Fiona Pinto

2006-10-28T09:31:00.000-07:00

Sunday Times reports on Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynacecologists proposal to treat people as though they never existed

This is utterly horrifying and shouldn't go unrecorded: The Sunday Times reports that the RCOG has drawn up guidelines recommending that "babies born alive at less than 22 weeks gestation should be treated as if they had never existed, even if they breathe, move or their heart beats."

Ultrasound pioneer Professor Stuart Campbell is quoted as saying: “If the foetus is making respiratory efforts, its heart is beating and it is moving its limbs then it is born alive. This seems like trying to deny the truth of what is happening”.

The Royal College story stinks on so many levels - the Orwellian distortion of the truth, the insult to the intelligence of every person in our democracy (democracy where we are supposed not to receive the state falsified line but to know the truth) that a professional body can deny basic biology, the human rights abuse of creating non-persons, the cover up of a crime (infanticide) for these children that die in hospital, and the abuse of the professional medical code of ethics they represent.

Where is the public, parliamentary and media outcry? Isn't this a more urgent cause then possible risks and dangers of ID cards that everyone gets so worked up about?

2006-07-30T09:16:00.000-07:00

How complicated would it be for the news reporters to report that President Bush supports adult and umbilical cord stem cell research? And in fact as well as being objectionable, embryonic stem cell research has so far lagged behind adult stem cell breakthroughs and achieved NOTHING to date? and that if you want cures for diabetes, heart disease etc you should back the prolife case for adult stem cell research and channel all funding into adult stem cell research and prohibit embryonic stem cell research?

As I have said many times before, I'm fed up of the inaccuracy in the newspapers whenever stem cell research is reported, and I'm fed up of chronicling the mistakes in articles on stem cell research. How difficult would it be for the newspapers to report the facts?

First of all, the headlines and full articles never properly distinguish between embryonic stem cell research and non-embryonic sources of stem cells. The headline always implies that those who are opposed to stem cell research are against curing diseases and lines up President Bush against cures, along with prolifers, against people like Tony Blair who is reported this week as backing "stem cell research". It fails to mention that we are not at all against stem cell research but only against embryonic stem cell research. I would give my own bone marrow, blood or other non-vital organs (like skin cells or fat) for research if that would help and I cannot understand why the same organisations that enthusiastically back embryo research are against widespread national umbilical cord stem cell banking.

Not only is it personally irritating to those of us who strongly support adult stem cell research but are being branded as anti-science, but this is the worst sort of inaccuracy in journalism. It is a basic inaccuracy that is endlessly repeated in the newspapers which should not be recurring time after time. It fuels misinformation. It distorts the debate. It misleads the public. It stimulates support for embryo research as though it is the panacea for all ills, and as though it is the only position any one pro-science can take, which is not justified by the basic facts of embryonic and adult stem cell research. We should not conduct our public debates and journalism on the basis of half-truths and misinformation. Laws should not be made as a result of myths when the scientific fact that embryonic stem cells have caused cancer and would be rejected by the immune system is clear for all to see. Vast amounts of taxpayers money should not be ploughed into funding nonsense research. However anti-prolife you are, we should all agree that human life should not be destroyed when there is a perfectly wonderful and more effective means of treating patients using stem cells taken from umbilical cord blood or adult tissue.

It generates anti-americanism against President Bush who has massively increased funding for umbilical cord banking. Instead of reporting the facts accurately, the newspapers make the prolife pro-adult stem cell research harder to argue simply by leaving it completely out. It is bloody unfair. And Blair, we shouldn't let you get away with presenting yourself as pro-science when you back embryonic stem cell research in order to score headlines, and the reality is that patients would be better off if you backed adult stem cell research only.

Take this article in the Observer today for example, entitled Blair to defy Bush over stem cells: PM will publicly back California's research into disease treatment despite White House's strong opposition What a load of nonsense!

Objections:

1. No where in the article does it explain that stem cell research is an umbrella term and that adult stem cell research and umbilical cord stem cell research are perfectly wonderful alternatives to embryonic stem cell research

2. It points out the moral objection to embryonic stem cell research without pointing out that there are strong scientific objections to embryonic stem cell research, ie. the problem that it might not work (cancer and immune rejection and getting hold of sufficient cells, and genetic instablity, and exploitation of women to acquire enough eggs)

3. It implies that opposition to embryonic stem cell research is effectively opposition to researching and finding cures. How different the entire article would be and its impact on public opinion if the article was to state that President Bush is very pro-adult stem cell research and the headline was pro-stem cell research just against embryo research.

4. This sentence is wrong on several counts: "Pro-life and religious groups oppose stem cell research because one source of the cells is human embryos created during fertility treatment and subsequently destroyed." - Firstly, prolifers DO NOT OPPOSE STEM CELL RESEARCH. WE SUPPORT STEM CELL RESEARCH!!!!!!! [adult and non-embryonic] The Catholic Church in Korea was opposed to cloning embryos but it provided FUNDING FOR ADULT STEM CELL RESEARCH which was actually much more useful than anything Blair and the pro-embryo research lobby have done. Moreover any one following the debate knows that the embryo researh lobby want to create and destroy embryos for stem cells. They aren't left over from IVF, and even if the embryos were discarded after IVF why would that make it right anyway?

One interesting point in the Observer article today is that Downing Street included an internal memo about the disappointing progress of the UK Stem Foundation. Not surprising to anyone who knows that the real progress in medical research is with adult stem cells, not embryonic stem cell research at all.

2006-07-02T05:41:00.000-07:00

Superb article in the Daily Mail asks why Britain has skyhigh abortions and unprecedented levels of IVF

At last! An article that points outthe absurdity of skyhigh abortion rates and high IVF failure rates. Why can't the government join the dots? Instead of incoherent proabortion and proIVF policies, the Government should urgently address why women have abortions. If women are forced by circumstances to have abortions then that is totally unacceptable, and if it is a lifestyle choice, they why can't these babies be given for adoption?

At the same time, there should be a much greater preventative measures to treat infertility. Contrary to what Professor Ledger says, there is plenty of evidence that abortion increases the likelihood of infertility. Why aren't women told? Why are the facts withheld from them? And what kind of policy takes eggs from younger women, subjecting them to unpleasant and dangerous egg harvesting programmes, to give them to older women?

2006-06-30T05:47:00.000-07:00

Good news! The British Medical Association votes against supporting euthanasia, reversing it's undemocratic policy last year

I was delighted to see that the British Medical Association (BMA) has voted to reverse its support for euthanasia - voting by 65% to 35% against helping those who are terminally ill to end their life (Guardian report).

The BMA's 2004 edition of Medical Ethics today puts forward an absolute case against legalising euthanasia from the point of view of medicine, palliative care, slippery slopes and the inevitability of involuntary euthanasia and older people being made to feel that they are a burden. It was therefore bizarre that they overruled all these arguments in 2005.

The massive vote against euthanasia, akin to the recent huge poll of doctors by the Royal College of Physicians which showed that the very vast majority of doctors are against euthanasia, suggests that the BMA vote last year was totally unrepresentative of the BMA membership (apparently rushed through at the last minute).

Could we have another vote on abortion please and overturn the BMA's disgraceful support last year for the current abortion law when so many doctors have expressed concern at late abortions? I recently heard Wendy Savage speak at a debate in London and couldn't believe that she was responsible for the BMA voting in support of the current law on abortion. Her views are so 1960s.

2006-04-01T10:29:00.000-08:00

Eugenics analogy used inaccurately and selectively in The Times

I was struck by the science correspondent, Mark Henderson's comment piece in the Times today "We should all boo that weaselly phrase 'the welfare of the child'. Apart from the fact that Mark Henderson has a platform to dismiss this clause and there is no counterpoint put forward by anyone arguing in favour of the "welfare of the child", it also struck me that it was rather clever how he raised the spectre of eugenics to tarnish any state restriction on fertility treatment. He says that:

"The [welfare of the child] provision enshrines a concept in law that was last popular in the heyday of eugenics: that the State has a right to decide who should and should not become parents. Civilised societies no longer forcibly sterilise the mentally ill or disabled, and constrain the reproductive rights of convicted criminals only for as long as they are locked up. We do not vet fertile men and women before allowing them to have sex, even when they have a history of violence or drug abuse. Expectant mothers are free to smoke and drink during pregnancy, regardless of the risk to the foetus. Yet as soon as people need medical help to conceive, an entirely different standard is applied.

Is anyone taken in by the idea that state restrictions in the interests of safeguarding children, which simply attempts to consider the child as well as but not instead of the infertile couple, on immensely expensive, experimental and often ineffective fertility treatment is an abuse of human rights, when it simply refuses a not medically essential treatment on serious welfare grounds, has anything in common with the universally condemned forced sterilisation programmes on a whole population of women in Peru or China motived by blanket racism which maims women? Surely there is a vast difference between the violence of forced sterilisation and voluntary and often ineffective IVF procedures?

Is it not in fact entirely justifiable to consider the welfare of the child when the state has a hand in fertility, and therefore a responsibility for the child, in a way that is not justifiable when no lab techniques are involved? How is it eugenics to ensure that non-essential medical techniques are only applied when it is obvious there is no harm to those involved?

Isn't eugenics much more applicable to many IVF procedures including pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) which seeks to test and destroy embryos for being "defective"? Why use the eugenics argument to attack the welfare of the child clause and say nothing about the eugenic principles underlying PGD, where embryos can be discarded because they might have a late onset condition? or the trend towards designer babies when parents could design a supposedly "perfect" child (surely a good birth and inescapably eugenics) they want down to blue eyes as a parental right without state interference?

