Hormone Pregnancy Tests — House of Commons, 2017-12-14
Topic: Health
Anthony Joseph Lloyd (Labour, Centre-left): I join other hon. Members in thanking the right hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning) and my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi), but I hope they will forgive me if I say that even more thanks are due to Marie Lyon and the other people who have been campaigning, some for many decades, to get justice and to discover the truth about Primodos I have been struck by the consistency of the stories that we have heard today, but there is one detail that I do not think the Minister will be able to help us with—that is not a challenge to him, by the way. We will probably never know how many women were given Primodos, and some of the victims will probably never be in a position to know whether they were victims of it. I have a constituent who used Primodos for a pregnancy test many years back. She lost her child a month after he was born with a blocked oesophagus and other physical difficulties Another of my constituents, Adele Stretch, was born with only one finger on each hand, reduced thumbs and only eight toes. Despite her disabilities, she has tried to live a full life. She is the mother of a healthy child, she works, and she does all those things that we would applaud her for doing. She began to realise that Primodos might have been the cause of her disabilities only when, in a casual conversation with her mother, she was told about the test that her mother had taken all those years ago, before she was born. A little later on, having found no one else with similar disabilities, they linked the disabilities as remarkably similar to those of Primodos victims elsewhere. That is why I say that we may never properly know the number of victims Our society—not just the victims—should be able to establish the real truth. That matters, because there is a stench in this case—a stench that vested interests have for 40 years been able to obfuscate and obscure, as they cynically and deliberately prevent the truth from coming out. If the truth does comes out, there will of course be consequences. It might be that scientifically provable causality will be difficult to establish over such a period of time—the drug is of course no longer inflicted on women for its original purpose—so it may be difficult to achieve the scientific veracity that would let scientists prove a causal link. That does not mean to say that the statistical consistency of victims relative to the use of the drug is insufficient to give us a genuine belief that there is enough correlation to draw our own conclusion That is important, however, because the victims of course want the truth, and they want the scientific and medical communities to accept and own up to the faults. That is important for another reason, because we have to say that this kind of obfuscation can never happen again. We cannot have a medical community and a drug industry that are driven by money—I know why that is the case—and unwilling to let the sun shine into their practices. We cannot have such a regime any more. Primodos matters to the victims, but it matters even more because of what it means If we can move the debate forward, have a judge-led inquiry and get some final reports with genuinely believable credibility, that will lead to the demand for compensation, so I understand why the Government might be reluctant. My constituent Adele Stretch says that she is leading a full life at the moment despite her disability, but she is now 51 and says that she can feel the future beginning to impose on her. She would like to believe that as she gets older, when her single fingers will find it even more difficult to carry her shopping, there will be some recognition of that and, where appropriate, some compensation.