'No new thought' in DHSS paper aimed at 'bamboozling' public

Pro-life lobby slams follow-up Warnock document
by Peter Stanford PRO-LIFE groups have slammed the Government's latest consultation paper on test tube babies and accused Mrs Thatcher of sidestepping the major issues in favour of recovering already well worn ground.
Last week the Department of Health and Social Security published "Legislation on Human Infertility Services and Embryo Research", which aimed to cover the major issues raised" in the considerable volume of public debates and controversy" since Baroness Warnock and her team reported in 1984 on their inquiry "into human fertilisation and embryology".
A greater part of the new discussion document seeks further views on several of Warnock's most hotly contested conclusions — namely over research on human embryos and surrogate motherhood.
However, Professor Jack Scarisbrick of Life, the antiabortion group, told the Catholic Herald this week that he considered the document to contain "no new thought" and no discussion of "Warnock's awful muddle on 14 days" — the time limit suggested by the 1984 report for research on human embryos.
Welcoming the Government's announcement of a free vote on any future legislation on the subject, and their decision to allow either/or clauses in the draft bill on contentious issues, Professor Scarisbrick nonetheless felt that the new report aimed at "blinkering the public" and "confining discussion" to old ground.
The field of organ transplants and genetic manipulation was scarcely covered in the new paper, he said, and pointed to the controversy earlier this week over an operation at Harefield hospital where a heart was transplanted from a baby born without a brain to another baby. The recepient subsequently died.
Professor Scarisbrick said that such operations were the thin end of the wedge as far as efforts to control the human genetic make-up were concerned, and therefore meritted much fuller treatment in any future discussion on embryology.
It was just such issues, he maintained, that needed to be investigated by a parliamentary select committee such as the one suggested by William Cash MP.
The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) was equally dismissive of the Government consultation paper, labelling it "a deliberate delaying tactic used to fobb off the public and MP's, the vast majority of whom support legislation to outlaw the use of the embryonic human being as a guinea pig" in the words of Phyllis Bowman, the society's national director.
She felt sure that experimentation on embryos would be ruled out if the measure was given a fair chance of discussion in the House of Commons and appealed to Mrs Thatcher and her government to take action now.
"They are obviously determined to do everything possible to prevent legislation reaching the statute book before a general election. They might have been a little more honest about it rather than producing a paper obviously intended to bamboozle the public into thinking that they were doing something".
The sixteen page government discussion paper invites interested parties to send in their views before the end of June 1987. The paper is available from HMSO price £2.90