Hormone Pregnancy Tests

Debate between Lilian Greenwood and Bill Grant

Thursday 14th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Bill Grant (Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning) for securing this extremely important debate. Many constituents in Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock, and throughout the UK, will have been disappointed by the recently published outcome of the review by the Commission on Human Medicines expert working group, but I have one constituent in particular who is devastated by it. It was concluded that the scientific evidence did not support a causal association between the use of hormone pregnancy tests such as Primodos in the mid to late part of the last century—roughly from 1953 to the late 1970s—and miscarriages or horrendous birth defects ranging from brain damage and heart abnormalities to transposed internal organs.

Of particular concern to my constituent is the apparent non-availability of her general practitioner records for the relevant period, when she was prescribed—a better word might simply be “given”—Primodos as part of a pregnancy test. It appears that others find themselves in a similar position.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

My constituent, Peggy Gedling, finds herself in precisely that situation. In 1969, when she gave birth to her son Justin, she attended a medical practice in Crawley. Many of the GP notes were handwritten, and they appear to have been lost. Her previous practice in Gloucestershire tried to obtain her medical records and found that she had ceased to exist for 12 years. It is very worrying, is it not?

[Bill Grant]

I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention, which corroborates my constituent’s concerns. This may be a common thread throughout the United Kingdom. As I understand it, general practitioners’ records are normally required to be retained for the duration of a patient’s life. In the case that the hon. Lady describes, if it had been possible to recover the GP records, it might have been interesting to establish whether there was a cluster pattern for such cases.

My constituent advises me that in June 1975, only months after she was prescribed or supplied with Primodos in the January, a warning was added to the packaging, stating that the drug should not be given to pregnant women. My constituent perceives that to be a response to a realisation that a risk had been identified, at least by that point. Her child was born in August 1975 with serious birth defects, which required major surgery. That child, in adulthood, still has to contend with the associated medical complications. Credit to both mother and child, however—despite the trauma and hardship that they have endured, they contribute positively to society and champion the care of others.

One has to ask, if Primodos is not linked to birth deformities in children whose mothers took the drug, what is the common denominator for the tragic outcomes of those pregnancies? It has, as I understand it, sadly been mooted that such women should consider genetic tests to identify other potential causes. In other words, the suggestion seems to be that all who took Primodos might coincidentally also have a defective gene—I do not think so—and that that defective gene was supposedly passed to their child and formed the root cause of miscarriage or deformity. I very much doubt that, although I might not be qualified to comment.

My constituent does not consider that she has received justice for herself or—more importantly, in her eyes—justice for her child. She feels let down by the outcome and the process followed by the EWG. She had high hopes for that outcome, but it brings us nowhere nearer to the truth or to justice for those who might have fallen foul of a drug that might not have been fit for purpose when it was prescribed, or simply given, to the patients.

For the families involved, I would welcome a broad-based and—as has been said—independent inquiry to review the evidence, of which there is a great deal. The hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) alluded to the fact that the journey has been long, and many pieces of the jigsaw are missing. Those should be secured to enable the independent inquiry to find the truth. There might have been a regulatory failure; we need to find out. Outcomes for the people who were subjected to hormone pregnancy testing between 1953 and 1975 have been devastating. The families deserve both truth and justice, and it is the role of parliamentarians relentlessly to pursue the truth about Primodos and other such drugs.