We are all against unnecessary regulation and everyone seems to agree that the government is right to carry out a cull of quangos. But there is one that is different. The Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority is apparently on the hit list, and I am asking a question about it on Wednesday. It was a world first and remains a model, bringing together the ethics and science of embryology and IVF. It guards the great database with the names of the anonymous donors and the details of the treatments; it issues guidance and support to patients, it monitors clinics and laboratories and it allows new developments to go ahead once satisfied that they are safe as possible. It costs only about £5m a year (funded largely by the patients).
To dismember it and redistribute its functions to other health quangos, including a new one, which is the alleged plan, seems to me to be a retrograde and damaging step.
By the time the database is transferred and the licensing committees set up again, new letterheads and pamphlets printed etc., more money will have been wasted, and expertise will be lost. One cannot readily divide, as is proposed, the collection of embryos from patients and research on them in the laboratories. No-one should think that patients will pay less or that research will be licensed any more readily if those controls are passed to other government departments. Only the more swashbuckling doctors and those who are completely opposed to the use of embryos approve of this particular abolition. Leave well alone and let us not endanger the satisfactory progress and leadership in IVF and embryology shown by the UK. Has not Dr Robert Edwards, our own pioneer, just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine?
It’s on the list because its failed. Ask yourself why so many women and couples are going to the secondary market to get sperm from other sources. There was a case the other day, when in effect you’re system prosecuted people because as a monopoly supplier you didn’t like the competition.
People are off to the alternatives because the system the quango has come up with means a shortage of supply. Those supplying the sperm have decided to opt out because they didn’t like the rules. End result is that the quango fails to provide the service the public wanted.
When you say, it’s only 5 million, you ignore the costs to the end users. Not surprising as you’re in it for the money. The 5 million is the cut those in the quango take.
It’s a good example of a quango that needs to go.
“why so many women and couples are going to the secondary market to get sperm from other sources”
The very first comment by Blagger is apposite.
The private sector may provide where the Nationally provided service fails.
Whilst any “health” service provided by the state is about the state, (and getting something free being worth what you pay for it, to you, but NOT to the state), what you pay for, to privately chosen medical services, may well have a value far greater in proportion to the one the state purports to provide.
That is so, with any received services, by contrast with ones that are acquired by dint
of theoretical state contributions, of one sort or another.
It would be interesting to effect an appraisal of Ivan Illich’s thought (d2001)
about state enterprise to cover such issues of medicine as well.
It seems likely to me that, he, as an unfrocked priest,he would have taken the line of Zarove rather than Blagger!
I may say that I take the line of Pope Dominic on most recent political issues, without being a reactionary Catholic. Times change.
But many are opposed tot he Use of Embryos in research, and not all here are in agreement that they should be killed for the sake of said research.
What would you tell those of us who actually would find that sort of think monstrous and horribly immoral, on top of unethical, that would persuade us of the continued need of this particular agency?
This quango is in charge of regulating legal scientific enquiry. If you disagree with the embryos being used in research, fair enough (I civilly disagree), but you want a change in government policy. Don’t blame the implementer, blame the policy.
Yes, but, while we accept your right to voice your opinion, we also reserve the right to ignore it in favour of people who do science rather than people who refer to ancient, crumbling texts for moral guidance. Sorry about that. Part of living in a free society and whatnot.
It being still painfully evident that all Parties are incurably addicted to playing expensive and wasteful trial-and-error and learning-games with our taxes, and unskilfully further ‘shedding blood’ by cutting into other and less luxuriously-remunerated citizens’ basic necessities and essential lifesupports.
It has to be assumed that much ‘quango-cutting’ under the Tories will finish up seeing as many Labour-initiated quangos as possible axed completely, or name-changed to “Conservative-initiative quango”.
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The only voice such subjects as JSDM have any hope and real chance of sharing democratically with the rest of The British People and at the same time submitting upwards to any-one in Parliament with ears-to-hear, is that of such e-sites as The Lords of the Blog.
(It will be 55 months before we are allowed our only other way of communicating our minds, on behalf of our life-experience and needs, namely through a few blind, deaf and dumb pencil-marks, in polling booths that probably only two-thirds of our ‘fellow-democratic-British-citizens’ will consider worthy enough to turn up for).
The Tory motive for so much Cutting, and for so much “empowering of their new Cameronian Conservative-Initiated Big British Society”, is transparently as much to make individuals and people-groups pay for essential services, instead of the new Conservative-government’s taxes-swallowing dependants and departments, as it is about “Saving Britain”.