Who will fill the decision-making gap if the state leaves it up to whatever couples want and whatever IVF clinics (motivated by money as Deborah Spar points out in her book on the IVF industry) want to give them? How is it better for the state to wipe its hands of any responsibility and for the IVF clinics and infertile couples to make eugenic choices themselves?

2006-03-09T23:56:00.000-08:00

Unbelievable – Questiontime panellists express touching concern about the child’s need for a father in the Natalie Evans case, as a justification for destroying the child’s life

I couldn’t believe my ears hearing the panellists on Questiontime cite the child’s need for a father as a reason for agreeing to the destruction of Natalie Evans embryos, following her losing her case for custody of the embryos against her ex-partner Howard Johnston who withdrew his consent to IVF treatment after the embryos had been created. As much as I support the child’s need for a father, how on earth can a need for a father be more basic than life and the right of the embryos not be destroyed once they have been created? Add in the fact that Hazel Blears representing the Government have been responsible for undermining the child’s right to a father without any parliamentary debate, through the HFEA, whose unelected and unaccountable ex-chair, Suzi Leather, made pronouncements last year about the child’s right to a father being removed from statute so that single women could receive IVF, and the whole thing struck me as ridiculous, muddle headed and more than a little hypocritical.

I was also astonished that Michael Nazir Ali, Bishop of Rochester who chaired the HFEA’s ethics committee admitted frankly that he did not know who had the right to custody of the embryos, Natalie or her ex-partner. While the HFEA should not be a decision making body, this just goes to highlight the total inadequacy of the HFEA’s understanding of ethics and the fact that the HFEA ethics committee is not just a democratic farce but an intellectual shambles. It is clearly endowed with a power far in excess of its capabilities.

In any case are the ethics really so complex? How on earth can anyone weighing what each party loses side with anyone other than Natalie and the embryos who respectively lose their right to motherhood and life against a man who loses nothing by the implantation of embryos he previously consented to creating? Natalie has undergone a much more serious invasive procedures to produce the embryos than her ex-partner, why should all the egg harvesting, injections and invasive treatment be all in vain because he has changed his mind? The physical consequences of terminating the embryos or implanting them concerns Natalie and the embryos and has no physical impact on her ex-partner. Any attempt to turn this scenario on its head and ask if a woman could be forced to carry embryos if the woman withdrew her consent instead, simply misses the point that the Natalie Evans case does not in any way involve a lack of the woman’s consent to pregnancy.

The current law on consent may side with Howard Johnston but that only proves that the law must change. Consent should only apply to the creation of the embryos and should then be irrevocable, just as marital separation doesn’t give the male partner the right to insist on the destruction of children. It is not as though Howard Johnston’s sperm was used against his will. Writing in the Evening Standard, Will Self says that “Mr Johnston has made statements that exhibit an emotional intelligence all too often far from men’s minds during the act of conception. He has said that IVF is “something that you should undertake as a couple in a stable relationship where the key consideration is the welfare of any offspring. And that he couldn’t countenance having nothing to do with his child, despite knowing that he was somewhere in the world” . All of which is fine and admirable in the context of good fatherhood, but how can it be good fatherhood to insist on the destruction of embryos? Shouldn’t consent to IVF involve a commitment to the children first that isn’t subject to a future change of mind?

2006-03-08T16:30:00.000-08:00

International Women's Day - Hands off our Ovaries! International Woman’s Day brings launch of a new coalition of women to campaign against exploitation of women in biotechnology

This is the press release from a new international coalition, check it out:

More information www.handsoffourovaries.com or email everywoman@handsoffourovaries.com

On Wednesday, 8 th March, International Women’s Day, a coalition of pro-choice and pro-life women, concerned at the growing exploitation of women in biotechnology will launch a new campaign against the harvesting and marketing of human eggs. The campaign. ‘Hands off our ovaries!’ will highlight the short and long-term risks involved in egg harvesting and its significance for the health and dignity of women.

Concerned feminist representatives have joined together on this common ground, outraged by the casual attitude of the biotech industry towards the female body. Like-minded leaders and groups from around the world are invited to join a list which already includes representation from the USA and Europe.

‘Egg extraction as currently practiced poses inadequately understood, yet clearly significant risks to women’s health. It is criminal to encourage young women to take these risks purely for research purposes.’ says Diane Beeson, Professor of Sociology at the California State University, East Bay, and founder member of ‘Hands off our Ovaries’.

‘Women must quickly come together so that these life threatening concerns for our health and safety are heard. We can no longer sit idly by while women altruistically put themselves in harms way,’ stated Jennifer Lahl, President of Every Woman First.

Leading Italian Feminists, Paola Tavella and Alessandra Di Pietro, authors of the newly-published, ‘Untamed Mothers – Against Technorape of the Female Body’ *, support the campaign and comment, ‘We believe that current biopolitics are separating men and women from natural reproduction and are robbing women of their biological tissues for experimental technoscience. We will fight together with other feminists for the freedom of women and the welfare of future generations.’

‘Women can die from egg harvesting, or suffer irreversible infertility, and the long term effects of the drugs which are used in the process are still being questioned,’ said Josephine Quintavalle on behalf of Comment on Reproductive Ethics. ‘None of these issues has been adequately addressed by the stem cell scientists eager to get their hands on women’s eggs and ovaries. And all for scientific research which still remains in the realm of hypothetical benefit.’

2006-03-07T09:00:00.001-08:00

Exploitation of women totally disregarded by biased and ridiculous Times comment piece "The crazy coalition holding back science"

Instead of giving factual and accurate information on why women internationally are opposed to the harvesting of eggs from women in invasive and dangerous procedures, the Times today dismisses this as the crazy coalition holding back science". There is no mention of the fact that women have died from egg donation, no mention of the invasiveness and dangers of the procedure to women's health, and no mention of the ludicrousness of the scientific procedures that require vast numbers of eggs and have achieved nothing to date or the profit motives driving these scientists.

If you want information about how women could be exploited, don't go to the Times, see CORE's information about women exploited by egg trading in Romania, and the woman who died during IVF treatment from ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome.

2006-02-06T12:52:00.000-08:00

BBC's objectivity hits all time low with pro-abortion report that "UK pledges £3m for safe abortions" to "help prevent thousands of deaths": what about the destruction of life?

I cannot believe the BBC's bias in this report. On an issue as controversial and serious as abortion, how can the BBC seriously get away with a report which expresses a proabortion view from beginning to end and only quotes a pro-abortion junior minister at the Department of Health and a representative of the proabortion International Planned Parenthood Federation? Pretty much every sentence in this report is objectionable and biased.

1. "safe abortion" in the title. Abortion is never safe for the baby and also has serious health risks for the mother.

2. "International Development Minister Gareth Thomas said he hoped the move would persuade other nations to step in and help prevent thousands of deaths." This kind of language is suited to the protection of lives from killer diseases, not abortion which is the deliberate killing of a child.

3. "thousands of deaths" is in no way quantified. Where is the data? Why are these women's lives at risk and why can't they be helped by treatment that does not involve abortion. What medicines could be used to help women other than brutal abortion methods?

4. "The World Health Organisation estimates backstreet abortionists cause 70,000 "agonising" deaths every year." If abortion is so unsafe then why not eliminate illegal abortion practices altogether? I asked a representative of IPPF once if she supported the prosecution of illegal abortionists that maimed and killed women. She simply couldn't answer. If IPPF were concerned about the welfare of children they would be in favour of prosecution illegal abortionists, but they do not.

5. "But to receive US aid, health clinics must pledge neither to provide abortion services nor advise women to have one." And what would be wrong with that?

6. "Since US President George W Bush imposed this so-called "global gag" rule in 2001, the International Planned Parenthood Foundation (IPPF) has had to close dozens of clinics." The "global gag rule" is a proabortion term. In fact there was a Congressional investigation into the use of federal funding being used for forced abortions and sterilisations in China and other countries.

7. "But with Britain's £3m it will set up the Global Safe Abortion Programme to improve access to safe abortion services and "support other partners that have had to cut back on reproductive health services because of the impact of the gag rule"." I do wonder at this point who is writing this report. I mean what is all this in inverted commas? Not exactly objective reporting. I wonder if I sent the BBC some of my writing if they would stick it up on bbc newsonline?!!

I could go on but I won't. BBC Newsonline ends with a long quote from the IPPF director which is about a third of the whole report. No quote from any prolife organisation. Not even a mention of any possible objection to abortion. Poor Steven Sinding from IPPF expresses his lack of knowledge about why anyone might be opposed to funding abortions. If only the BBC had provided space for comment from the prolife side perhaps we could have enlightened him.

2006-01-25T21:56:00.000-08:00

Society worries about the rise in antisocial behaviour, and at the same time the High Court rules that parents should be kept in the dark if their teenage daughters are referred for an abortion

In the same week that a High Court judge ruled against Sue Axon, the mother who challenged doctors referring teenagers for abortion without notifying the parents, Jenni Russell wrote a perceptive article about the damage that long working hours and institutionalised childcare does to children in the Guardian 28/01/06 “We give work a high priority - I wish the same could be said of our children - After 17 years as a parent, I'm convinced it is our attitudes to employment as much as to childcare that need to change”. Her focus was Labour’s childcare strategy to get children into nurseries by the age of three and wraparound childcare. She wrote about the growing concern for what prolonged parental absence does to children, and about the danger of “subcontracting ..childcare to professionals”, “As they grow, children need to feel loved and understood by the adults around them, and taught how to handle their emotions. That doesn't happen in after-school clubs or playschemes, where playworkers must retain a physical and professional distance. The consequence is that children have to make the effort of maintaining their public faces, too. They can't relax. A mother whose daughter goes to an after-school club three days a week says the eight-year-old is rigid with tension when she picks her up, and angry and unmanageable until falling asleep. Her experience is typical of many parents I know.”

