UK Parliament / Open data

Immigration Bill

Proceeding contribution from Baroness Neuberger (Crossbench) in the House of Lords on Tuesday, 12 April 2016. It occurred during Debate on bills on Immigration Bill.

My Lords, I, too, strongly support this amendment. I will speak briefly because much of what I wanted to say has already been said, and said very eloquently.

This is enormously important. As many noble Lords know, we run a drop-in for asylum-seeker families at my synagogue. In talking to some of the women, many of them pregnant, who visit with their small children, one thing that comes out time and time again is how they worry that the situation in which they are living—they are not detained—is so insecure that some of that insecurity may be transmitted to their unborn children. Of course, we know a great deal now about the transmission of anxiety and trauma to unborn children. If we extrapolate from that and from those women talking about it to women detained for what seem to be not very good reasons, it is really important that we have an absolute exclusion on pregnant women being detained. I hope that people will look at the evidence given by the Royal College of Midwives. That made it absolutely clear that unborn children may well be traumatised by the experience. I do not believe that we in this House would wish to take responsibility for that.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
771 c136 
Session
2015-16
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords chamber
Subjects
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