Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, I listened with great care to the outstanding opening speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Williams. It was extremely persuasive because I have enormous sympathy with the objectives which she so clearly enunciated in making the case for a national bioethics commission. Like many other noble Lords, however, I have serious reservations about the potential efficacy of such a body. In the course of my professional life, I have been much involved in ethical discussions in a whole series of different fora: as president of the British Medical Association; and subsequently as a member of the standards and ethics committee of the General Medical Council and later as its president. It is important to recognise not only that we have bodies such as the Human Genetics Commission, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and the Genetic Interest Group, but that the professional medical bodies themselves play a major role. The British Medical Association regularly publishes and recently updated a substantial booklet entitled Medical Ethics Today. The General Medical Council continually gives advice to the medical profession about ethical issues that have emerged as a result of recent developments not only in medicine but in medical science. The Royal Society, too, has a role in ethical discussions with scientists in the broader sense. The more recently established Academy of Medical Sciences regularly produces significant reports on ethical issues as they affect various situations in medicine. In 1992-93, I had the privilege of chairing the ad hoc Select Committee on Medical Ethics, which was established in this House. That body was set up simply to examine in detail two important issues. The first was the sanctity of life and whether it was appropriate to change the law on euthanasia and assisted suicide. The issue arose after a number of cases such as that of Tony Bland, the young man who had been crushed in the Hillsborough stadium disaster, and another case in which a doctor had been accused of murder because he had brought to an end the life of a patient who was in intolerable pain and in the terminal stages of disease. There were 16 members of that Select Committee of your Lordships’ House. We met weekly and took a huge amount of oral and written evidence from individuals and organisations over 15 months. We spent several weekends in consultation and deliberation on the outcome before ultimately producing a unanimous report. That ad hoc Select Committee was established to look at just two major problems, only two of many that could have arisen in the ethical field. Mechanisms are available in this House to establish Select Committees to examine ethical problems. There has been the Select Committee that I just mentioned, as well as the Select Committee established to consider the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Joffe, and the pre-legislative scrutiny committee, to which noble Lords have referred today, on the Bill that we are now debating. The field of medical ethics is enormous. A human bioethics commission simply could not function with six to eight members, even if you trebled that number to cover the representation that would be demanded not only by ethicists and philosophers but by people of various faiths and of different persuasions in science, medicine and the law. It would be an enormous body if it were to fulfil its task fully and properly. The problems that would emerge would make it almost impossible to deal with the short-term issues to which my noble and right reverend friend Lord Harries of Pentregarth referred, because inevitably in matters of complexity in the medical and scientific-ethical field, it takes many weeks and months to be able to assess the evidence and come up with recommendations. Although I have all possible sympathy with the proposal, this House has the opportunity to create ad hoc Select Committees to consider crucial ethical issues, and an ad hoc Select Committee, rather than a human bioethics commission, is likely to be the right forum.