Ironically, this appeared in Saturday's Guardian at the end of the week in which the High Court ruled that parents should be kept in the dark about teenagers being referred for abortions. Of course the ages of the children are different but the principle is the same that professionals are coming between the parent and child to the detriment of the good of the child. Unsurprisingly the cheerleaders of this interference are the self-appointed professionals at the Family Planning Association who gave evidence to the High Court in November that parents are "no longer necessarily the best people to advise a child" about contraception, sexually transmitted infections and abortion. My reaction on reading this in the Guardian on the 10th November was to wonder who is Nathalie Lieven?!!! I couldn't discover anything about her at all from the family planning association website. I have no idea what her qualifications are or what evidence she has for the arrogant assertion that her proabortion organisation knows better than millions of parents across Britain.

The point about qualifications is interesting because the “professionals” who are supposed to be better than parents are people who work for proabortion clinics, who by definition support abortion, not really professionals in any meaningful sense of the word, like the 21 year old school outreach worker, who referred Melissa Smith for an abortion and Melissa's subsequent wish to keep the baby when it was too late, or busy GPs who have a waiting room full of patients to see. Strangers in fact who do not know the child in front of them, who have no time for the child, have no particular bond, and will never see the teenager again, and will never deal with the aftermath of abortion. These are practical issues that have less to do with whether abortion is right or wrong - the parents after all could have views either way on the subject - the point of parental notification is to enable the child to have the best support available when they are distressed, except where there is obvious evidence that the child needs protection from the parents, which must be extremely rare. This was the response of one parent in the debate at The Times (25/01/06) the day after the judge ruled that parents should not be told:

"This is an abhorrent decision. My wife and I brought our children into this world; we love them dearly and would do anything for them. We feel our responsibility for them in every way. I realise that we may not be representative of absolutely everybody but I do not think that we are in a minority either. It is utterly ludicrous that a third party should be allowed to even counsel them, never mind treat them, on matters of such huge physical and moral importance without at least our knowledge, let alone my consent. The world is going, or frankly has gone, mad. If these are the kind of measures which it is believed are required to "protect" our children something is deeply wrong with our society. Richard Bell, Crowborough

What amazed me in this debate is how those who took the view that parents should not be told, on the basis of teenagers' fear, exhibited the kind of teenage thinking that adults should have grown out of! They completely missed how natural and understandable it is that a teenager would wish their parents not to be told and completely misunderstood the natural of parenting in terms of discipline, caring and nurturing. How incredible that the law could be based around teenagers hypothetical and, more likely than not, exaggerated fear of being told off by their parents. It also seems a little strange that the state collaborates in this kind of secrecy and coverup which will force children to hide the truth from their parents for the rest of their life.

We don't generally make public policy based on teenagers perceptions, but usually on a more sophistocated analysis of the facts by adults, so why is teenage perception dictating policy here? Abortion is something that is generally beyond the comprehension of most teenagers who may just be forming their views on the issue. Confidentiality is appropriate to ensure that patients are respectively treated but when the issue is something of as great a magnitude as abortion, with so much potential long term damage, children obviously need support. Can children really take in how serious abortion is? The BBC quoted the the Pro Life Alliance saying that it was staggering a young girl could "end the life of another human being without her parents knowing anything about it." Doesn't making this a matter for a teenager trivialise the seriousness of abortion?

The ironic thing is that with the exception of representatives of the abortion lobby, the majority of voices against the right of parents to know still acknowledged the need to involve parents as far as possible. Caroline Flint from the Department of Health was quoted in the Guardian saying that it was "a very difficult issue" and that healthcare professionals should always try to persuade a young person to involve their parents. The British Medical Assocation issued a press release which was strangely enthusiastic about denying parents the right to know (for a reason I couldn't quite fathom, why should doctors have a particular position on this issue?) nevertheless went on to say “Doctors always encourage young people to involve their parents in important decisions, and research shows that the majority of young people do so. If, in exceptional cases, they cannot talk to their parents then doctors try to give them the confidence to talk to another responsible adult who may be able to support them." And citing research against their own proabortion position, Marie Stopes International (an organisation which is certainly a little confused given by their support for a restriction of the abortion time limit to 20 weeks and their subsequent U-turn on this) nevertheless released a survey saying that the majority of teenagers do tell their parents. So if it is so important that parents should be told by the teenager then why are their guidelines insisting on secrecy? and with the spiralling abortion rate, isn't the willingness of the Department of Health to take their guidelines straight from the unrepresentative self appointed experts at the Family Planning Association a factor in increasing teenage abortions?

2006-01-02T01:35:00.000-08:00

Pro-cloning spin? You decide: Either The Times is right and "stem cell medicine was never going to depend on clones" or The Guardian is right and "Research that gave hope to millions of people with incurable diseases has been put "back on the starting line" by one of the worst cases of scientific fraud"

Having met a commercial lobbyist once who said he advised the biotech lobby in the UK in 2000 to concentrate on evoking images of cured patients in order to win support for human cloning, I wasn't surprised to see an article in the Guardian opening in the aftermath of all the negative publicity of the cloning scandal by the previously highly respected Korean cloner, with the words "Research that gave hope to millions of people with incurable diseases has been put "back on the starting line" by one of the worst cases of scientific fraud". Transparently as Wesley J Smith points out on his blog, Second Hand Smoke Current Spin: Hwang Fraud Not a Setback For Science (05/01/06) this is a means to counter some of the criticism and bad press surrouding cloning. Not only is the idea that cloning will lead to treatments factually untrue because cloning is practically difficult requiring vast numbers of eggs, as Mark Henderson pointed out in the Times HUman cloning was always a scientific roadshow (30/12/05), but it is also a strange way of putting it as though an act of fraud makes any difference to cloning's success.The point is not the act of fraud setting back cloning research, but the fact that cloning is so difficult that the scientist fabricated the results because he had no actual success to show. Moreover, contrary to patients' hopes being dashed by revelations of fraud, it is surely in patients' interest to know the truth. The truth is that cloning is unlikely to work, yet patients' hopes were raised says more about cloning hype and spin that allowed Hwang to get away with his cloning claims in the first place, even though it plainly stated in the research paper that the cloned embryos would not be able to be used in treatment because they would have the same condition as the patients they were cloned from.

The Guardian headline, "Cloning fraud hits search for stem cell cures " is therefore wrong on several different levels at once. Fraud does not help scientific endeavour, in fact it obscures it, so the cloning fraud revelations help the search for cures. At the same time, if cloning was never going to deliver cures anyway for the "millions of patients" in the Guardian's opening paragraph, which is recognised internationally, HUman cloning was always a scientific roadshow (30/12/05) then it is just as well that this avenue does not consume time and resources which would delay cures, even ignoring the ethical problems with cloning. Finally, by quoting patient groups that support cloning research and the use of embryos, the Guardian conveys the impression that the only avenue for cures is cloning and embryo research, failing to mention the success and promise of non-embryonic sources of stem cells such as bone marrow, umbilical cord blood and nasal stem cells.

Equally unsurprising as pro-cloning spin was the report in the Scotsman "Dying can aid stem cell research" which wasn't as I expected about the ethically acceptable donation of organs after natural death which I fully support, but Dolly-the-sheep cloner, Ian Wilmut's advocacy that embryonic stem cells should be tested on dying patients. The idea that terminally ill patients should be used as guinea pigs is clearly worthy of a shock headline or two, especially when it is casually mentioned that the purpose should be "saving their lives or at least speeding up the pace of research" which raises questions about what the risk to the patient would be from experimental treatment, whether they would be worse of by having embryonic stem cells injected which are known to cause tumours to form (which makes any possibility of clinical trials unethical, an issue raised at the Medical Research Council conference in November 2002), and seems massively premature as a suggestion at the very time when the Guardian is stating that embryonic stem cell research has been "put back to the starting line" because of the cloning fraud. Hardly the moment to try these cells out on the terminally ill. The use of human beings in research is an ethical boundary that should not be crossed unless it is demonstratably clear that the treatment has no harmful effects at all. That is not the case with embryonic stem cells. The Scotsman quoted Ainsley Newson, a researcher in medical ethics at Imperial College London as greeting "Prof Wilmut's idea with cautious optimism". This does not bode particularly well although she was quoted as saying that "all other avenues have been exhausted" - that experiments with animals have been tried, that terminally ill patients are not being exploited and that participants are aware preliminary research may only benefit future generations." In the light of the Guardian article and the spin surrounding embryonic stem cell research, it is questionable how realistic and accurate patients' understanding of the reality of embryonic stem cell research is, or for that matter that adult stem cells and non-embryonic stem cell sources are more likely to work.

2005-12-31T09:09:00.000-08:00

"Human cloning was always a scientific roadshow" - Great article by Mark Henderson, science correspondent of The Times, agrees with everything that the anti-cloning lobby has been saying for years. Great. So can we ban cloning now?

