The Embryology Bill

Ian Dale says that anyone who has a public platform should be prepared to show how he would vote on a sensitive issue like the Embryology Bill. He may be right and for what it’s worth I’ll give a couple of observations. All societies condemn killing and just as when I was young we had to reach for a definition of what ‘dead’ meant – stopped breathing, no viable life predicted, brain dead etc – so now we have to reach for a definition of what being alive is. And in my view we have to do it before we start discussing more complicated matters such as the Embryology Bill.

The only conclusion I have been able to come to that makes any sense (to me) is that life begins at the moment of conception. I should say immediately that I bear no resentment or ill will to anyone who has come to a different conclusion – it is a difficult matter, particularly in my case because its implications are unpopular. The people I do despise are those who vote for abortion because it is convenient.

For me it means that there is no moral difference in killing a human 20 weeks after conception to killing one 20 weeks or 20 years after birth. Accordingly I would have abstained on the 20-24 weeks issue on the grounds that the difference is purely aesthetic: the age and similarity of the aborted foetus to a grown human. I might possibly have persuaded myself that animal-human hybrids are not humans so you can do what you like with them but I doubt it and find the scales tipped by its sheer repugnance. I should certainly have voted against ‘saviour siblings’ because in my terms this is saying your child can live if we kill 99 others. That I should have done so in the knowledge that this might limit the chances of a cure for a number of diseases is an indication of how difficult an MP’s job can be.

I hope MPs have informed themselves fully on this and related matters, such as whether the alternatives to embryo cells are viable. Some people are saying that embryo cells are not as good as stem cells taken from the spine or from blood because they are naturally carcinogenic. Some are saying we simply cannot progress using only non-embryo stem cells. Which is the truth?

But I have my doubts as to whether MPs are taking their responsibilities seriously and the Tory response of splitting the difference between the proposed 20 weeks and the existing 24 smacks of canny politics which has no place in this debate. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Lastly, I am fed up with being grouped with the ‘religious objectors’ and therefore regarded as mad by the left wing press. This has nothing whatsoever to do with religion: it is a secular, humanist morality with which the Roman Church (to which I don't belong) agrees.