My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 16, in the names of my noble friend Lord Mackay and the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan. I thank them for tabling the amendment because I have a direct personal interest in it, having been born with a severe disability. My objection to the current Clause 4, which I appreciate was not part of the original Bill, is twofold.
First, I object on the grounds of inequality. As noble Lords will know, I do not take a position on abortion itself, but I most definitely do take a position on disability equality. Though supposedly about advancing human rights, Clause 4 is actually about a hierarchy of human rights. It is, in effect, about denying the right to exist of, and the equality of, human beings diagnosed with a disability before birth, and ensuring that the power—dressed up as rights—of stronger human beings reigns supreme.
A world in which one group’s equality is more important than another’s is not equality; it is inequality. Clause 4, perversely, would achieve the opposite of its presumed purpose: it would entrench inequality. The argument which was advanced forcefully in the other place—that this is somehow about equality—is therefore bogus. The fact is that if Clause 4 becomes law, more human beings with my condition and other disabilities will be aborted. As it stands tonight, Northern Ireland is the safest place in our United Kingdom to be diagnosed with a disability before birth. That will change if Clause 4 is allowed to stand part of the Bill, because the presumed protection against the most lethal form of disability discrimination—death for disability—will be gone, in time.
A quick glance at the Department of Health’s own statistics tells us everything we need to know about what would happen. I wonder, would any noble Lord care to hazard a guess at the trends in disability-related terminations? Only last week noble Lords may have read about the amazing breakthrough in intra-uterine surgery on human beings diagnosed with spina bifida before birth. Indeed, human beings diagnosed with my condition—brittle bones, which put me in hospital for most of my childhood—can now be treated from the moment of birth with medicines such as bisphosphonates, to ameliorate even some of the most severe forms of the condition. Some people with my condition lead perfectly normal lives, to the extent that they can play sport.
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Yet the direction of travel is one way, and we are going at a disturbingly faster and faster rate. Despite wonderful medical advances, between 2007 and 2017 the number of terminations on the grounds of disability increased by a massive 63%. In the same 10-year period, terminations for Down’s syndrome increased by 45%, and the figures for the 20 years between 1997 and 2017 are even worse. If you took the disability death toll as the key performance indicator of the success of this measure, we could not get a higher score, for the simple reason that the increase in Down’s syndrome abortions in that 20-year timeframe is 100%. That means that in 2018, in the rest of the UK we can “boast” that 90% of human beings diagnosed with Down’s syndrome before birth never see the light of day. So much for human rights. So much for equality.
If Clause 4 is left in the Bill, the one part of the UK that has done so much to challenge and break down bigotry since the Good Friday agreement will have bigotry foisted upon it under the perverse pretence of advancing human rights. No wonder, as we have heard, that recent polling shows that the people of Northern Ireland are dead against it.
My second objection is that it is not for us to tell the people of Northern Ireland what to do on this most contentious of issues. We should respect the people of Northern Ireland, not belittle them.
I close by asking this question. What is the message that your Lordships’ House will be sending to people born with a disability if we allow Clause 4 to stand part of the Bill? Surely it is this: “We believe that you would be better off dead; we believe it would be better if you had never been born, because of your disability”. So I ask my noble friend the Minister to take this opportunity to reassure me that the Government do not believe that I, as a Member of your Lordships’ House, would be better off dead and indeed that the Government do not believe that disabled human beings like me would be better off never having been born. I also ask my noble friend the Minister to reassure me that the Government will insist on protections, so that that message can never be given in practice by changes to the law and to practice in Northern Ireland.