After over a month of revelations that the media-described cloning "superstar", Woo Suk Hwang, from Korea had exploited a junior researcher to obtain human eggs and finally confirmation that he had in fact not cloned any embryos at all, ("BBC S Korea cloning research was fake (23/12/05)", Mark Henderson science correspondent of Times has written an article headlined " The retreat of the clones One scientist's fêted work has been discredited, but human cloning was always a scientific roadshow". Given the initial enthusiasm with which most of the media greeted Hwang's cloning announcement in May 2005 and obscured the arguments see BBC interviews cardiologist opposed to cloning but fails to ask him about adult stem cell success with cardiology (even though a careful reading of the scientific paper revealed that the clones would have the same diseases as the patients they were cloned from and therefore could not be used in treatment), this dismissal of cloning as scientifically flawed is something of an amazing but very welcome development. Finally the point that cloning is flawed is being given proper attention. Take just one example about the number of human eggs needed for so-called therapeutic cloning, Mark Henderson says in his article:

"Cloned embryos might be the ideal source of therapeutic stem cells, but they are not going to be a practical one for the foreseeable future. To create them, one must first have plenty of human eggs, and this raw material is in very short supply. Egg donation is complicated and risky for the donor, and there are insufficient quantities available to treat infertile couples, let alone to serve regenerative medicine. The idea there will be enough to treat Britain’s 120,000 Parkinson’s patients, let alone two million diabetics, with tailor-made clones is monumentally far-fetched."

I couldn’t agree more. That cloning is massively impractical and unlikely to work was an argument used by all the anti-cloning groups across the world repeatedly, including Student LifeNet which campaigned in 2000 against cloning legislation when I was in my final year at university drawing attention to the 101 reasons to oppose cloning including exploitation of women for eggs and calling for a proper debate and across the Atlantic, the American Senate heard testimony from a pro-abortion organisation who opposed cloning because of the exploitation of women.The facts for anyone who chose to listen are definitive as this cloning fact from Americans to Ban Cloning shows, Where Will They Get the Eggs? 12/03/02 :

“Let’s review the math. More than 100 million people in the United States suffer from medical conditions for which embryonic stem cell therapies are being promoted as promising – Parkinson’s disease, stroke, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injuries, juvenile diabetes, and more…..it would take 800 million eggs just to treat just 16 percent of the Americans who suffer from conditions for which therapies involving cloned embryonic stem cells have been promised. If ten eggs are harvested per woman, then 80 million women of childbearing age would have to submit to the risks of drugs that induce hyper-ovulation and a surgical extraction procedure to provide the eggs that would be needed to develop therapies for just a fraction of those who are suffering from these conditions…. The “egg dearth” is a mathematic certainty. It is one reason why researchers say that therapeutic cloning will not be a generally available medical treatment. For example, a year ago biotech researchers Jon S. Odorico, Dan S. Kaufman, and James A. Thompson admitted the following in the research journal Stem Cells: “The poor availability of human oocytes (eggs), the low efficiency of the nuclear cell procedure, and the long population-doubling time of human ES cells make it difficult to envision this [therapeutic cloning to obtain stem cells] becoming a routine clinical procedure even if ethical considerations were not a significant point of contention.”

So where was the media’s reporting of these facts over the last five years? Mostly the media have overlooked the arguments. It has become normal to recite that prolife groups are opposed to cloning in quite a boring way. But the facts are so overwhelmingly against cloning that there has been some very good journalism too. In 2001, the editorial of the New Scientist described UK Ministers “like old records” out of touch with international scientific opinion in the same week as the UK Government rushed through the Human Reproductive Cloning Bill – November 2001 claiming that therapeutic cloning was necessary for medicine when the majority of bench scientists thought it was a waste of time. As the ProLife Alliance pointed out at the time in numerous press releases about their judicial review of the Government, and Cloning Remains Blockedwhat was needed was a proper and thorough debate of the facts, the kind of thing that should be standard when passing laws, nothing exceptional.

Instead, the Government rushed through loopy legislation purporting to ban cloning (live birth) while allowing the cloning of embryos still. If there had been a proper debate instead, everyone would have come to the conclusion that the New Scientist were aware of in 2001 and that Mark Henderson writes now in 2005, that cloning is “a scientific roadshow” and cures from cloning are “monumentally far-fetched”. There was no rush for cloning legislation in 2000. There was plenty of time for debate and reflection.

So Mark Henderson’s analysis is very welcome. Like the journalists who properly pursued the story that Hwang had exploited a junior researcher for eggs and fabricated all the results, the public depends on rigorous evidence based journalism to ensure that the claims of the biotech lobby are properly questioned and that scientists do not go beyond proper ethical boundaries. It is right that the public should know the truth about cloning because it involves the destruction of embryos, the dehumanising exploitation of women for eggs, and the massive waste of time and money that could be spent on further ethically unproblematic treatments using bone marrow and umbilical cord stem cells that is already proving promising but adult stem cell research needs funding that is being wasted on cloning. And if a scientist manages to get fraudulent work published in Science (which should never have happened in the first place) it is entirely proper that this work is publicly retracted. Credit too to the BBC for giving this proper top story coverage in order to correct the misleading impressions created by the overly pro-Korean cloning reports in May 2005.

But having agreed with Mark Henderson’s conclusion, it is curious that he arrives at exactly the same conclusion as the anti-cloning lobby, namely that cures from cloning is “monumentally farfetched” due to the need for vast numbers of eggs, while strangely attacking the anti-cloning lobby for holding this same view, saying that the revelations of scientific fraud and exploitation of a researcher for eggs has “played into the hands of the technology’s opponents” whereas in fact the explotation of women for eggs exists whether or not Hwang personally exploited a junior researcher as the United Nations stated in a declaration passed in February 2005.

Far from seizing on the international scandal of Hwang’s fraud, the anti-cloning lobby has always been very interested in the science of cloning and in the much more efficacious use of adult stem cells and non-embryonic stem cells, and this has been a main feature of opposition, simply that cloning does not work, so why destroy embryos pointlessly and exploit women and patients when perfectly good ethical alternatives exist? The ProLife Alliance has consistently and thoroughly put forward a comprehensive case against cloning as unethical and unnecessary and is currently backing a legal challenge against the first UK cloning licence on the grounds that it is unlawful (as research could be carried out without cloning).

Simplifying the anti-cloning case to simply opposition to the destruction of embryos, ignores the fact that there are 101 arguments (as Student LifeNet put it) against human cloning. The fact that it doesn’t work and is exploitative of women is a very good reason to ban it – these were key arguments last February when the United Nations passed a declaration against human cloning. The exploitation of women is such a serious point that if this was the only argument against cloning then cloning should be banned worldwide. Way back in February 2004, when the Koreans announcement that they had cloned an embryo, the ProLife Alliance said “'Not only does this technology abuse embryos but it also exploits women, exposing them to the risks of superovulatory drugs and using them as egg farms. We would all welcome the development of treatments for conditions, such as Parkinson's disease and Multiple Sclerosis and are greatly encouraged by the successful use of adult stem cells.'Leading stem-cell researchers, Dr Thomson, Professor Trounson and Thomas Okarma have all indicated that they are not optimistic about the future for therapeutic cloning because of the low efficiency of the procedures, risk of abnormalities and the fact that the product of an expensive and time-consuming procedure is only useful to the donor.'"

Henderson says for example that “Embryo rights activists who object not only to cloning but to any use of ES cells” .... but he doesn’t explain why we oppose the use of embryonic stem cells and fails to mention that embryonic stem cells have many scientific flaws including their tendency to cause cancerous tumours and be rejected as not compatible with the patient, whereas adult stem cells have already been used in treatment and are compatible with the patient from which the stem cells are taken – ie. Bone marrow to treat heart patients, nasal stem cells to treat spinal cord injury. (see CORE )

Henderson says the anti-cloning lobby have “seized on Hwang’s downfall to stir public doubts about the probity and potential of the entire field. If the stem cell emperor is clothed in nothing but hype and deception, they contend, shouldn’t this research be shut down? Does it really deserve the £520 million that Britain is being urged to invest over the next decade? This argument, however, rests on a pair of fallacies. Hwang’s reprehensible behaviour does not in any way justify ad hominem attacks on other scientists, such as Alison Murdoch, at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, who are pursuing similar work. That one researcher has fabricated data does not mean that others are bound to do the same, and Britain’s strict embryo research rules provide strong safeguards that should prevent similar abuses here.”

Actually it is entirely legitimate to ask whether if Hwang was able to get away with it for so many months and even fooled the internationally renowned scientific journal Science, what about the cloning claims of UK researchers? Henderson doesn’t mention that in fact the Newcastle scientists were rebuked by the scientific journal Nature for rushing their results out on Reproductive Biomedicine Online without proper peer review. Neither does Henderson mention the legal case against the Newcastle cloning licence which is based on the lack of scientific detail in the cloning application. It is naïve to say that Britain has strict embryo research rules. We have the most destructive embryo research laws in the world! Thousands of embryos are destroyed each year, and licences are given for research by the HFEA which is an unaccountable quango.

But perhaps most objectionable of all is Henderson’s point that “critics are also exploiting a common misconception that therapeutic cloning and stem cell research are essentially the same thing.” I am not alone in being frustrated that the media as a whole lumps stem cell research altogether and doesn’t explain that we support adult stem cell research and non-embryonic stem cell sources like the placenta, amniotic fluid and umbilical cord blood whereas we oppose embryonic stem cell research and human cloning. Even a brief look at either CORE or Stemcellresearch.org shows that these organisations are meticulously accurate in discussing the exact source of stem cell.

