Daily Mail, 24 March 2008
http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=575
With all the difficulties facing the Prime Minister, you’d think
that he would be making every possible effort to avoid any further
elephant traps. But no - having unaccountably constructed one for
himself, he has not only fallen in but is refusing to haul himself
out.
For reasons which so far have eluded everyone else, he is
refusing to allow Labour MPs a free vote on the Human Fertilisation
and Embryology Bill and is instead imposing a three-line whip.
This has placed Roman Catholic Labour MPs in particular in
serious difficulty, because the Bill contains a number of
provisions - of which the most repugnant is the proposal to allow
the creation of animal/human hybrid embryos — which diametrically
conflict with their religious principles. As a result, three
Cabinet ministers and nine other members of the Government are
reportedly considering their position.
Now the row has dramatically escalated, with some exceptionally
strong statements by church leaders expressing their horror at the
Bill in their Easter sermons.
First, the Scottish Catholic leader Cardinal Keith O’Brien
compared the hybrid proposal to the creation of Frankenstein’s
monster. Then other churchmen piled in, including Cardinal Cormac
Murphy-O’Connor, who called for a free vote on the Bill, and the
Anglican Bishop of Durham, who called upon all faiths to object to
these ‘1984-style’ proposals from ‘a militantly atheist and
secularist lobby’.
As the pressure on Gordon Brown has mounted, so too has the
scope for political mischief. Yesterday, the arch-Blairite Stephen
Byers gave another hefty turn of the ratchet when he warned that
the public would ‘look on in disbelief’ if MPs were not given a
free vote on such a sensitive measure.
With the row suddenly thus turning into a direct challenge to Mr
Brown’s authority and judgement, it now stands to inflict upon him
a level of damage going far beyond this immediate controversy.
This is truly a most baffling state of affairs. For the issues
in this Bill have previously always been treated as matters of
conscience on which MPs have accordingly been given a free
vote.
So why on this occasion did Mr Brown decide instead to deny a
free vote and force this crisis of conscience among Labour MPs?
Why, when there are so many things — such as the gathering economic
crisis or the meltdown in public services —which require urgent
government attention, has Mr Brown allowed himself to become
enmeshed in a wholly unnecessary fight over science and
religion?
Moreover, even now he’s in a hole he’s still digging. Yesterday,
the Government suggested that MPs could abstain on parts of the
Bill - but only if its passage through Parliament wasn’t
threatened. Such MPs would therefore be allowed to uphold their
religious principles only if doing so was totally useless. What an
insult.
The Health Secretary Alan Johnson says MPs won’t be forced to
act against their conscience or their faith. Big deal! What about
allowing them to vote with their conscience?
For parts of this Bill, such as the proposal to allow scientists
to combine animal eggs with human nuclei and create hybrid embryos
from which stem cells can be grown for research, are simply
unconscionable.
Scientists claim that the protesters are irresponsibly
scaremongering, since the proposed hybrids would not be grown into
‘monsters’but would be used only as primitive cells for research.
In their arrogance, such scientists fail to understand the nature
of the objection. It is the idea of creating such a hybrid embryo
at all that is so abhorrent.
Experimenting on human embryos is bad enough; it destroys an
individual life in order to serve the interests of others and thus
degrades and brutalises us all.
But creating an animal/human embryo breaks an even deeper taboo.
It negates the acknowledgement of what it is to be human and, by
obliterating the difference between animals and humans, destroys
the concept of human uniqueness.
In the House of Lords’ debates on this Bill, it became crystal
clear that the Government is indeed doing nothing less than
redefining a human being. In a remarkably revealing admission, the
health minister Lord Darzi said that, after some thought, the
Government had decided that the hybrids in question were ‘at the
human end of the spectrum’.
Just think about that for a moment and you can see how grotesque
this all is. It appears that an animal/human hybrid embryo can be
said to be more human or less depending on the proportion of animal
material in the mix, like a Delia Smith recipe.
But you can’t be a little bit human. This is the way humanity is
dehumanised. Indeed, since this Bill would allow the creation of
embryos that are half animal, half human, they would have no claim
to be more human than animal.
Alan Johnson cynically suggests the Bill will bring about cures
for such terrible afflictions as motor neurone disease, multiple
sclerosis or Parkinson’s. Yes, of course, everyone would like to
bring such suffering to an end. But there isn’t a shred of evidence
that this will be the case.
The destruction of hundreds of thousands of human British
embryos for research has not led to any such major breakthroughs -
for which there is more hope from taking stem cells from adult
tissue.
What’s more, only last summer the former Chief Medical Officer,
Sir Liam Donaldson, told a committee on this Bill that there was
‘no clear scientific argument’ in favour of creating such hybrids
and it would be ‘a step too far’ for the public.
So why did Gordon Brown decide to take that step too far?
Part of the answer must lie in the intense pressure from
scientists who, in the Godlike belief that they can eradicate
disease and misery from the world, constantly push to be in the
forefront of medical research regardless of any adverse
consequences for society.
They find all-too-willing allies among government officials who
are mesmerised by the prospect of this country leading the world in
anything, and also among politicians who will cheerfully tear up
any moral or ethical code going in order to satisfy public
demand.
Indeed, the Bill contains many other deeply troubling proposals.
It removes fatherhood from the family script altogether for some
children conceived through IVF.
It allows the creation of ‘saviour siblings’, whose sole purpose
in being brought into the world will be to provide parts of their
organs or tissues to help another member of their family. It
permits fertility clinics to create ‘designer babies’ by selecting
for destruction those embryos which are marred by serious
disease.
In short, it should be renamed the Dehumanising, Brutalisation
and Freakology Bill.
It was based on a report by the cross-party Science and
Technology Committee, which was itself profoundly split. The
dissidents on the committee said the majority report was
‘unbalanced, light on ethics, goes too far in the direction of
deregulation and is too dismissive of public opinion and much of
the evidence’.
That’s about the sum of it. This Bill should never have been
brought to Parliament in its present form. Now that it has, there
must be a free vote on it.
After all, if these proposals aren’t a matter of conscience for
Mr Brown, what is? Or does he see absolutely everything in terms of
crude political power? If this Bill is rammed through, where does
that leave that famous moral compass of his?
In pieces.