Jim Shannon
Main Page: Jim Shannon (Democratic Unionist Party - Strangford)Department Debates - View all Jim Shannon's debates with the Ministry of Justice
(9 months ago)
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Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered baby loss and the role of coroners.
I am afraid you have a double dose of me this afternoon, Ms Elliott. That is obviously far too much for the people in the Public Gallery, who have made a surge for the exits.
This short debate will be focused on my Civil Partnerships, Marriages and Deaths (Registration etc) Act 2019, which has been going for quite a while now and remains unfulfilled in one part; that is the purpose of the debate. My Act started in the private Members’ Bill ballot in autumn 2017. It had its Second Reading on 2 February 2018. It passed all its parliamentary stages in February 2019 and passed into law in May 2019, almost five years ago. There were four parts to this historically quite ambitious and complicated private Member’s Bill.
The first part was that the names and details of mothers should appear on marriage certificates, now an electronic record. That came into being in May 2021, since when I have received many grateful thanks from mothers or the husbands of late mothers whose names could be now recorded on marriage records.
The second part was the extension of civil partnerships to opposite-sex couples, which came in on 31 December 2019 and became regulation on the last day of Parliament before the election in 2019. Since then, more than 25,000 happy couples have availed themselves of that facility.
The third part was for the Secretary of State to produce a report on the registration of pregnancy loss. A pregnancy loss committee was set up, and I sat on it. Within the last couple of weeks, baby loss certificates have become a thing and again have gone down very well.
Jim Shannon
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on the four provisions that he brought forward, particularly the pregnancy loss one. It is something that probably all of us have to come to terms with in our family, and it is difficult. It is always a difficult topic to discuss, but the hon. Gentleman is right to bring it forward. As families, we can all feel for those who have lost babies during pregnancy. We feel for our partners, our wives, our mothers, our sisters, and all those who have lost as well. I commend the hon. Gentleman for bringing this forward.