Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Viscount Hailsham and Lord Patel

Monday 2nd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, can the noble Viscount please assist me? I understand all the legal reasoning that he has put forward. I am not a lawyer, so I cannot challenge any of it. But I ask for his assistance on what actually happens in reality. In reality, lots of mothers lose their baby as a stillbirth. It happens at all periods of pregnancy. A lot of those losses are unexplained, and every health professional has a real concern when it happens, but for decades we have not been able to find reasons for unexplained stillbirths. If a mother, after 36 weeks of pregnancy, has unexpectedly lost her baby and she delivers a stillbirth, under this amendment, if I have interpreted it correctly, if she is reported to have interfered with that pregnancy—even if she did not—she would be made to prove that she was mentally unstable or financially handicapped. In the circumstance that she was neither of those things but had lost her baby naturally and inexplicably, how would the noble Viscount’s amendment work?

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

My Lords, I agree that all investigations in this matter should be conducted with great sensitivity. I take the noble Lord’s points, but at the end of the day you have to establish a principle. May I complete my point before the noble Lord intervenes further? If there is powerful evidence that the mother has wilfully terminated the birth of a child immediately up to the moment of birth, it is right that Parliament should set out a process whereby she has to be investigated. If she falls within the defence, she will have a defence. I admit that that would not prevent an investigation, but at the end of the day you have to determine where you stand on whether or not this House is really going to guard human life.