Northern Ireland (Executive Formation and Exercise of Functions) Bill

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 30th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 16, in the names of my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay and the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan. I thank them for tabling the amendment because I have a direct personal interest in it, having been born with a severe disability. My objection to the current Clause 4, which I appreciate was not part of the original Bill, is twofold.

First, I object on the grounds of inequality. As noble Lords will know, I do not take a position on abortion itself, but I most definitely do take a position on disability equality. Though supposedly about advancing human rights, Clause 4 is actually about a hierarchy of human rights. It is, in effect, about denying the right to exist of, and the equality of, human beings diagnosed with a disability before birth, and ensuring that the power—dressed up as rights—of stronger human beings reigns supreme.

A world in which one group’s equality is more important than another’s is not equality; it is inequality. Clause 4, perversely, would achieve the opposite of its presumed purpose: it would entrench inequality. The argument which was advanced forcefully in the other place—that this is somehow about equality—is therefore bogus. The fact is that if Clause 4 becomes law, more human beings with my condition and other disabilities will be aborted. As it stands tonight, Northern Ireland is the safest place in our United Kingdom to be diagnosed with a disability before birth. That will change if Clause 4 is allowed to stand part of the Bill, because the presumed protection against the most lethal form of disability discrimination—death for disability—will be gone, in time.

A quick glance at the Department of Health’s own statistics tells us everything we need to know about what would happen. I wonder, would any noble Lord care to hazard a guess at the trends in disability-related terminations? Only last week noble Lords may have read about the amazing breakthrough in intra-uterine surgery on human beings diagnosed with spina bifida before birth. Indeed, human beings diagnosed with my condition—brittle bones, which put me in hospital for most of my childhood—can now be treated from the moment of birth with medicines such as bisphosphonates, to ameliorate even some of the most severe forms of the condition. Some people with my condition lead perfectly normal lives, to the extent that they can play sport.