Foetal Sentience Committee Bill [HL]

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, in declaring non-financial interests as listed in the register, I express my gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for bringing in this Bill. I entirely endorse what my noble friend Lady Smith of Newnham has said to the House today. Being pro-life—for a woman and a child—and believing in the right to life as a human right does not make people misogynist bigots, and they should not be caricatured as such.

During the passage of the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022, I wrote that it left a gaping hole because of the lack of any comparable mechanism for the consideration of the human foetus, a point the noble Lord made earlier. I agree with what CS Lewis said in support of the National Anti-Vivisection Society: if you start by being cruel to animals, you will also end up being cruel to human beings. It is that incongruity, and how we treat the most vulnerable of our own species, that is close to my heart, and I make no apology for that.

In the 18th century, Jeremy Bentham argued that the relevance of pain was not dependent on the ability to think rationally, but rather to feel, as animals can do. In 1789 he wrote,

“the question is not, Can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But, can they suffer?”

There is an analogy here with foetal sentience, one which emerged in two ad hoc inquiries held in Parliament and in which I took part, one chaired by the late Lord Rawlinson of Ewell, a former Solicitor-General. We said that, like a newborn infant, a foetus may not be rational in the way an older child or adult is, but, if there are grounds to believe that a child in the womb may be able to suffer, we have a responsibility to do what we can to minimise such suffering. If we are uncertain about the exact point at which, and by how much, an unborn baby suffers, we should always err on the side of caution.

The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, referenced, by implication, Professor John Wyatt, who has three decades of experience treating extremely premature babies, including a large number born at 22 or 23 weeks, below the current abortion time limit. A few years ago, when addressing parliamentarians, in sobering evidence, Professor Wyatt told us that there was a link between what the foetus and premature babies experience. He said:

“I think from my observation of extremely premature babies that they are sentient, they are conscious, and they are responsive to their environment”.


Why should we care? First, this is a human rights issue. The preamble to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which the UK is a signatory, states that the child

“needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before”—

please note that word—

“as well as after birth”.

We have obligations that must be honoured, and how will we do that without expert research or guidance policy?

Secondly, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Robathan, barbaric, discriminatory legislation permits abortion up to and even during birth in the cases of Down’s syndrome—it was World Down Syndrome Day yesterday—club foot and cleft lip and palate. As the noble Baroness told us, the NHS recommends the use of analgesics when performing foetal surgery on babies with spina bifida after 20 weeks, but pain relief is not mandatory for foeticide abortions.

Noble Lords should study the recommendations of the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and attempts in the other place, in one instance, to increase the opportunities of abortion right up to birth in all cases, and, in another, to lower the abortion time limit from 24 to 22 weeks, in line with the increase in survival rates of babies born at 22 and 23 weeks. I also gently point out that, as long ago as 1988, I succeeded in the House of Commons in persuading 296 MPs—a majority of 45—to vote for my Bill to reduce the upper time limit to 18 weeks, the Swedish upper time limit. It would have saved the lives of some of the 10 million babies who have been aborted in Britain, but it was talked out by opponents. The case today is even more compelling; please note that the EU average upper time limit is around 12 weeks, with many Parliaments greatly influenced by the questions of sentience and pain.

In other areas of medicine, the precautionary principle is often applied: the idea that, where there is uncertainty, we should err on the side of caution. So, it seems to me that we ought to be prudent when it comes to foetal sentience.

I end with Professor Wyatt’s words:

“I think we should play safe, we should give the foetus the benefit of the doubt. We should assume that it is capable of experiencing pain and unpleasant sensations, and we should then treat the foetus appropriately, which would if necessary be with strong pain relief medication or with anaesthesia”.


This is both sensible and humane. A foetal sentience committee, which is all that the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, is asking us to support today, would enable us to increase our understanding in this area. I therefore commend the Bill to the House, and I gently say to my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, that Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:

“Everyone has the right to life”.


Supporting that does not make me right wing, a bigot or a misogynist.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

The noble Lord will note that my noble friend made all her remarks within the guidelines of the House on how we address each other. He may not enjoy what she had to say, and he may disagree with her—some of us do agree with her—however, she did it within the rules of the House.

First, I would like to congratulate—

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

I am sorry to interrupt the noble Baroness. I do not think I have ever misused the procedures of the House and I do not intend to start now. I respect the noble Baroness and we have made common cause on my occasions. Does she think it is within the rules of the House to talk about other noble Lords as if they are dupes or as if they are in receipt of money from outside that has been undeclared?

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

If the noble Lord reads Hansard, I am not sure that that is actually what my noble friend said. However, she is perfectly capable of defending herself.

I want to start my remarks by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, on introducing the Bill with such clarity. He called it “modest”, but I beg to differ: this is not a modest Bill. It is short, which definitely helps, but it is not modest. I also need to start by stating that Labour’s policy is that abortion is an essential part of healthcare. We support a woman’s right to choose and we believe that access to safe, legal abortion should be available throughout the UK.

We need to be clear about the true intentions of this proposal: it seeks to chip away at the Abortion Act and change how we govern abortion law. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, may have said that this is not about abortion or the Abortion Act, but the fact that so many of his supporters have said exactly the opposite—that this is indeed about abortion—shows that that is what the Bill is actually about. We can be clear that that is the intention behind the Bill.

The topic of foetal sentience is under constant review by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, and its last review found no evidence of a foetus experiencing pain before 24 weeks. It is best that we trust expert medical bodies and scientists, not a Government-appointed committee, to say what is the case and how we should proceed. We need to be clear that the Bill seeks to circumvent expert clinical guidance because it has an ideological disagreement with its conclusions. I was looking at the list of participants on the committee of the royal college, and I suggest that noble Lords do the same because it is a truly impressive medical and scientific body that takes its job very seriously. One noble Lord said they had changed their view between 2010 and 2022. In a way, that proves the point: the point of that committee is to do that review.

Has there ever been a time when a Bill has been brought to this House asking the Government to set up a committee to analyse the medical evidence for, for example, coronary heart disease or endometriosis? No, because we trust the relevant expert medical bodies to do that job for us. We believe the Bill represents a dangerous move to politicise the way that we make decisions about healthcare, and for that reason I will not be supporting it if it moves forward.

The review of foetal awareness of pain reception undertaken by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists found in 2010 that the cerebral cortex is necessary for pain perception, and that connections from the periphery to the cortex are not intact before 28 weeks. It was therefore concluded that a foetus cannot experience pain in any sense before that stage. In the light of that, I ask noble Lords to ask why we would vote to set up a committee on that issue, unless that evidence is not considered robust.

I note that, if the Bill were to pass, the remit of this government committee would not extend to the health and well-being of pregnant women, as the noble Baroness said. The comments about sentience in fish, animals and so on make one question where the supporters of the Bill place women’s health, well-being and reproductive rights on the scale of animals, fish and so on. One has to question where that is coming from.

No other area of healthcare is subjected to a dedicated government committee designed to limit access to its treatment. The Bill would leave a woman’s right to access to care at the whim of a committee focused solely on the foetus, with no remit to consider women’s experience, needs or rights. I will certainly not support the Bill as it progresses.