HFE Bill

The HFEB was a forward-looking initiative introduced by the government into parliament in November 2007.

The aim was to amend the now-dated Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 by modernising regulations for assisted reproduction and embryo research - sciences which, as we all know, have advanced at pace.

You can read the bill as it was introduced on Parliament’s website.

What’s in it?
The bill’s key proposals include:

• ensuring that all human embryos outside the body – however they are created - are subject to regulation
• regulation of inter-species embryos created from a combination of human and animal genetic material for research
• a ban on sex selection of offspring for non-medical reasons
• retention of a duty to take account of the welfare of the child in providing fertility treatment, but removal of the reference to ‘the need for a father’
• recognising same-sex couples as legal parents of children conceived through the use of donated sperm, eggs or embryos
• altering the restrictions on the use of data collected by the regulator to make it easier to do follow-up research

increasing the scope of legitimate embryo research activities, subject to controls.

Who hates it / who likes it?
This bill was always going to encourage various groups to arms. Many of the bill’s proposals have raised the ire, for instance, of the Catholic church. Creating and using healthy human embryos for stem-cell treatment of diseases like Parkinson’s and motor nuerone disase, and creating and using animal hybrid embryos to a similar end was probably never going to be up Catholicism’s street. The church believes that life begins at the moment of conception.

Proponents of the bill believe that life can and should be created to support and improve existing life - surely, technical advance should be used to improve existence for those most in need? Surely, the Lord has had his chance to beat stem-cell treatments to a cure for Parkinson’s? We err towards the latter thesis here, but if you’re still making up your mind, The Guardian has an excellent short analysis of the bill’s most controversial proposals.

There are other issues, too: The church and various pro-life groups are particularly hot on the bill’s proposal to remove the reference to the need for a father, claiming that is a bridge too far for a society that is already struggling to keep morality and religion aligned. Others feel that ‘family’ can and should take many different forms, and that the Western traditional nuclear family - Mum, Dad, and a couple of dysfunctional kids - was never much to write home about anyway, and that there is plenty of room for other options.

The Act’s 24-week gestational time-limit for legal abortion is the main target of this attack - the anti-abortion lobby argues that the limit should be lowered to 20, or even 18, weeks, now that babies born at that stage can be saved. Except that they can’t: as doctor and Lib Dem MP Evan Harris told a very well-attended Abortion Rights rally at parliament earlier this year, an investigation into the upper time limit by parliament’s science and technology committee found that while survival rates of 24 weeks and over had improved to an extent, they had not done so below that point.

It’s also important to remember that very few abortions are carried out at that late stage - around one percent of all terminations, usually with excellent reason - so centring abortion debate around that small number is disingenuous.

In other words, there is no scientfic reason to reduce the time limit. The pro-life lobby’s claims otherwise are entirely political. The questionable tactics employed by the religious right have drawn much criticism as a result: for example, a couple of doctors who contributed to the committee’s work on the science of abortion did their cause no favours when they were sprung as members of the Christian Medical Fellowship. These little games of faith-based silly-buggers send a chill up the female spine: it’s here that you realise that the Christian Right’s interest isn’t in saving babies. It’s about infiltrating and influencing secular life. Little wonder that the pro-choice lobby worries that a reduction to the legal time-limit for abortion would only be the beginning of a prolonged attack on a woman’s abortion rights.

And so the HFEB moved through the House of Lords, to the Commons, where it is due to be read very soon. It is ironic that the weak link in the chain is turning out to be our very own Flash Gordon Brown. Pirouetting lumpishly through another u-turn, his latest contribution to the HFEB has been to allow government ministers a free vote on the controversial aspects of it.