Human Fertilisation & Embryology: IVF - rights and responsibilities.

The Government has just published a White Paper 'Recording Responsibility'. It can be downloaded here. As part of an upcoming Welfare Reform Bill, it is intended to impose a requirement on a mother when registering the birth of a child to name the father, unless it is 'impossible, impractical or unreasonable' for her to do so; should the mother consider her circumstances falls into one of those categories, she will have to persuade the Registrar that they do. The new arrangement is called 'joint registration' and is intended

to promote child welfare and parental responsibility.

It has a lot to say about fatherhood. Before one even gets into the paper itself, the Ministerial foreword tells us that

The role of both father and mother is important to a child’s development.

and goes on to say that

Fathers’ involvement in their child’s life can lead to positive educational achievement, a good, open and trusting parent-child relationship during the teenage years and reduce the risk of mental health issues for children in separated families. Engaging fathers around the time of their child's birth, including through being registered as father, is important in establishing that close involvement.

These fine words, with which I entirely agree, are purportedly written by the Rt Hon James Purnell (Secretary of State for Work and Pensions) and the Rt Hon Ed Balls (Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families).

The paper itself says

At the heart of our reforms is a desire to promote child welfare and the right of every child to know who his or her parents are. In most cases, a child's right to be acknowledged and cared for by his or her father should not be dependent on the relationship between the parents.


At this point I suspect that I'm not alone in wondering whether the Rt Hons Purnell and Balls voted against the proposals related to the registration of children to same-sex 'parents'. But of course they didn't, and the paper itself has a sting in its tale. It doesn't

cover... the changes proposed in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill to allow a same-sex couple to be recorded as parents at birth.

Let's forget fathers for a moment, and suggest that the Government should consider 'recording' its own 'responsibility'. Our Government is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states that

children, whenever possible, have the right to know their parentage.

Now I don't think that when this convention was drawn up, what was meant by 'parentage' was the names and addresses of the people who were bringing a child up. What it meant was the two people who had each contributed half of a child's genes, the child's mother and father. Nature's inconvenient like that, continuing to insist that children get one of each, despite the best efforts of our scientists and politicians. And it has been very well established through the latter half of the twentieth century that children have a very strong need to find out about, and more often than not to find, their biological parents. Despite all that, the Government has now done something that it never countenanced with adoption; allowing the birth certificate to be no more than a lie, that records either, or maybe neither, of a child's parents without regard to nature or fact. Adoption has taught us more than that children need to know the facts of their biological parentage; Dr Barnardo's would not be alone in recognising the long term grief and anger that results from the telling of lies, and particularly those that have legal sanction.

I wouldn't dispute that same-sex couples are entirely capable of providing 'supportive parenting', and many already do, but that doesn't alter the unavoidable fact that at least one of them won't be the parent of the child. In that context, I find it impossible to consider IVF morally acceptable unless the couple concerned are the biological as well as the supportive parents; beyond that denies a child its most basic rights.

In the end, it's the same as the abortion debate. There's far too much talk of rights, far too little about responsibilities. The rights being talked up here are once again those of selfish uncaring adults (and are not really 'rights' at all); never are they those of the rights of the child. As for responsibilities, none of the supporters of the recent changes in the law seem to have regard for those whatever.

Human Fertilisation & Embryology: a woman's right to choose.

I posted on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology bill prior to the Parliamentary debate, and then had an interesting discussion with the Political Umpire, through the comments attached to both my original post and his own on the same subject. In fact, I think I probably achieved greater clarity in those comments than in my first post. I said that I would return to the subject when the dust had settled, and it has so I am.

Re-reading my original post, I'm not sure whether my sense of priorities at the time was correct. The stem cell research proposals, horrendous as they seem to me, have such an uncertain outcome that it is difficult to be absolute in condemning them. Scientists will in the end disregard legal niceties anyway, particularly as the technology already exists. So I'm deeply unhappy, but have nothing to add to what I said at the outset. However the other two issues (abortion, and the need to consider the need for a father) were not covered as I now wish they had been, so I'll set down my thoughts on them in separate posts.

Abortion. As I said previously, I support the existing 24 week limit on obtaining a termination, and believe that they should be easily available. However undesirable it may be it is the lesser of two evils (unwanted, abandoned babies and the return of the back-street abortionist seeming worse). Nevertheless, I think that the limit is a subject that it is entirely reasonable to review from time to time.

Those who oppose abortion outright tend to do so from religious conviction, and are entirely entitled to do so. However the debate as to whether we permit abortion or not took place in 1967, and there has been no likelihood of abortion's opponents even beginning to approach a majority in the Commons since. This leaves a difficult problem in its wake, because when you have the secondary debate as to the point in a pregnancy where termination should no longer be permitted, it becomes skewed by the opponents always supporting the shortest period available as an option, regardless of any evidence to the contrary. It is a dilemma that is just about impossible to resolve, but it does mean that any final decision is likely to err on the side of caution, and that at least is no bad thing.

What struck me most about the debate itself though was the repeated invocation (by supporters of the status quo) of a woman's 'right to choose'. What on earth is this supposed 'right', and where might it come from? Women have clear rights with regard to pregnancy in this country, in particular the right not to get pregnant unless they wish to do so. They are not compelled to have sex, and if they should choose to do so they are not prohibited from using contraception (including a 'morning after' pill).

Pregnancy though is not a right it itself, rather it is a responsibility. A woman who chooses to get pregnant takes on a responsibility for her unborn child, to which her own rights are entirely secondary. Regardless of the law, she should not for example place the child at risk through the excessive use of alcohol or of other drugs; to do otherwise would be immoral and entirely to be condemned.

It is offensive that women claim a 'right to decide'. If they possessed such a right (and they don't) it would surely permit that they be allowed terminations right up to the point of delivery, maybe of infanticide beyond that. There is of course no such right, and those who claim that there is simply encourage women to disregard the immense responsibility that comes with conception.

I recognise that there are many unwanted pregnancies that arise from emotional and sexual immaturity, from lack of education, and sometimes as a consequence of non-consensual sex, and that there are many other valid reasons why a woman might need a pregnancy terminated. But if we talked less about rights and more about responsibilities, I suspect that the number of terminations would fall, regardless of the limits set out by the law.