What Harman calls a ‘distraction’, the rest of us call debate

It’s very difficult to get one’s head around the moral and ethical implications of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill on a damp and frowsy October afternoon after perhaps one too many stiffeners. I came away from my research with a vague notion that the Roman Catholic Church wishes to prevent scientists from experimenting on dead lesbians, but that the House of Commons is determined to let this iniquity go ahead and that some progressive left-wing MPs wish to proceed further and allow scientists to monkey around with lesbians who are not yet dead, regardless of whether they give their consent. I must admit that it had never occurred to me that lesbians actually existed — I always assumed that like poltergeists and UFOs, they were something that had been dreamed up by attention-seeking individuals who wish that the world was a less mundane place than is actually the case. Unexplained lesbian sighted over East Anglia, police and RAF alerted. I turned on my television one night and a giant silver lesbian manifested itself in the corner of my room, shrieking. That sort of stuff.

I accept now that there are indeed such a thing as lesbians — although I understand that in this country there are perhaps only eight or nine of them, living quietly in Hebden Bridge. Anyway, it seems that they feel discriminated against by the law, as it currently stands, on what used to be called artificial insemination but is now probably known as Democratic and Inclusive Non-Phallocentric Fertilisation. At the moment, lesbians who wish to grow a child in this manner must satisfy the requirement that the kid will somehow have a father figure hanging around, when this notion does not usually figure in the lifestyle choices of most lesbians. It is not enough, under the law, that one or even both partners should simply sport stubble.