Clause 24
Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [Lords]
3:45 pm
Evan Harris (Shadow Minister, Innovation, Universities and Skills; Oxford West and Abingdon, Liberal Democrat)
I do not want to get too heavily involved in the generational issue here, because the provisions are prospective, but one can envisage a situation whereby the grandparents of the person seeking the information did not want it known in their family that infertility services had been used. I think that the provision will have to be prospective since a couple of years ago, so we are talking a number of decades hence, but the amendment would provide that those people do not have any opportunity to prevent not just the child who was conceived from finding out—as is the right under the Bill, regardless of whether I think it is a strong right or always beneficial—but a third party, and it is a third party from their point of view. I will be interested to hear the Minister’s response to the amendment. I understand the basis upon which the hon. Gentleman has tabled amendment. One can imagine that it would be of real interest and significance to an individual. That was said in the House of Lords and I do not dispute the sincerity of people who believe that, but I think that what is left out of these debates all the time, especially in the House of Lords, is the right of the people who were patients receiving fertility treatment to have some privacy.
I am a great believer in people who are having fertility treatment telling their children, at an appropriate age, that they were conceived through donor insemination, but it is not my view that they must do that and it is clearly not the Government’s view, because the Government are not forcing them to do so or automatically releasing information.
I think that the Government are absolutely right, because family dynamics are complex and it is not right for the state to wade in in that way. While the amendment is relatively modest in that respect, here and in other debates I urge consideration for the privacy and memory of the parents and patients. If they have not told someone, the fact of it being found out means that they have, essentially, concealed it. That has implications for all sorts of things, including people being written in and out of wills regardless of their legal entitlement to inherit. A can of worms exists here, and I think that that is why we must have caution in all these areas.