Clause 54
Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [Lords]
9:30 am
John Pugh (Shadow Minister, Treasury; Southport, Liberal Democrat)
Indeed. I preface this by saying that my hon. Friend and I do not see eye to eye on many issues in the Bill, but I am doing this in a spirit of charity and comradeship and not necessarily because I see it as anything other than a probing amendment to which the Minister may want to respond.
Before I discuss the amendment, I have a brief observation about the whole clause. Throughout the previous part of the legislation, when we were trying to tease out the rights of the person who has given non-genetic material—cytoplasm—to the IVF process, we rigidly defined motherhood along the lines of child bearing. I have got that clear in my head. The mother is the person who bears the child and not the one who produces the genetic material that forms the child. I understand that. Here, interestingly, we decouple that. We allow it to be decoupled in a way which is probably quite novel. Always under surrogacy, there has been some decoupling. Now we have the clear concept of motherhood being viewed in two different ways by the same bit of legislation.
Returning to my hon. Friend’s amendment, the crucial issue to which I will draw hon. Members’ attention is probably the very first section of parental orders in which he has a objection to the word “two people” and wishes to eliminate “two”. He suggests that now that the concept of supportive parenting has been established, it seems timely to ensure that single parents should have the opportunity to apply for a parental order following surrogacy. He suggests that that would make the law consistent with current adoption law, which allows applications from single people and couples. The amendment that he proposed would bring the legislation in line with the current adoption law.
My hon. Friend’s key point is that when the Bill refers to a couple—a same-sex couple, a civil partnership or a married couple—additional phrasing would allow a couple to be defined in the same way as in the legislation, but he adds to that that one person who is not married or a civil partner is also a potential beneficiary of a parental order. He wishes to stress that his point is purely to make the provision consistent with adoption law.