cerebral palsy, an underactive thyroid that was diagnosed at age 11, and labyrinthitis. Her mobility is getting worse. I will briefly repeat some of their comments.

This is how Wilma describes what her life has been like:

“Our lives have been turned upside down, are we going to see justice for our kids? It is now that we need it, because every day we see the difference in mobility and it is real. These people need to be taken care of and it is the opportunities that have been taken from them since the day they were born”.

I asked Kirsteen if she would like anything passed on, and she said:

“I don’t see why there was a cover up in the first place. They should fix it now.”

We can never say it often enough, but this place is at its best when we are in agreement, and today we have had cross-party agreement. I am sure the Minister is aware of the strength of feeling. It is also at its best when we are representing and speaking up for our constituents, as everyone has done here today.

Another lady, who did not want to be named, contacted me this week to say:

“I was wondering if I can count on your support on Thursday. My daughter died at birth after I took The Primodos drug, she was born without the top of her brain and skull.

This week would have been her birthday, December 13th.”

So her birthday would have been yesterday. That is harrowing, as it is harrowing to hear about the deformities and disabilities that hon. Members have spoken of.

I must draw on some of the comments that really struck me. The hon. Member for North Devon (Peter Heaton-Jones) talked about our constituents being treated as guinea pigs, and that is, in essence, what they were treated as—human guinea pigs. Let us not forget that this drug was on the market unregulated and untested for five years before any proper research was done on it. The right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey) spoke about the research and the information that came from Germany and some of the vast number of documents that were not looked at by the expert working group. My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North West (Carol Monaghan) could not be with us today, but she has spoken about her constituent Russell Kelly, who has also been affected and wanted to share his experience. Russell is the youngest of four children, the other three having all been born healthy. His mother was prescribed a similar drug to Primodos and he has been left with significant disabilities, which has been devastating.

Since the release of the report on hormone pregnancy tests produced by the Commission on Human Medicines, our constituents have been further let down. I was there, as I know other Members were, at the press conference—indeed, the hon. Member for Bolton South East and I were walked out of it. Some of the women who took Primodos told me at the launch of the report that they had been told that they should now be happy and take comfort from knowing that it was not taking Primodos that caused their babies to be born with defects or malformations. How offensive and insulting is it to say something like that to victims who have experienced so much trauma? None of these women is happy or comforted, and many were absolutely shocked, particularly at the fact that the expert working group did not want to watch the Sky documentary that we had spoken about. That seems utterly incredible, but the group said it did not want to be prejudiced.

As we have heard, the report, which was produced by the expert working group, was changed between the draft and final stages. Given the process and the amount of public money committed to it, it is shocking that such a situation has been uncovered. I hope the Government will reflect on everything that has been asked on the judge-led inquiry moving forward, and on how a process can fall down and become so bad. We know that Marie Lyon, who was mentioned by the hon. Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue), was restricted by the most serious and difficult circumstances as a result of the legal document she had to sign. Marie Lyon wanted to help; she wanted to make the process better. She had information that she could have passed on, but she was not able to do that—because of the document she had to sign, she was not able to do the job she wanted to do. I hope the Minister considers that as well.

I was deeply concerned that what was described as a “scientific process” by the expert working group was not just about the science. Many Members have talked about the concern that arose recently when Dr Gebbie, the chair of the expert working group, was asked about the change from the draft report not being able to reach a conclusion to the final report being able to reach one. Her reply was:

“The CHM all commented very fully and said we should make it more conclusive.”

When it was put to her as a follow-up question that those people are not scientists, she said, “Yes they are.” The point is that those people did not sit through the expert working group for all those months going through the information, so how could they possibly have that information to reach that conclusion?

I know we are pressed for time, so I shall conclude by quoting my constituent once again. She says:

“We need help now, not in 5 or 6 years’ time.”

She says that she does not really want a public inquiry; she wants something to compensate for what has happened to her and Kirsteen. She says that she wants her daughter

“to have a house where there are no stairs, but no one is prepared to give her it.”

She also says:

“We need to have trust in the people who are governing us—we look back at all these years ago and we look at what is happening now and they are still failing us. They let drugs go out that should never have gone out and they were negligent. The same people are not around now so why can’t someone now just do the right thing and say we were wronged?”