Baby Loss (Public Health Guidelines) — House of Commons, 2017-03-21
Topic: Health
Timothy Paul Loughton (Conservative, Centre-right): I had not intended to speak in this debate—I just wanted to be part of it and perhaps to question the Minister—but you have tempted me, Mr Deputy Speaker, to add my three penn’orth. I, too, will not take up the remainder of the three hours and 50 minutes in making a few comments. I again congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince) on securing the debate The Government have made good progress on the smoking front, and that needs to be recognised, but 10.6% of people still smoke through pregnancy. That figure needs to be brought well down into single figures. My hon. Friend made a good point about the use of advertising messages with regard to alcohol. Of course, unlike alcohol, this issue affects only half the population. The graphic images on cigarette packets of diseased lungs, and those grisly television adverts with pus coming out of lungs and so on, really send home the message about the harm that any smoking can do. Making that clear to women who still take the risk of smoking during pregnancy would help to get the figure down further We still have a major problem in this country with high levels of baby loss through stillbirth as well as through the rather less quantifiable form of miscarriage, the true extent of which we do not really know. As I said earlier, it must be a priority for Government to work out why we have regional and cultural differences, and to extend and learn from best practice rather better than we do at the moment. Some of the pilots and experiments that have happened in Scotland are something for the rest of the country to look at and learn from Given the title of this debate, we could, strictly speaking, extend it well beyond just smoking, and I am going to take advantage of that. On drinking, there has been a very confused message for some time. I am an officer of the all-party foetal alcohol syndrome group. We produced a report that urged complete abstinence as the only safe way, and that must be the default position. For women who do choose to continue to drink in some form during pregnancy, there need to be very clear health messages, and perhaps lower-alcohol alternatives. If someone has to drink, there are ways of potentially doing less damage to their baby. The Government can be part of that through the differential pricing tax mechanism. We are rather bad at that in this area. I remember going to Denmark some years ago and visiting a children’s home just outside Copenhagen that specialised in treating children who were the victims of foetal alcohol syndrome—particularly children of mothers from Greenland, where there is a particular problem with heavy drinking. Those children were born with all sorts of disabilities, some of which manifested themselves as the symptoms that we know of in ongoing conditions such as autism There may be an understating of the effects of foetal alcohol syndrome because it can appear somewhere on the autistic spectrum as well. We need to do more research into that. There is no more stark example than we see in Denmark of a direct correlation between excessive drinking and giving birth to a child who will bear the effects of that for his or her whole life, with the learning disabilities and other things that go with it. We have lessons to learn from that. We still need stronger messages to go out to women during pregnancy about the potential, and potentially lifelong, harm that can be done by inappropriate drinking.