Dr Williams gets it right

Monday, 12th May 2008

Credit where credit is due: the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, got it absolutely right yesterday in his excellent article for the Mail on Sunday about the iniquitous Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which is being debated in the Commons today. The headline row over the Bill during the past few days has been about the abortion amendments, a development which is as regrettable as it was predictable. It was always likely that these amendments — to bring down the upper time limit for abortion from 24 weeks to anything between 20 weeks and twelve — would overshadow other provisions in the Bill which are far worse. In particular, these are the go-ahead for ‘saviour siblings’, where babies are conceived for the sole purpose of using bits of their body to cure their siblings of disease; abolishing the current requirement that a child created through IVF will have a father to help raise it; and the go-ahead for animal-human hybrid embryos to be created for therapeutic purposes.

It’s no use arguing, as supporters of this Bill so disingenuously do, that people have got the wrong end of the stick because the wicked tabloids have told them that this last provision will create monstrous chimeras, which isn’t true because they will be destroyed while they are still mere days-old bundles of cells. It’s no use arguing that anyone with an ounce of compassion for children suffering from appalling diseases must support the ‘saviour siblings’ clause, because after all what’s the problem with taking a few cells which can easily be spared and for such a noble cause. And it’s no use arguing that there’s no real evidence of many babies living below 24 weeks’ gestation and that the whole abortion row actually reflects abhorrence of abortion itself which is confined to a few die-hard Catholics (and how dare they try to influence the debate? Don’t they know that unless people with religious principles keep absolutely silent they are guilty of trying to end other people’s freedoms??) As Dr Williams wrote:

But if you put it another way and talk about creating an embryo that could in principle become a distinctive person - because it is already a distinctive organic unity - could this in the long run encourage a drift towards a new attitude to human life – an attitude that was more and more fuzzy about the absolute right of an individual not to be used for the purposes of another?
…I am yet to be convinced that the measures relating to non-reproductive cloning will not open the way to a less consistently respectful attitude to life or that those concerning 'saviour siblings' similarly protect against a person being treated primarily as a tool for another's ends. These matters need further serious debate. This doesn't mean that we are bound to think of the primitive embryonic material as in every sense a 'person' – but it does mean that we can't lose sight of the fact that this organic unit is a potential person, and that the decisions we make about it are decisions about possible human and personal futures. This is also why I welcome the pressure from some quarters to take this opportunity of reducing the time limits for abortion.

Exactly. It is the further giant stride towards the instrumentalisation of human life represented by this Bill which is so disturbing. And for the government to be pushing this brutalising and amoral Bill through with only the most grudging nod towards the exercise of MPs’ conscience — and even that inadequate concession had to be dragged out of it — is really quite tyrannical.