Conscientious Objection (Medical Activities) Bill [HL]

Viscount Craigavon Excerpts

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

[Viscount Craigavon (CB)]

My Lords, I oppose this Bill, but I was grateful to have the article, which has been referred to, in the House magazine by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, to provide some sort of background to how she got to this point, as well as the excellent Lords Library Note, which expanded on some of the references that the article mentioned, in particular the Supreme Court judgment, all of which I will come to shortly.

One might ask, as they do more robustly in the House of Commons on Private Members’ Bills, what is the need for this particular Bill? Given that we saw the first appearance of a Bill very similar to this one from the noble Baroness in our House in June 2015, when it had time only for a First Reading, I was initially wondering whether the need for this legislation had arisen to meet popular demand and discontent at the present law, or whether it might have been created by a small group of the well-intentioned for their betterment of mankind. I hope what I can show here is that the direction is from the top down and that there may not be the popular clamour for more statute law to deal with what is before us.

As we have been made aware in the briefings we have received, the four councils referred to with their registers in Clause 1(2) all have their own procedures for dealing with conscientious objection when it is not covered by statute law. I was not sure that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, was fully aware of that. I will mention that in more detail. These have slight variations but cover broadly the same ground, particularly in passing on to others responsibilities that one individual can reject for reasons of conscience, and are framed to suit the particular needs of each of these four councils.

I noticed that the one major change to the earlier 2015 Bill was the addition, in Clause 1(2)(d), of the General Pharmaceutical Council. That adds to the numbers who could be directly or indirectly affected by this Bill—about 53,000 members who are on its register. I therefore would have thought that at least some sort of proper consultation with the council should have taken place before incorporating it in this Bill, but I understand that that has not happened. That is very much from the top down.

It also may have been thought that pharmacists could become a major channel for the distribution of medical abortion pills. The noble Baroness made that connection in her speech. But, as I explained, without any further statute law, the General Pharmaceutical Council already has a perfectly good provision in place for conscientious objection by its members, framed for their particular professional circumstances.

To try to put all these councils in a common straitjacket of general and far-reaching statute provisions would be counterproductive and require extensive continuing legal dispute and interpretation.

The Supreme Court judgment of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale, particularly in paragraph 38 and her interpretation of “participate”, is a very good division of the existing position between what is suitable for statute law and what can be fairly achieved by individual guidelines, which, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, said, can be context specific or decided in employment tribunals.

From a practical point of view, we have learned from the various submissions that we have received on this Bill, from organisations with complex medical procedures and specialised manpower, how much uncertainty this Bill would cause in day-to-day running, mainly in one never being quite sure what staff would be available to meet ever-changing needs and circumstances, with the patients being the ones to suffer.

In the article that I mentioned at the beginning, the apparently simple phrases,

“the taking of human life”,

and,

“to take a human life”,

occur. Most of us here know that they are the beginning of divergent views in the fields we are addressing today—the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, used the same phrases. For example, when exactly does human life start? When is withdrawing life-sustaining treatment or turning off a machine justifiable? Many more questions are begged by those simple phrases, which might give us a false sense of a shared starting point. I hope that I have highlighted some of the potential difficulties with this Bill, which I oppose.