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i have so far only seen Baroness Deech’s short account of this particularly-valuable non-government-organisation “The Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority”, but that looks quite sufficient to win my support for NOT killing-off such a well-established, highly respected, and knowledgeable HFEA, and instead for improving, and if you will strengthening it, by which I do not necessarily mean by giving it more money.
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0421M111010
Oh dear, do I feel yet another JSDM and Zarove bi-ologue coming on ? I would comment but it would be lost betwixt the judgemental and the religious insertions I feel will come.
Like most Governments this one will dismantle and then erect at great cost to suit their own cronies needs. I think we could cut the budget deficit a whole lot quicker by not having Government for 4 or so years.
Ahhh Nobel, he who invented dynamite. Then there was Hans Bethe the designer of the Nuclear bomb….Sorry what destructive force has Dr Robert Edwards got the Nobel for ?
When the review of the QUANGOS was announced it was explained that it would serve two purposes. The first was to save money and the second was to ensure that those which remain are fit for purpose (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10765931).
The HFEA is not fit for purpose. It’s prime function is to act as regulator for the licensing of activities under the Embryology Acts. As originally envisaged, and to fulfil its function of providing public reassurance, it was supposed to represent the full range of views in this very sensitive area – that is, represent us – yet by policy it excludes those who still dare to disagree with the destruction of human embryos for research, a group whom Baroness Deech recently presumed to designate “extreme right-wingers” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9029000/9029331.stm).
The result is it has “gone native”. It agrees to everything, sometimes after a coy delay for consultation. And when scientists began to seek a change in the law to facilitate creating embryos by mixing human and animal material the HFEA, instead of standing aside as befits its function, was in the vanguard in supporting this further breech of principle.
Yes, all those other worthy functions which Baroness Deech describes must continue and, yes, abolishing the HFEA will not save money. But abolish it we must. We need a new regulatory authority which represents us all and which is worthy of the trust we are invited, and need to be able, to place in it.
Yes, we do disagree with religious fundamentalists. Anyone who can show that a human organism without a functional nervous system is befitting of the same rights as one with one can try their hand at doing so in debate, but so far most people seem generally OK ignoring the magical thinkers and acknowledging that a barely-multi-celled organism doesn’t require representation as fully human, for the same reasons that your liver or a corpse doesn’t.
The fact that you have been counted against does not mean that your opinions haven’t been considered. The problem, I think you’ll find, is that your evidence is lacking and your prime spokespeople talk mostly in screed form. Sort yourselves out and you might have more luck.
You do not have to be a religious fundamentalist (and, correctly defined, I am emphatically not) to be opposed on principle to the deliberate destruction of human embryos. Science and reason, working together, tell us when human life begins; the embryo is a human life, your liver or a corpse are not.
After that, I suggest, the burden of justification falls on those who would exclude some members of the human family from the rights and protections more generally afforded. You speak of “a functional nervous system”. But you fail to explain why this should be an essential prerequisite for qualification for human rights.
So, single cell embryo, or another single cell, say a scraping from the mouth.
Both contain the same amount of genetic information. One’s a mixture of two people, the other comes from one person. Same amount (number of genes etc) in both cases.
Both are capable of life. You can now even take the the dna from both, implant in a egg, implant and grow a person if you have a willing surrogate.
Do both deserve human rights?
In order to exercise that right, do we force women to be implanted to grow a baby?
ie. The criteria is independent life. Self supporting is part of the test in my opinion.
So why should something that is not capable of independent life without forcing someone else to do something they don’t want to do trump the rights of that person not to do it?
The difference between a single cell embryo and another single cell is very simple. One is the beginning of a new human life. The other is not. A cell may be alive (as long as it forms part of a live organism) but being alive is not the same as being, in and of itself, a living organism – a ‘life’.
It is true, in theory at least, that you can create an embryo – a new life – by combining an egg from which the nucleus has been removed and a somatic cell or nucleus. But “can create from” is not the same as “is”.
No forced implantation is required if embryos are not created except to be implanted in a woman at her request.
So, Lord Blagger, for you the criterion for human rights is being ‘capable of independent life’ . Not the same as McDuff, then. And what is your justification for your criterion? And who does it include and exclude exactly?
The question is not whether the human embryo deserves the same respect as an adult (votes for embryos?) but whether it has a special status that should be respected by the law. Lord Blagger plays an ‘all or nothing’ game which is good rhetoric but poor philosophy.
If the embryo has no more status than scraping from the mouth then why have a quango dedicated to repsecting it? The HFEA should be scrapped. Equally, if the embryo has some status that deserves respect but is not getting any from the HFEA, then the HFEA should be scrapped as it is not fit for purpose.
HFEA delenda est.
barely-multi-celled organism doesn’t require representation as fully human, for the same reasons that your liver or a corpse doesn’t.
