Conflicting Concerns: The Political Context of Recent Embryo Research Policy in Britain

Abstract

On the night of the 1987 British General Election, the BBC sent its interviewers onto the streets to ask electors what they expected from the next government. In Trafalgar Square this important task fell to Esther Rantzen. One of her interviewees was an earnest young man, who was given a few moments to utter the passionate plea that the next government ban experiments on human embryos. For him, at least, this was the most important issue on the legislative agenda. Six months later, in debate in the House of Lords on a government White Paper, published in the autumn of 1987, which promises the statutory regulation, but not the banning of such experiments, the Earl of Lauderdale, a Scottish peer and a devout Catholic, compared such investigations with those conducted at Auschwitz: ‘Like it or not, pleasing or offensive to the progressive children of the Enlightenment as it may be, I say that this is darkness all day: it is not light. This is a licence to kill without even trial for a crime. We must not allow it’ (Hansard, 1988, p. 1487). His sentiments, if not his wild and imprecise language, were echoed by several other peers, Lord Longford amongst them.