IT ISN’T often that you get to meet God. Happily, we can report that He turns out to be a charming, sandy-haired grandfather with more than a passing resemblance to an ageing Gregory Peck. This is Richard Harries, the former Bishop of Oxford, now Lord Harries of Pentregarth and the head of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, and so responsible for many of the most difficult life-and-death decisions facing Britain today.
As interim leader of the body that regulates IVF, cloning and stem-cell research, he holds the balance between parents’ and patients’ hope of life and the rights of the unborn. The irony of a bishop “playing God” does not escape him, but doesn’t seem to bother him much either. “In terms of ‘playing God’, human beings have always interacted with nature,” he said. “And, from a religious point of view, it seems to me that it is part of our God-given talent and ability to engage in scientific research to improve people’s chances of having children, of having healthier children. This is all part of the divine gift to human beings and a very, very fundamental part of what it is to be a human being.”
It is quite a surprise to find a religious man even wanting such a job. While the Church of England, unlike Roman Catholicism, may tolerate innovations on the cutting edge of fertility and stem-cell research, many of the cloth would be squeamish about taking responsibility for them. But Lord Harries is unusual. An old-timer on Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4, he relishes the intellectual and moral conundrums the post forces upon him. “Its whole area of work is very fraught.
We can’t have a meeting without a battery of lawyers,” he said. “There are people who watch every decision we make and will challenge our decisions in the courts if they think that we have stepped outside the law.
“On the one hand there are some clinics who feel they are overregulated and, on the other hand, there are the pro-life people who are totally opposed to IVF, particularly research on embryos.”
Lord Harries, who ended his 19-year tenure as Bishop of Oxford this summer when he hit 70, has accepted the hot seat as an interim measure, before the HFEA’s amalgamation with the Human Tissue Authority next year. It comes at a critical time for the regulation of our scientific frontiers: the 16-year-old Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, which established the HFEA, has been outpaced by science and is undergoing an urgent update.
These decisions go to the heart of how we see society in the 21st century. Think of some of the most emotive ethical debates of recent times and the chances are that Lord Harries will have a stake in it: “designer babies” created as a result of embryo screening; whether a woman can have IVF without a male partner, or in middle-age; if women should be allowed to donate eggs for research, or to reduce the cost of IVF; along with all the anguished questions over cloning.
“I do think there are some very teasing, testing decisions that are not clear that we’ve got them right and the HFEA in fact changed its mind on some point in a slightly more liberal direction,” he said. “It’s not that I think we’ve made wrong decisions, but they take a very great deal of thinking about.”
Only last week it was revealed, beneath appalled headlines about “Frankenbunnies”, that scientists will apply to the HFEA for a licence to create “chimeric” embryos that will be 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent rabbit or cow, to boost stem-cell research. This development tests each part of Lord Harries’s dual roles: Frankenbunny pushes the scientific and ethical limits of the HFEA, but also his Christian sense of what it is to be a person. From a professional point of view, he hopes fervently that the hybrid can be judged human enough so as not to evade completely the HFEA’s rules governing embryo research.
“It would be predominantly human, if you are going to use the word human at all, but at the moment we don’t know whether this entity would even be covered by the HFEA Act,” he said. “It may be there are people who will say that this is not an embryo according to the Act, but I think it would be a pity, because I think it would begin to undermine confidence in scientific work in this area.”
The legal debate aside, how would Adam, in the Garden of Eden, have classified such a creature? He keeps using the word “entity”, but what if a part-rabbit, part-baby turned up at the Gates of Heaven: would it have a human soul? Lord Harries instinctively brought his hand to his dog collar, and kept it there at his throat while trying to answer.
“I’d rather not say if it is human, rather that it is seen to have predominantly human genetic make-up. From a religious point of view it is impossible to say. Being human implies a capacity or potential capacity to choose, to love, to respond to God, to respond to other people. The question would be, would those characteristics be there? We don’t know at the moment.”
This moment of angst was a fleeting one. Many would assume that the job of deciding which human beings can be created, when and how, involves excruciating soul-searching. Even more so if that post is filled by a leading figure in the Anglican Church, not exactly famed for its decisiveness. Not for Lord Harries. No, he said, he does not lie awake at night, worrying if he has done the right thing. His vision is clear cut, in debt more to his time at Sandhurst than to his Cambridge theology degree.