For example on the 5th August, CORE issued a statement that “research published in the Journal of Stem Cells reveals that the placenta contains some 300 million amniotic epithelial cells which can be transformed into liver, heart, nerve and pancreatic cells to treat disease. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh predict that if these cells were retained for research rather than discarded, they could easily be multiplied to between 10 billion and 60 billion cells to provide a limitless source of ethical cells to treat disease. ‘CORE has always advocated research on tissue obtained from ethical sources including the placenta,’ said a spokesperson for Comment on Reproductive Ethics. We are delighted that this research is gaining international recognition and serious funding in the United States with grants from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.’” These are cells that are being discarded in hospitals every day.

Ironically, nowhere in Henderson’s article does he mention that adult stem cells and umbilical cord sources of stem cells exist! It is the media that needs to be much more accurate when it discusses stem cell research.

2005-12-13T22:04:00.000-08:00

UK researcher dismisses promising research using adult stem cells on the grounds that the US has a political agenda... so how would he respond to UK research into treating spinal cord damage with nasal stem cells since that is happening in London?!

The BBC reports that a woman from Merseyside's will travel to the Netherlands to receive the world's first umbilical cord stem cell treatment for Ataxia. Umbilical cord stem cells have already been used successfully to treatmultiple schlerosis sufferers. The day after the report about Ataxia, the BBC reported further promising research from the United States about adult stem cells. As part of the same report, the BBC quotes the dismissive comments from a UK embryonic stem cell researcher who downplays the success of adult stem cells as part of the "political agenda" in the States. This is ironic for two reasons. Firstly, political agenda or no political agenda, it should be a cause for joy if medical research using adult stem cells is leading to possible treatments and cures because this provides an ethical alternative to destroying embryos for research.

If the real aim of scientists is the cure and treatment of patients and they support all avenues of research, why not encourage research using adult and umbilical cord stem cells, why be against an avenue of research that has no ethical problems? Even if the ethical problems with embryonic stem cells did not exist, they are hardly close to delivering treatments, adult stem cells are ahead for a vast range of conditions and have technical advantages over the problems of embryonic stem cells. Lastly, less than two weeks ago, on 30th November, the Guardian reported "The nose cells that may help the paralysed walk again - Surgeons in London to try revolutionary stem cell technique on crash victims"". Ten operations on young people who have spinal cord damage as a result of motor bike accidents willbe carried out. The team is being led by the neuroscientist Geoffrey Raisman, who heads the spinal repair unit of University College, London and has been researching the use of nasal stem cells for 20 years and has proved that the treatment works in animal models.

2005-12-12T20:57:00.000-08:00

University of Oslo researchers find that abortion causes more longer term anguish than miscarriage

The Telegraph, BBC News Online and The Daily Mail all report research from the University of Oslo published in the journal BMC Medicine that shows that abortion causes women more longer term anguish than the immediate anguish experienced six months and a year after a miscarriage. One of the key statistics highlighted in the Telegraph editorial is that five years after a miscarriage, less than 3% of the women who suffered a miscarriage demonstrated distress, whereas 20% of the women who had an abortion showed symptoms of distress. The reports draw welcome attention to the need for support for women.

Predictably, proabortion organisations like BPAS and the Family Planning Association, which are responsible for carrying out the terminations and lobby for abortion to be allowed at any time up to birth, and for any reason, immediately dismissed the research. BPAS is quoted saying that women do not return to BPAS for counselling following abortion, but it doesn't take much understanding or empathy to imagine a woman who has suffered and does not want to return to the clinic that was responsible for carrying out the abortion in the first place. How likely is it that staff whose whole business is the daily termination of life would sympathise with a woman grieving for her child, which BPAS repeatedly describes as the product of conception?

A spokesperson for the Royal College of Obstetricians is reported as saying "It has always been considered, and this study also shows, that the decision to terminate may bring with it long-standing feelings of anxiety and guilt.... when necessary, the need for ongoing support and counselling should be recognised and appropriate help given.". But until women are no longer kept in the dark or given only proabortion propaganda, but have a right to know more about the reality of the abortion procedure, the baby’s development and the physical and psychological risks in advance of undergoing an abortion and have alternative options and the negatives of abortion fully spelt out rather than hidden from them by the abortion agencies, they cannot be said to have a real choice. Counselling can only genuinely help women if it precedes abortion not just attempts to alleviate the trauma that could have been avoided. It also must be mandatory, proper funded, professionally run, and carried out by organisations independent of the abortion providers and genuinely sympathetic to the woman’s loss.

Proabortion agencies who go to incredible lengths to avoid the word “baby” are unlikely to want to carry out the researchers recommendation that women should be given information about the psychological effects of losing a baby from miscarriage or abortion. It is standard practice to refer to the baby following a miscarriage as a baby, so how can society pretend that a baby of the same gestation that is deliberately aborted is intrinsically any different?

The Telegraph has a superb editorial which draws the logical and important conclusion that "every month, medical research or horrifying news stories strengthen the argument - and public support - for a tightening of Britain's abortion laws" and obviously that counselling is not a solution in itself as in "the short term, more post-abortion counselling is needed. In the long term, the need for it should be reduced by a change in the law." The Telegraph is right to say that the current abortion limit of 24 weeks (and up to birth for abortion on grounds of disability) is “appallingly high”, however the main subject is that women suffer distress regardless of the gestation of the baby so women need help and support before any abortion and the numbers of abortions overall should be reduced, in order to reduce the harm done to women currently pressurised into abortions.

2005-12-04T13:32:00.000-08:00

Front page where it should be - Official inquiry into the 50 babies that are born alive after botched NHS abortions AND 28 year old survivor of 7 month abortion speaks against abortion

It is commonplace for the killing of a child to be front page on newspapers and for politicians to state that it will never happen again, but in spite of the scandals surrounding botched abortions and reports that babies have been born alive in February and August, until Monday 28th November, no newspaper had given the babies that survive abortions front page coverage. Finally this week, the infanticide of babies, born alive following abortion, received serious attention in at least 2 newspapers, and this time it was not just description without action, but the promise of a serious inquiry into the issue, welcome both on democratic and human rights grounds. The Sunday Times and Daily Mail (front page) reports that there will be an investigation by the Confidential Enquiry into Maternal and Child Health (CEMACH) into the fifty babies a year which are born alive after abortion.

The Confidential Inquiry is a hugely important step forward in treating this issue with the seriousness that it requires and addressing the awfulness of highly developed babies being killed by feticide, placed in intensive care with horrific injuries due to deliberate medical practice, or struggling to survive after being born alive. The survey of 31 babies born in northwest England between 1996 and 2001 following abortions after 18 weeks appeared in the August edition of the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and is commented on here. It revealed that babies were being born alive after abortions at 18 weeks, and are being left to die and struggling to breathe for up to 5 hours, raising concerns about the numbers of babies affected throughout the country. That was in August and still the practice of babies being aborted at late gestations continues without any democratic scrutiny.

It is disgraceful that to date, abortion agencies both NHS facilities, funded by the public and private facilities which should never be outside of the law, have been able to get away without any public scrutiny or accountability - quite literally getting away with infanticide. The report in the BJOG, despite being written by proabortion authors admitted that official guidelines are being ignored, including the midwives code of practice and BMA guidelines which state that the baby if born alive must receive medical care. It is not necessary to be a professor in obstetrics to agree with Professor Stuart Campbell, who pioneered the 4D ultrasound images of the baby at 12 and 14 weeks, that medicine that results in a baby born crying following an abortion at 19 weeks and is left to die or harmed by the brutality of the abortion procedure is the victim of "substandard medicine". It is difficult to see how it can be described as medicine at all.

The abortion agencies continue to obscure the barbaric nature of how abortions are carried out and how highly developed babies are during the second and third trimester. It is time that pro-abortion claims were interrogated properly by a sceptical media. They have been given a free ride for too long. The abortion groups are keen to stress that there are only small numbers of abortions at later gestations. However, as the Sunday Times points out, there were 7,432 abortions at 18 weeks or more last year. Hardly small. The public have a right to facts. The Sunday Times also points out that "70%-80% of babies in their 23rd or 24th week of gestation now survive long-term." Not for the first time it is pointed out Britain is out of step with Europe wiht the highest legal limit for terminations (24 weeks or up to birth on grounds of disability), compared to France and Germany which limit so-called “social” abortions to the 10th and 12th weeks.

Most of all debate on the issue of abortion should be grounded in facts, not pro-abortion euphemism and vagueness. Both the Sunday Times and Daily Mail reported that a 28 year old American woman is currently speaking in Irish universities and will be speaking in the UK about surviving an abortion. Her story urgently needs to be heard:

My name is Gianna Jessen. I am 19 years of age. I am originally from California, but now reside in Franklin, Tennessee. I am adopted. I have cerebral palsy. My biological mother was 17 years old and seven and one-half months pregnant when she made the decision to have a saline abortion. I am the person she aborted. I lived instead of died. Fortunately for me the abortionist was not in the clinic when I arrived alive, instead of dead, at 6:00 a.m. on the morning of April 6, 1977. I was early, my death was not expected to be seen until about 9 a.m., when he would probably be arriving for his office hours. I am sure I would not be here today if the abortionist would have been in the clinic as his job is to take life, not sustain it. Some have said I am a "botched abortion", a result of a job not well done.

