Schedule 6
Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [Lords]
10:00 am
John Pugh (Shadow Minister, Treasury; Southport, Liberal Democrat)
I stand corrected.
We are confronted with an adjustment to the law that is of byzantine complexity, but we are implicitly being asked to believe that there is a kind of coherence to it, even though we have not established that there is—we must take that on faith. I am sure that we have enormous faith in the ability of parliamentary draftsmen to guarantee the integrity and coherence of the law, but I can hear the alarm bells ringing.
If anything, those alarm bells grew louder last night when I inspected a website devoted to fathers’ interests that explains how fathers can successfully deal with any threat to those interests. The website put enormous stress on the importance of the birth certificate—what it means and how fathers can use it to get the rights, the access to their children and the responsibilities that they feel they deserve.
There was a naïve belief that the birth certificate had clarity, but that can no longer be established. If there is a dispute in the House of Lords between people who should know whether the birth certificate is supposed to indicate genetic origin or social parenting, the ordinary public will suffer from a certain vagueness.
The Minister said that an entry on the birth certificate could be purely symbolic.