“I don’t feel troubled in my conscience about it because, as I say, I don’t regard that very early embryo, which is just a small bundle of multiplying cells, as having the rights of a human being,” he said.
Another influence may be at work. His wife is a doctor, and it was his House of Lords work on stem-cell research that led him to the HFEA. His manner is warm and avuncular, but his judgment is clinical. He barely flinched, for example, when talking about the destruction of embryos used for research after 14 days. Science helps to bolster his morals. “Scientific studies now show that a very high percentage, something like two thirds of fertilised eggs, don’t implant in the first place. In other words, there is huge wastage in nature anyway.”
This certainty is needed for one of the most important tasks of his stewardship: the current review of the 1990 Act. This will decide whether the “welfare of the child”, including its need for a father, must still be taken into account when considering whether a woman is suitable for IVF, a clause that currently means that women can be rejected on grounds such as their marital status or age, rather than simply their medical suitability.
Lord Harries is, typically, progressive. He is, after all, the man who ignited the debate about homosexual bishops by nominating the gay priest Jeffrey John several years ago. He is in favour of completely reforming the law so that the State’s role in judgments about who makes a good parent is almost non-existent. “I think what we would like to see is a loosening up of that so that the clinic only has to inquire, let us say, of the person’s GP if they have concerns, if they feel that something is not right,” he said.
As for the welfare of the child including an emphasis on the presence of a father, Lord Harries said: “That should go. I don’t think it’s very useful because I think studies have shown that two people of the same sex together can be good parents.” Clinics would be expected to make further inquiries only if they had serious concerns about, say, child abuse or drug addiction.
He is also very sympathetic to the desire of women to conceive when their biological clock is on its last tick: the modern equivalents of Sarah, the Bible’s ancient mother of Isaac. The NHS does not provide IVF for women over 39 and British doctors are loath to treat women over 45, but Lord Harries does not believe that an upper age limit should be imposed. “I don’t think it should be mandatory, I don’t think it should be legal. I think it should be a clinical judgment.”
Lord Harries recalled the case of Patricia Rashbrook, 62, who this summer became the oldest woman in Britain to have a baby. She had travelled to Eastern Europe to have IVF treatment from an Italian doctor. “Well, I think I respected her choice. I mean, men can conceive at a vast age.”
He cannot simply be characterised as a liberal. He has previously campaigned for a nuclear deterrent, and argues for the idea of “just war”, although he did oppose Tony Blair’s war on Iraq as not fitting that criteria.
He is, moreover, unafraid to get tough in the emotional wrangling over the number of embryos a clinic can implant during IVF. At the moment women under 40 can have two, and women over 40 three, to increase their chances of conception. But Lord Harries believes that the health risks of conceiving twins and triplets are greater than the emotional and financial cost of increased cycles of IVF. “This is quite a controversial thing in the HFEA,” he said. “We probably will be encouraging people eventually to go to one embryo transfer. That’s not policy yet, but there is quite strong scientific evidence that there is a greater risk of disability.”
If there is a contradiction that pains him, it is a life-and-death choice beyond the remit of the HFEA. While his colleagues, doctors, scientists and parents lavish huge care and attention on the creation and preservation of embryos, a rising number of women are having abortions. “At the moment I think that there is a very big contradiction in this country between the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act which, although the assumption is that these unused early embryos will be destroyed or used for research, nevertheless they are accorded great respect in the sense that every single fertilised egg has to be accounted for,” he said.
“Very big contrast between that and the situation in this country where in many instances it seems to be almost abortion on demand.
“There are too many abortions. I mean, I’m not an absolutist at all. I don’t want to see abortion illegal, but I’d like to see a great change in our culture so that there are far fewer abortions and abortions are only done for a range of very serious reasons.”
Lord Harries is due to be unleashed from the HFEA within a few months. Expect him at a controversy near you soon.
HOW THE IVF LAWS WORK
Some IVF doctors oppose this switch because it would reduce a woman’s chances of conceiving at all MARK HENDERSON