...I have met other survivors of abortion. They are all thankful for life. Only a few months ago I met another saline abortion survivor. Her name is Sarah. She is two years old. Sarah also has cerebral palsy, but her diagnosis is not good. She is blind and has severe seizures. The abortionist, besides injecting the mother with saline, also injects the baby victims. Sarah was injected in the head. I saw the place on her head where this was done. When I speak, I speak not only for myself, but for the other survivors, like Sarah, and also for those who cannot yet speak ...
see Gianna Jessen's testimony given before the Constitution Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee on April 22, 1996. here

see also Telegraph 4th December Gianna Jessen was aborted at 7½ months. She survived. Astonishingly, she has forgiven her mother for trying to kill her.

an extract from the Sunday Telegraph interview:
..."at 17 months, Miss Jessen was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, caused by her brain being starved of oxygen during the termination. "The doctors said I was in a horrible state," she says. "They said I would never be able to lift up my head, but eventually I did. "Then they said I would never be able to sit up straight, but I sat up straight. Then they said I would never be able to walk, but by the age of three I was walking with a frame and leg braces." She pauses before adding: "I have a little bit of feistiness in me."
It is this "little bit of feistiness" that has enabled her to become a full-time disability rights and anti-abortion campaigner. Although she lives in Nashville, Tennessee, she travels the world to talk about her experience and, last year, ran her first marathon in seven-and-a-half hours. She is entered in the London Marathon next April for the Stars Organisation for Cerebral Palsy, a charity that raises funds with the help of celebrities, and hopes to better her time. "I'll be running furiously till then, trying out my brand new leg muscles," she says, with a laugh.

2005-11-20T17:30:00.000-08:00

Fantastic ethical news - Guardian reports world's first blood vessels grown from patient's skin and trials into using new blood vessels to treat heart patients in Cambridge..... so why are scientists, reported by the Sunday Telegraph, still sidestepping UK law and planning to import embryonic stem cells?

Fantastic news reported in the Guardian (16/11/05) that kidney patients have successfully been treated for the first time with new blood vessels created from their own skin cells! The research was reported to the annual conference of the American Heart Association and proves yet again that adult stem cells provide an ethical alternative to the hypothetical and much-hyped sensationalism surrounding embryonic stem cells. The blood vessels breakthrough is particularly exciting because this technique could also be used to treat patients with heart damage and to treat diabetics as an alternative to limb amputation, as well as treating children with congenital heart defects which would mean that the blood vessels would grow naturally with the child rather than requiring further surgery. The Guardian reports that British trials will be taking place at Papworth hospital in Cambridge to treat heart bypass surgery patients with lab grown blood vessels which will avoid requiring blood vessels from the patients' legs. All credit to the science correspondent on the Guardian for this particular report, but the impression still prevails that embryonic stem cells are necessary.

Only three days before the Guardian report of this world first, the Observer included a wideranging piece about future controversial manipulations of science in which embryonic stem cells were casually referred to. References to curing parkinsons and diabetes were casually tossed around, no mention of the real progress being made with adult stem cells into the treatment of over 60 different conditions. The article concluded with "Milestones in human biology" which mentioned Dolly the sheep and the first cloning licence issued in the UK, despite the fact that the cloning licence isn't a milestone, it's only a licence and (again not mentioned) is under legal challenge for being unnecessary and unlawful because alternative avenues of research exist.

Here for example are some real breakthroughs that merited a mention from the news updates on the CORE website:

Bone marrow stem cells improves heart's efficiency (14th November 2005)

Commercial umbilical cord stem cell bank possible in Cambridge,UK (26th October 2005)

Spina bifida may be cured using amniotic stem cells (11th October 2005)

Fast and efficient technique to reproduce cord blood stem cells (10th October 2005)

Vacanti brothers quietly pioneering adult stem cell treatments for diabetes and paralysis (8th October 2005)

London: Liver failure patients treated using bone marrow stem cells extracted from blood (6th October 2005)

A cure for baldness (3rd October 2005)

Major advantages of placental stem cells (27th September 2005)

Only 1 out of 96 New Jersey research proposals involves Embryonic stem cells (22nd September 2005)

World's largest umbilical cord bank to be set up in India, to provide stem cells for transplant surgeons globally (12th September 2005)

Nature Genetics: Embryonic Stem Cells produce cancerous mutations (4th September)

Embryonic stem cells trigger immune rejection (29th August)

First real progress in acute renal failure: bone marrow stem cells "fast direct improvement" (16th August)

Placenta contains 300 million amniotic epithelial cells (5th August)

Adult stem cells could help tens of millions of heart patients each year (2nd August)

And then in the Sunday Telegraph on the 20th November it was reported that two fertility specialists plan to sidestep UK law and import embryonic stem cells. Again readers were informed that "Stem cells are gathered from embryos at an early stage of development..[and] can grow into any of the 220 types of tissue in the body, offering scientists the best hope of cures for many disorders." - no mention of the complete pointlessness of this when countries around the world are setting up banks of umbilical cord stem cells and having real success using stem cells collected from ethical sources.

2005-11-02T19:30:00.000-08:00

British Medical Journal research paper on abortion and depression should not have been represented by news outlets as conclusive proof of anything

see also: University of Oslo researchers find that abortion causes more longer term anguish than miscarriage (12th Dec)

Anyone who saw the cavalier and misleading news reports last week which made sweeping overgeneralisations that abortion is not linked to depression should read David Reardon’s comprehensive online rebuttal of Nancy Russo’s research in the rapid responses to the British Medical Journal article (see Study Fails to Address Our Previous Findings and Subject to Misleading Interpretations (Rapid response, David Reardon, 1/11/05). David Reardon has published extensively about the increased rate of depression following abortion in the BMJ in 2002 and in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 2003, which found that 6.5 per 1000 women were admitted for the first time to a psychiatric unit within 4 years of a live birth, compared with 12.9 per 1000 women admitted within 4 years of an abortion.

Russo's research paper criticised Reardon's conclusions but also failed to note, as Reardon pointed out, how extensive the literature is on the link between on abortion and depression by concentrating only in critiquing Reardon's work and not mentioning the literature, which include a paper by Russo herself which revealed significant increases in depression, suicidal ideation, and lower life satisfaction, even though Russo hypothised that this is due to factors other than abortion. It is a pity that the mainstream media are unlikely to report Reardon's objections in full and that the misleading impression generated by Russo's paper is allowed to stick.

The immediate flaw that jumped out at me when I looked at the research by
Russo in the BMJ online first, which was reported by BBC Newsonline as
“Abortion depression link queried” and by the Times as “First abortion 'not linked to depression'” was that these headlines were too sweeping and inaccurate given that Russo’s study explicitly stated that they had deliberately left out cases involving women who underwent abortions in which the pregnancy was wanted, even though these women are the most at risk of
suffering from depression. Far from proving that abortion in general does not cause depression, if Russo’s research was to be believed it is only applicable to pregnancies women classify as “ unwanted”, and even then the conclusions can be challenged. So far from disproving earlier findings, Russo's research simply ignored them. As David Reardon says in his rapid response "their results do not contradict ours" as they "can easily be reconciled with our own findings" - any differences in results “can primarily be explained by differences in coding of key variables and sample selection.”

Reardon's says "Ambivalence about pregnancy and abortion is common. I do not doubt that there was a group of women who
had swings in “wanting” their pregnancies, which ended in a decision against keeping the pregnancy. Indeed, ambivalent swings from wanting to unwanting a pregnancy is a well-known risk factor for emotional turmoil after an abortion.For example, research by Husfeldt and colleagues found that 44% of participants experienced doubts about a decision to abort upon
confirmation of their pregnancies, while 30% continued to have doubts on the day of their abortions. Eliminating this subset of women may significantly bias the analysis by eliminating a class of women who have abortions who may be at highest risk of post-abortion depression.

Not only does the selection of women in the abortion sample skew the findings but somewhat strangely the researchers also included women who went on to have an abortion in the control group. The control group should have consisted only of women who gave birth following unintended pregnancy in order to avoid introducing a bias, but instead it included women who had abortions too and therefore means that the depression scores for the control group could have been high due to subsequent abortions, not due, as the researchers concluded, to giving birth. Indeed, Reardon points out that there is some evidence that women who have given birth who go on to have an abortion are at a greater risk of emotional sequelae. As the time lapse under analysis is eight years after the first pregnancy, it is even more likely that the depression score may be due to the subsequent abortion and not the original pregnancy that went to term. By including women who had abortions in the control group, it lessens the chance of being able to detect any statistical difference between the delivery group and the abortion group. Reardon also notes that Russo's study does not involve any control variables for women who gave birth, and does not include any consideration of concealed abortions which is thought to be as high as 60% (compared with national averages, only 40% of the expected number of abortions are reported) which means that another confounding effect in the control group may result from the inclusion of minors who became pregnant with two years of an abortion where the abortion is not recorded. Reardon concludes that there needs to be more research not less in this area.

Proabortionists are typically dismissive of the link between abortion and depression. Nancy Russo was quoted in January 2004 by a science reporter from the Toledo Blade newspaper saying "As far as I'm concerned, whether or not an abortion creates psychological difficulties is not relevant...it means you give proper informed consent and you deal with it". Perhaps unsurprisingly, given her membership of the proabortion board of the UK Prochoice forum she also uses her research to promote abortion as a way of lowering the risk of depression, when she is quoted in The Times saying that "research should focus on how to prevent and ameliorate the effect of unwanted childbearing, particularly for younger women", a conclusion which is obviously contradictory to the vast body of research studies cited by Reardon.

