Human Fertilisation and Embryology or HFE Bill

Click below for SPUC's latest lobbying alerts on the HFE Bill:

New pro-abortion amendments announced, please leaflet now

Briefing on pro-abortion amendments

Click here for how you can contact your MP to urge him/her to vote against the HFE bill and against pro-abortion amendments to the bill.

We have produced two striking new leaflets for mass distribution - click here for the leaflet "No to more abortion" and click here for the leaflet "How should human life be treated". Previous leaflets have been very effective in alerting people to the bill - but we need to do more. Please do all you can to help circulate these leaflets now. It can be distributed door-to-door, outside churches and on the street. The leaflet urges people to write to or telephone their MP, and offers copies of our latest briefing for those who want to know more - click here. Leaflets and briefings can be ordered by emailing Liz Foody at SPUC lizfoody@spuc.org.uk or by telephone 020 7091 7091 or by fax 020 7820 3131 or by post to SPUC, 3 Whitacre Mews, Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB.


Effects of the HFE Bill in summary:
  • The main effect of the bill is to allow licensing of more procedures that will harm or kill embryos created in the laboratory.
  • In the bill, IVF is seen as a way of creating babies not just for infertile couples, but others who want to use IVF to serve lifestyle choices.
  • The bill extends the ways in which embryos can be artificially created and manipulated - including hybrid (animal-human) embryos, genetic manipulation, etc.
  • The bill is designed to make it easier to change the law in future to extend objectionable procedures like cloning.

Like all members of the human family, the human embryo deserves respect. Support for the HFE bill, which further undermines the status of the embryo, breaches international conventions upholding the right to life of all members of the human family.

The HFE bill, like the existing law, disregards the status of the embryo. It will permit new abuses of embryos and extend those already allowed. The HFE bill will extend the general scope of in vitro fertilisation (IVF), regarding it not only as a treatment for infertile couples, but for others who demand their purported "right" to have a child.

Instead of IVF as a last resort, it has now becomes a norm. Embryos become just things. The HFE bill focuses on reproductive technology in which human reproduction is put at the service of those who demand it. At the same time the stress on the welfare of children born from IVF is weakened, with the removal of the reference to the child's need for a father.

Embryos may be used in experiments even if alternative ways of doing the research are possible. Embryo stem cell research remains far behind adult stem cell research in terms of results. No treatments are available using embryonic cells; seventy or more have been developed using adult stem cells, see, for example, www.stemcellresearch.org/facts/CheckTheScore.pdf

The Bill promotes the "saviour sibling" procedure. This is where a couple who have a disabled child undergo IVF in the hope of producing a baby who can be used as a tissue donor to treat the older sibling. However, most "saviour sibling" embryos are discarded or destroyed.

The embryology authority will be clearly empowered to licence the creation of cloned embryos for research. The bill also alters the way the law is framed to make it easier for parliament to permit cloned embryos to be transferred to the womb in future. Also, people who were never asked about such procedures could have embryos created using their DNA

Mixing human and animal gametes to create hybrid embryos is unethical. How can it be right to generate such embryos when there is no clear answer to the question "how should we treat them"?

Within the same bill, some parliamentarians also want to widen the law on abortion. This would mean more abortions and there are already between 500 and 600 abortions every day.

Summary briefing for MPs, HFE bill 2nd reading, Monday 12th May 2008

"What you need to know about the government's embryo bill" by Anthony Ozimic, SPUC political secretary (greyscale PDF copy of colour PowerPoint presentation)

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© SPUC 2008