Health and Care Bill

Debate between Bob Blackman and Matt Warman

Consideration of Lords amendments
Wednesday 30th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

I rather think that men should enter the debate on abortion with a degree of trepidation and humility. In that spirit, I will make three simple points.

First, it strikes me as absolutely right that parliamentarians in this place and in the other place should seek to use every vehicle before them to enact the improvements in our constituents’ lives that we all want. It is right and fair to say that the measures were temporary and were brought in only for a certain purpose, but it cannot be right to say that now that we have done that extraordinary experiment, seen how many women have benefited from the change in telemedicine and got the data, we cannot let the vehicle of the Bill pass us by without trying to make this improvement.

Secondly, the reason that all the expert bodies—including the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, Women’s Aid and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, where I have to declare that my wife works—support this approach is that they have seen the evidence. They look at that evidence as organisations that have the safeguarding of their patients absolutely at the heart of every single thing they do. They have looked at what we have done and the evidence we have gathered, and they say it is right to continue with the measures brought in for the pandemic. That is why Wales and Scotland have continued them.

We have to trust the evidence; we have to trust the science. We have to understand that we are in the position that we are in as a result of the covid vaccine programme because we trusted the science. Today, we have an opportunity to trust the science yet again. That seems to me an incredibly powerful argument.

We are not making telemedicine compulsory; we are making it a choice. Yes, we are putting a huge burden on doctors to say that the person on the other side of the screen is not someone who should have pills by post, so to speak. We are saying that they should make that calculated judgment. We ask the professionals, be they in charities or in hospitals, to make those judgments every day. We do so because they are the experts.

I say simply to hon. Members that there are issues on which we profoundly disagree—of course there are; these are fundamentally ethical issues—but if we are in favour of abortion, we should be in favour of the choice that is provided by the very safest options. We can see today from the evidence of the past couple of years that it is safer for women who are at their most vulnerable to have the option that we are talking about today. It is not compulsory; it is an option. For me, supporting that today is the definition of being pro-choice.

[Bob Blackman]

I have had more correspondence on Lords amendment 92 than on any other in the past 12 years. I shall vote accordingly, against Baroness Sugg’s amendment and against the Government’s amendment in lieu.

As chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on smoking and health, I support Lords amendments 85 to 88, which require the Government to have a consultation on the polluter pays levy on tobacco manufacturers. The levy was the central plank of our recommendations to the Government to deliver their smoke-free 2030 ambition. We had other recommendations, but that was the central one because funding for smoking cessation and tobacco control has been reduced every year since 2015 and has not been reinstated in the spending review or the recent spring statement.

Additional funding is vital to reducing smoking rates among the most disadvantaged in society and particularly among pregnant women. The current target to reduce the national prevalence of smoking in pregnancy to 6% by 2022 will be missed, and I think we should be clear about that. Last year alone more than 50,000 women smoked during pregnancy, which caused damage to them and to their unborn children. If we want to create a smoke-free society for the next generation, we must step up our efforts now.