Abortion agencies that carry out abortions like the British Pregnancy Advisory Service and have an ideological commitment to abortion on demand for any reason up to and including birth were quoted in the Times saying that few women return for post abortion counselling. Given that proabortionists regularly say "few" abortions are carried out past 20 weeks, even though there are over 3,000 abortions carried out on babies over 20 weeks gestation, the word "few" could really mean anything. But even if few women do go back to BPAS, is it really surprising given that this is the organisation that carried out the abortion in the first place?

2005-10-13T08:46:00.000-07:00

Compare the outrageous pressure from doctors for parents to abort disabled baby (who incidentally turns out to be healthy) with pioneering fetal surgery and work using stem cells from amniotic fluid to cure congenital disabilities

A couple are furious that they were put under repeated pressure by doctors at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital to abort their baby as the baby was supposed to have holoprosencenphaly and doctors said he wouldn’t survive for longer than an hour, but the diagnosis was completely wrong and their son, Harry, is now 15 months old and is learning to walk. The story was reported in the Daily Mail, “Baby defies doctors who says he’ll be deformed” and previously the Evening Standard in Norwich “The baby I was advised to abort” . The story is horrifying on every level – not only that the parents were put under pressure to abort, and doctors gave them dud information, that babies with disabilities are considered better off dead, but most of all it is horrifying because of the crude pro-abortion mentality, where termination of the child is considered preferable to sustaining the baby and hoping and trying every possible means to save the child’s life using the best medical methods available. In the last two weeks there are two particular causes of hope.

Only a few days ago, scientists reported that they had discovered a way to use stem cells found in the amniotic fluid to treat babies either during pregnancy or after birth and correct congenital diseases. It was reported to the American Academy of Pediatrics meeting in Washington and are seeking approval from the Food and Drug Administration to carry out clinical trials and could be applicable to conditions like spina bifida. (see CORE Spina bifida may be cured using amniotic stem cells

Only a couple of weeks ago, Newsweek did a feature length article about surgery on an unborn child who had hypoplastic left heart syndrome by doctors at Children's Hospital Boston
The child was born completely free of the condition is now a healthy little one year old. This is obviously a different condition from the baby in Norwich who was nearly aborted, but the pattern is the same – applying knowledge and perfecting medical practice till it becomes common practice because doctors do their best for their patients and develop techniques which save lives.

As Newsweek points out, “Thirty years ago, babies diagnosed with HLHS were doomed to die within the first days to weeks of life. Today, thanks to earlier detection through ultrasound and postnatal surgery, the majority of the 1,500-plus HLHS babies born every year now survive; the oldest are in their early 20s.” Fetal surgery is obviously difficult and involves two patients – the mother and the child – but it is a sophisticated medicine that treats the baby appropriately as a patient rather than terminating life. At the very least diagnosis of a condition during pregnancy should enable forward planning so doctors can treat the child immediately after birth by assembling a team of experts, including obstetricians, pediatric cardiologists and cardiac surgeons to collaborate on the best treatment for the newborn child. What a far cry from the collaboration to terminate life! Using the most sophistocated techniques to diagnose and treat the sick is surely the only acceptable medical approach.

2005-10-11T19:23:00.000-07:00

It's dishonest to report on medical research and fail to mention international excitement surrounding umbilical cord banking, placental research and adult stem cell research

The media nearly always refer to stem cell research, even when they are talking exclusively about stem cells taken from embryos, and fail completely to mention the existence of adult and umbilical stem cell research. It was therefore disappointing, but not surprising to see the subtitle in the The Guardian's report on embryonic stem cells that "Members could force the EU to stop funding work on stem cells". For anyone who actually follows stem cell research (and I mean stem cell research, not embryonic stem cell research)
not only is it entirely reasonable on democratic principles for NO EU money to be spent on embryonic stem cell research, since many member states expressly prohibit embryo research, and therefore cannot morally be expected to fund (imagine if the UK was expected to fund some practice we prohibit!), but for anyone aware of the alternatives to embryo rsearch, it was also much less of a significant revelation. Non-embryonic sources of stem cells are proving immensely exciting (see for example the Boston Globe article only a few days before which drew attention to the quiet pioneering work of the Vacanti brothers into diabetes and spinal cord damage, and their point that adult stm cells are preferable technically to embryonic stem cells). It is a reasonable question to put that if the investment is in non-controversial sources of stem cells and the research can continue without the destruction of human embryos, why is that a bad thing?

But can the majority of the readers have been expected to know that the article only told half the story? Nowhere in the article was the existence of adult stem cell research even mentioned, nor the fact that stem cells obtained ethically from bone marrow, blood, fat, skin, hair, or umbilical cord blood, the placenta, or amniotic fluid around the baby are proving immensely promising, especially since umbilical cord blood and placenta make use of material that is otherwise wasted. Since the article was primarily about investment and Californian investment was referred to into embryonic stem cells, it would have been appropriate to mention that there are moves in the States and India to put serious investment into umbilical cord banking, see for example CORE: World's largest umbilical cord bank to be set up in India, to provide stem cells for transplant surgeons globally:

"The world's largest umbilical cord blood bank is to be set up in Mumbai, India through a $20 million investment from the South Korean biotech company, Histostem, and aims to provide stem cells for transplant surgeons globally. By creating similar banks in Mexico, Australia and Europe, and linking them, Histostem expects to offer histocompatibility leucocyte antigen matched stem cells for every patient around the world. The umbilical cord blood stem cells will also be used for research into treatments for diabetes and spinal cord repair."

Only the day before this article was in the Guardian, Japanese researchers were reported in The Japanese Times to have perfected a new technique to reproduce umbilical cord stem cells at a rate that is four times faster than previous techniques. (see also CORE)

According to recent research there are 300 million epithelial cells in each placenta. Where was the analysis of placental stem cell research and the work being done to make use of this immense source that is otherwise just thrown away, and may in any case provide a source of compatible tissue? CORE news: Major advances using placental stem cells

Linda Nordling in the Guardian concludes that: "In his budget speech last spring, Gordon Brown tasked an independent group with drawing up a 10-year plan to make the UK the world's best place to do, and capitalise on, stem cell research. Over the summer, things have been quiet. But the group's report is making its way to the Treasury in time for this autumn's pre-budget report as we speak. It sure smells like money. So while the stem cell debate rages on in Europe, researchers in this country should focus on one question this autumn. Not whether, or even when, but simply how much?"

Even a cursory examination of how much is ignored in this article suggests that a much better understanding and public debate has to begin about the different sources of stem cells before taxpayers money is flung irresponsibly into unethical, controversial and perhaps even pointless research, that could simply be done better using umbilical cord blood and other adult stem cells.

2005-09-18T12:59:00.000-07:00

Why should restricting abortion to 12 weeks be a right wing issue? Doesn't the left care about human rights and a Surestart for every child?! Doesn't everyone know that even at 12 week the baby is highly developed?

I was delighted to hear the Tory leadership candidate, Dr Liam Fox MP courageously stating his belief that abortion should be restricted to 12 weeks, but I was also interested to see that the headline in The Telegraph read "Fox courts religious Right with plea to limit abortion to 12 weeks". Support for a major restriction in the abortion limit is widespread. A year ago, a number of commentators, some in spite of supporting some abortions, called for a restriction to 12 weeks in response to the ultrasound images which clearly show the baby moving in the womb at 12 weeks. In July 2004, Tony Blair said that he would consider a review of abortion law in response to new medical findings, which made the front page of The Times.

Every day there are 500 abortions, so there is considerable urgency to review and change the abortion limit and protect these babies which are currently being terminated. There is considerable support for a restriction in the time limit and in the numbers of abortions. As long ago as April 2004, Jasper Gerard in The Times while remaining pro-choice, called for a restriction to 12 weeks, saying that although the proabortion lobby says that the majority of abortions are carried out before 12 weeks, there are still 22,000 abortions after 12 weeks (3,000 after 20 weeks). Mark Henderson, the science correspondent of The Times also stated that there was medical support for a restriction in abortion after 12 weeks. The Daily Mail compared all the European countries showing that the UK is out of step with Europe with one of the latest time limits for aborting babies. David Steel, who introduced the private member's bill which legalised abortion, was widely reported calling for a restriction of abortion to 12 weeks (front page The Times, 4th July 2004 and The Scotsman

Mary Seighart's reflections on how her views of abortion have changed are interesting - from support to when she carried a child herself and felt "queasier" about abortion, to shock at hearing Ellie Lee, coordinator of the pro-choice forum argue for abortion up to and including birth. She does not agree with the absolute prolife position and suggests that earlier abortions are better than late ones and suggests that the abortion limit should be reduced to 22 weeks (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1071-1172846,00.html
Mary Ann Sieghart, Abortion rights and wrongs are all a matter of timing July 09, 2004)

I think aborting babies earlier to avoid aborting them later cannot be right. But the fact is that there is a growing consensus that 12 weeks should be the limit for abortions. It wouldn't make sense to leave it at 22 weeks given that babies can be born and survive at 21 weeks and babies have also survived abortions at 18 weeks, and anyone looking at the ultrasound pictures at 16 weeks and 14 weeks would have to admit it isn't possible to detect any significant difference in the intrinsic humanity of the baby at these gestations. Late second and third trimester terminations are so horrific that they have never been shown on TV. They must be stopped. This should be such a basic issue of humanity that it cannot belong to either side of the political spectrum, no more than we would expect our political system to be divided into those who support and oppose torture. Every political party should defend the right of children to life.

