CARE Concerned as Department of Health Holds Embryology Act Review

The Christian social policy charity CARE has expressed serious concerns about the Review of the Embryology and Fertility Act published by the Department of Health last week.

CARE believes that it is wrong that the government is recommending that women will deliberately bring into the world children who will not have a father.

The current legal requirement in the HFE Act that the child's need for a father should be taken into account is in place because a mother cannot be both a mother and a father to a child.

"Although physical requirements can of course, be adequately met by a single woman, a mother cannot substitute for all the emotional and social needs of children, especially boys," states a CARE press release.

Daniel Boucher, CARE's Director of Parliamentary Affairs, said: "Clear and well documented evidence has been published detailing the damage that absent fatherhood can have on children in the long term. It cannot therefore be in the best interests of children to deliberately plan to bring children into the world without a father, and yet this is exactly what the Government is now recommending. Our prime concern should be for the child, not the whims of a would-be parent."

Meanwhile, the recommendation to create animal human hybrid embryos raises significant safety and ethical issues. So much so that in most other European countries this would not be permitted. Thirty-one of the 45 Council of Europe Members States have signed the Council of Europe Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine which states that: "The creation of human embryos for research purposes is prohibited."

Philippa Taylor, CARE's Bioethics Consultant states, "The UK stands out on a limb in its treatment of embryos and we are increasingly going to be seen by the rest of Europe as an ethical 'rogue state', in which a number of moral principles are being disregarded as unimportant. Just because research can be done does not mean that it ought to be done, particularly when, as in this case, the need for the research is debatable and the means unethical."