As Lord Lane (Law lord) once notably said in Select committee, when asked what the opinion of a dead man might be(!)that it is hard enough to account for what the living have said, without accounting for what the dead might say!
In answer to a lesser moment of a Member of the HofC.
“great database with the names of the anonymous donors”
The courts overruled the promised anonymity. Which is in part why we have such a chronic shortage of donors.
I rather fear that Quangos have earned themselves a bad name without having justified it. Some are certainly unnessercary, some are overfunded, some are actually in charge of making policy decisions that ministers should be responsible for, and some are failing. However, to tar every quango with the same brush is lazy.
There are problems with quangos certainly. But each is a a case-by-case basis, not by cutting vast swathes of them.
I rather feel that if there were a National Union of Quangos, then they might be able to defend themselves.
Evidently there is a dearth of Clarity, Charity and Self-correction-preparedness in this blog;
so I retract my support, but not just for the Baroness Deech’s ‘case’, but for every other participant’s ‘case’ (or ‘splurge’ such as Carl H’s cynical one) so far.
I await (others’) Clarity, Charity and Self-Correction-preparedness.
Meanwhile all of my other comments stand, either until positively remedied and progressively redressed, or until proven to be false.
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Carl, the whole idea that Religiosu peopel liek me are judgemental and harsh and peple liek you arne’t is a bit silly. You’ve shown yourelf to be rather a bit more Judgmental than I am.
Which is why I really dislike the whole “Keep religion out of it” mentality, especially given that I still see no difference between one set of beleifs and another. (Everyone is religious, even if you hate the term.)
So do try to not see things by your own Biases.
Shush now.
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article6211299.ece
THE government’s IVF watchdog is “not fit for purpose” and must be reformed, according to the head of an official inquiry into an embryo mix-up in which black twins were born to a white couple.
Professor Brian Toft, who was asked by the government to chair an inquiry into the 2002 scandal, was prompted to speak out after The Sunday Times revealed last weekend that women’s eggs were fertilised with the wrong sperm at one of Britain’s leading hospitals earlier this year.
The embryos of three women being treated at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital in London had to be destroyed and their cycles of treatment abandoned following the bungles in February.
Toft, professor of patient safety at Coventry University, has written to Sir Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer, warning that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) is failing to protect the 37,000 women who have fertility treatment every year. The HFEA is responsible for regulating IVF clinics.
Toft said: “I cannot imagine what it must have been like to be undergoing that kind of treatment and then for someone to say ‘We haven’t done the job properly and, as a consequence, you have lost your embryos’. It is just beyond belief.”
In his letter to Donaldson, he wrote: “The HFEA should be reformed if it is ever to be fit for purpose”.
So no reform, and hence its time for it to go.
http://www.eggdonor.com/blog/2009/12/10/what-the-bumbling-british-ivf-labs-do-not-want-you-to-know/
Much more here.
Sadly, this is not surprising. The HFEA is less interested in their remit of licensing clinic than promoting their own polical goals. The are a QUANGO that is funded by the misery of infertile couples (each UK couple is charged £100 per IVF that funds the HFEA).
So when “it costs only about £5m a year”, that’s not the whole story. I presume when its abolished, we are still going to have to pay pensions for the next 40-50 years, plus pay offs. Amazing how the true cost is dropped onto another generation.
Even better was how the HFEA critisised couples who went to European clinics for donor treatment, saying they were unsafe and had low success rates. This from the regulator of a country that is at the bottom of the league table for success rates for infertility treatment.
Monopoly regulators hate that don’t they.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-berkshire-11521464
Two men who made £250,000 by providing sperm for women through an illegal website have been given suspended jail terms.
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Meanwhile, at the HFEA who take millions from childless couples and still can’t manage to get the supply of donors organised, complain they are being axed.
So those that provide, get sentenced, and those that stop the supply will get a pay off.
Hang on, the HFE Authority is primarily funded by special interest groups you say?
So it is neither democratically accountable nor an impartial, independent authority?
Much as I supported the HFE Act and the liberalisation of science it brought about, I’m afraid you haven’t convinced me that this is that truly rare breed: a ‘worthy’ quango.
barely-multi-celled organism doesn’t require representation as fully human, for the same reasons that your liver or a corpse doesn’t.
As Lord Lane (Law lord) once notably said in Select committee, when asked what the opinion of a dead man might be(!)that it is hard enough to account for what the living have said, without accounting for what the dead might say!
In answer to a lesser moment of a Member of the HofC.
Mr. Howell, the porbkem is, the Multicellusal orfinism is a complete and living being. A corpse is not livign at all and a Liver is a part of a whole, not a whole unto itself.
Therefore I disagree with Lord Lane.