The Abolition of Fatherhood

This week's splendid leading article in The Spectator:

To date, the government’s hand-ling of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill has resembled what might be called ‘Vicky Pollard politics’. Challenged to grant MPs a free vote on these far-reaching and ethically contentious proposals, the Prime Minister’s officials sent hugely confusing signals: ‘Yeah but no but yeah but no but yeah.’ Now the Prime Minister has finally conceded that Labour MPs will be able to vote with their consciences on three key issues: the striking of the phrase ‘need for a father’ from the rules governing IVF treatment; so-called ‘saviour siblings’; and the creation of hybrid human-animal embryos.

The condition is that they step into line and support the Bill as a whole on its third and final reading. So party discipline will still trump moral freedom. But this compromise — messy both in origin and character — seems to have headed off the threat of ministerial resignations, which was Mr Brown’s prime concern.

The fraught politics of this Bill should not obscure its content, much of which is deeply disturbing. The granting of (limited) free votes must be the start of the controversy, not its fudged conclusion. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a legislative package whose moral sweep and potential ethical consequences could be greater.

What matters is that the coming debate is framed correctly. While it is true that churchmen have — quite understandably — led the attack on the legislation, this is not intrinsically a doctrinal struggle. Predictably, the more vociferous champions of the Bill have tried to present the argument as one between ignorant superstition and enlightened progress. But this is wholly misleading.

First, one does not have to believe in a deity or subscribe to any religion to feel grave doubts about the procedures proposed in this Bill. Take the prospective licensing of research on ‘human admixed embryos’, composed of both human and animal material. Naturally, Catholics find this an appalling notion. But many atheists and agnostics are no less troubled by the notion of such biological hybrids.

Secondly, the sheer zeal of the scientific lobby has gravely undermined its claim to be representing pragmatic progress. On the question of hybrids, for instance, it is far from clear that this research — exciting, no doubt, to scientists — is as urgently needed as has been claimed. In his evidence to the parliamentary Joint Committee on the Bill, the government’s own Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, said that ‘there was no clear scientific argument as to why you would want to do it, and, secondly, a feeling that this would be a step too far as far as the public are concerned... the scientific arguments for wanting to do it are not particularly strong or convincing, or even existent’.

The debate on the Bill in the House of Lords between November and February foreshadowed the vehemence with which such reservations will be dismissed by the legislation’s advocates when it reaches the Commons. Baroness Warnock championed ‘the positive moral imperative upon government to allow research to continue’, as if that imperative were self-evident, and the need for a ‘broad utilitarianism’. Yet Lord Brennan came closer to the truth when he said that ‘control may give people confidence, but an ethical framework will give them trust... Humility before hubris in science is a wise approach.’

This principle will serve MPs well as the legislation comes before them. They should pay particular attention to clause 14 (2) (b), which has not received as much attention as the science-fiction prospect of human-animal embryos, but is of no less social significance. The proposed amendment is a moral disgrace disguised as a modest anti-discriminatory measure. In IVF treatment, there will no longer be the recognition in law of the ‘need for a father’: only for ‘supportive parenting’.

Ministers argue that it is wrong to expect doctors making clinical decisions regarding single women and lesbian couples to ‘discriminate’ against them by taking into account the likely presence of a father or father-figure in a child’s life. The Archbishop of York described this aptly as ‘the removal, by design, of the father of the child’, or, as Baroness Deech put it, ‘a fresh statement to the effect that a child does not need a father. It sends a message to men, at a time when many of them feel undermined as providers and parents.’

Lord Patten framed the issue with admirable clarity: ‘If faced with a choice between the hope of adults to become parents or the welfare and best interests of a child, which all the research that I have seen indicates is helped by a father or a long-term male role model, I would pick the best interests of the child every time. That is why it is so very odd to provide that some children can be legally barred at conception from having one of these “fathers”. It seems as though the government now see fathers as rather curious creatures.’

It was perhaps a sign of what lies ahead in the Lower House that, on 10 December, Lord Winston, one of the strongest advocates of the Bill, invoked the image of ‘Nazi doctors’ in this context — those who ‘believed that what they were doing was in the interest of society’ but forgot ‘what was in the interest of their patient’. It is hard to imagine a more offensive comparison — as if there were even the most slender similarities between the doctors of the Third Reich and those clinicians who still believe that contact with a father figure is an integral part of a child’s upbringing.

It is astonishing that this should even be an issue. But it is — in the proposed removal of a few words from the law of the land. As Barack Obama has reminded us, words matter. If it truly believes in fatherhood, as its members so often assert, the House of Commons will at least have the courage to strike clause 14 (2) (b) from the Bill.