Conscientious Objection (Medical Activities) Bill [HL]

Lord McColl of Dulwich Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 26th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con)]

My Lords, I am pleased to speak in support of the Bill. The issue that it raises is simple: if someone objects to abortion or assisted dying on grounds of conscience, how far should they be entitled to opt out? The issue is simple but the solution is difficult.

The Supreme Court held that, as a matter of construction, the conscience clause provisions of the Abortion Act 1967 should be interpreted narrowly so that Mary Doogan was not entitled to refuse to help facilitate abortions by organising other nurses for the purpose of providing abortions. The aim of this Bill is to change the wording so that freedom of conscience can be invoked as a ground for refusing to do acts which are less directly connected to the abortion than is presently the case. I think that that is a good thing and I shall endeavour to explain why.

The first reason is that a significant number of dedicated healthcare professionals have profound moral objections to both abortion and assisted suicide. The role of the state is not to sit in judgment on those moral objections: it is not the state’s role to coerce people into acting against their conscience. Therefore, it is a good and reasonable thing that the state should make the conscientious objection provision sufficiently broad to excuse acts which genuinely offend the conscience. The state should err on the side of respecting conscience, rather than placing valuable medical and nursing staff in a position where they have to choose between their vocation and their conscience.

I had a number of friends who, when applying for consultant posts in obstetrics, would be asked, “Are you prepared to take your share of the abortions?”. If they said yes, they were considered for the appointment. If, on the other hand, they said, “Yes, I’m prepared to take my share of the abortions within the 1967 Act”, they were not considered for the consultant post and many of them had to emigrate. They were very good clinicians and it was a great loss.

The second reason I support the Bill is that there is no evidence whatever that, if the Bill is passed, it will detrimentally affect anyone seeking an abortion.

The third reason I support it is that it is both unwise and unnecessary to force medics and nurses to act against their conscience in any sphere whatever. If we train them to do that in one sphere of work, we have only ourselves to blame if they do it in other aspects of their work. For those reasons, I support the Bill.