2005-09-15T20:29:00.000-07:00

"Alison Lapper Pregnant is a monument to the future possibilities of the human race as well as the resilience of the human spirit"

This is a beautiful quote from the artist Marc Quinn about his statue of Alison Lapper which is now on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square (reported in the Guardian )and here) I think it is a superb and inspiring image of the courage of the human spirit, and the beauty and hope of a new life. Alison Lapper is quoted in the Guardian with the "exultant message: "I regard it as a modern tribute to femininity, disability and motherhood. It is so rare to see disability in everyday life - let alone naked, pregnant and proud."

Rod Liddle expressed concern in The Times about the appropriateness of a tribute to disabilty. I disagree, because it isn't a tribute to disability but a tribute to equal human rights, feminism and overcoming disability. Even if the element of overcoming disability was excluded, this statue would still be a testament to the fact that human beings are not reducible to their physical parts but have a unique spirit.

This statue could be a real "monument to the future" if it presides over Trafalgar Square during a year in which politicians have an opportunity to end the discrimination against the disabled which results in babies being screened and aborted up to and including birth if they are found to have a disability. If politicians are genuine in their admiration and respect for the dignity of people with disabilities and committed to equal rights, then it is time for a proper debate on this issue, and an end to this clause and the screening and elimination of people with disability, rather than concealing the reasons for abortions in the annual abortion statistics in order to prevent public scrutiny and debate (see ProLife Alliance press release, Scandal as DoH refuse to release details of abortion for disability, August 2004)

2005-09-14T07:02:00.000-07:00

Science Museum uses public money to host event which only gives a platform to four of the most extreme proabortionists in the UK

Yesterday evening, the London based Dana Centre in South Kensington spent public funding on an event in which four of the most extreme proabortionists in the UK, who believe in abortion up to and including birth, were allowed to speak unchallenged about abortion laws. Amongst the many absurdities of the evening, the audience was informed at the beginning and it was reiterated at the end by the chair, ex-BBC journalist, Sue Nelson, that the purpose of the evening was not to discuss whether abortion was right or wrong, because abortion is legal and it is always going to be legal. (Someone ought to go and tell the politicians they're not needed any more!) How could she seriously get away with such an outrageous statement? Anyone committed to the principle of democracy surely believes that the law needs to be continually assessed and scrutinised and should be changed if necessary. It was quite absurd to state that the law is fixed and immutable especially given the current debate which is being conducted in the media, in medical circles and in parliament. There is every indication that there will be a parliamentary review of abortion law.

To state as Sue Nelson did that the event was not about discussing the rights and wrongs of abortion, and then go on to favouring one side of the debate and omitting opposition arguments and evidence was disgracefully biased. It is not possible to be neutral while having a panel of speakers who presume a position, and exclude arguments against that position. No one could possibly claim that the panel was fair, representative or balanced. All the speakers subscribed to the view that abortion should be allowed up to and including birth, a position which a YouGov poll only a few weeks ago showed represents only 2% of the population. All of the panellists work in leading capacities for abortion agencies that carry out 200,000 abortions a year in this country, and all of the panellists want to make abortion more available in this country and worldwide. To say that the event was not about discussing the rights and wrongs of abortion, and then go on to favouring one side of the debate and omitting oppositional arguments and evidence is disgracefully biased.

The audience was split into small groups and the speakers circulated. Half of the eight or so people on my table, it emerged, currently work for the proabortion British Pregnancy Advisory Service which performs abortions. They giggled at the description of early forms of abortion and asked about lead poisioning. After a few unendurable minutes of this, I asked the proabortion panellist who was distributing information about early abortion methods what affect lead poisioning has on the baby's body, and if she thought that any methods of abortion would be intolerable. I also said how absolutely appalling it was to drive women to such desperate means and as a feminist I felt deeply angry that women should feel so desperate and unable to continue with their pregnancies and that rather than celebrating abortion as a liberation of women we should all join in condemning the ghastly history of abortion and experimentation on women's bodies and destruction of children.

Directly after this a woman from Marie Stopes International came to speak to our table about illegal abortions and women dying from unsafe abortions. I asked her whether Marie Stopes International as an organisation work to prosecute anyone who carries out procedures which result in the death of women. She mumbled a bit and then said that she had never been asked the question before and she didn't know what Marie Stopes view would be on this. I said I was amazed that she could work in these countries yet not have a view on the prosecution of abortionists. Of course Marie Stopes only interest is promoting abortion, at the expense of women and children, they are not remotely interested in the alleviation of poverty or helping women continue with pregnanices. It angers me that we can spend money on abortion when the solution is ending poverty and putting money directly into alleviating famine, malnutrition and immunising children against killer diseases.

After this, Ann Furedi from BPAS came to speak to our group, and I asked her about BPAS's policy on how babies should be treated who survive the abortion procedure and are born alive. Her response was that these babies should not be surviving the abortion procedure. David Paintin was the final speaker and advises BPAS and devises ways to terminate children's lives. Predictably this did not lead to a very informative discussion on either how to restrict abortion, defend children or help women.

I have written to the Dana Centre to express my disgust at the event. I have attended events at the Dana Centre for the last two years, on a number of topics including stem cell research, disability issues and screening embryos, xenotransplantation, organ donation and human cloning. I have had serious concerns in the past about the balance of their panels, particularly when they have had panels entirely consisting of only one side of the debate on issues like embryo research, but last night took bias to a completely new extreme of offensiveness. There was no representative at all from the prolife side, and not even anyone who could take a partial-middle of the road medical, ethical or social perspective. All four speakers were absolutely proabortion. It was also not made clear to the audience how extreme all of the panelists were in their views. They were treated as though they were objective. However, none of them would be likely to give medical and legal factual information that would contradict the proabortion case. In fact the stock responses they gave about the mortality of babies and viability has been contradicted in medical literature.

This is part of a more general criticism of the Dana Centre using public funds and then only presenting one side of the issue. I am particularly alarmed to see that they have another event tonight discussing stem cell research. I have written to ask if they have invited panellists to speak who will be able to speak knowledgeably about the tendency of embryonic stem cells to cause cancerous tumours, recent literature which shows that embryonic stem cells are rejected by the patient's immune system, and the considerable advances in adult stem cell and umbilical cord blood stem cell research, in particular international moves to set up umbilical cord banking, and the news that the placenta has over 300 million epithelial cells? And that scientists have recently described embryonic stem cell research as overhyped? In other words that opposition to embryonic stem cell research is based on a serious analysis of the science, as well as the ethical issues (see www.corethics.org and www.stemcellresearch.org )

I have asked the Dana Centre if they will respond to my criticism and provide an assurance that, as a publicly funded organisation, they will ensure that all future events consist of a panel where the views are properly balanced and fair. I will update this when I have a response.

2005-09-11T19:00:00.000-07:00

UPDATED 25/09/05 WITH RESPONSE TO GOVERNMENT REPORT

First class investigative journalism reveals UK abortion agencies facilitate illegal abortions on highly developed babies past the UK legal time limit and pay staff bonuses for more abortions

Following on from the shocking undercover investigation in the Sunday Telegraph last October, which revealed that hundreds of women were being referred by BPAS to a Spanish clinic for illegal abortions on perfectly healthy babies up to 30 weeks old, breaking both UK abortion law which prohibits abortion on healthy babies after 24 weeks, and Spanish law which is even stricter, The Sunday Telegraph reports today that another Spanish clinic, the Mediterrània Mèdica clinic in Valencia, is offering commission to British abortion agencies to refer women to their clinic for illegal abortions past the UK 24 week time limit. It is incredible that nearly a year has passed and these shocking revelations are repeating themselves.

It has also been revealed in the Mail on Sunday last week that"staff at one clinic were paid bonuses for maximising the weekly number of terminations is shocking and disturbing. Marie Stopes International, the organisation involved, is a registered charity bearing a revered name, though it is also a company limited by guarantee whose chief executive is paid £150,000 a year." Today, The The Mail on Sunday reports that "This week there are equally shocking revelations that another charity is paying doctors to authorise abortions without even meeting the patient. Both organisations receive large incomes from the taxpayer for carrying out terminations on behalf of the NHS."

The Sunday Telegraph revelations were so shocking because of the casual attitude of the staff at BPAS and at the Spanish clinic to the termination of the lives of such developed babies and the way in which the Spanish clinic staff openly admitted to falsifying records in order to get around the law by claiming there was a medical need. After months of seeing beautiful pictures of unborn babies at 12 weeks, the medical reality that babies can survive if born after 21 weeks, and the lyrical beauty of the undercover reporter’s description of her 26 week old very much wanted baby in the abortion clinic scan, no one is going to fall for the euphemisms BPAS have used for so long which claim that the baby is just tissue. And it is impossible to read the Sunday Telegraph investigation without feeling desperately sad and angry on behalf of the women who undergo these late term abortions, when they clearly need help and support to continue with the pregnancy.

When the revelations that BPAS were referring for illegal abortions first emerged in October last year, the then Secretary of State for Health, John Reid, ordered an immediate investigation by the Department of Health and said "If there is evidence that the will of Parliament is being thwarted and that the law of a fellow European country is being broken by an organisation in receipt of public money, this would be a very serious situation indeed. If The Sunday Telegraph lets me have the material I will ask that this matter is looked into immediately." The Charities Commission also began an investigation, the police were asked by the ProLife Alliance to investigate BPAS. The Guardian reported that David Davies has questioned why the report by the Department of Health into BPAS has not been published yet (see David Davies’s blog.) With more revelations about Marie Stopes and BPAS it is clear that decisive action is needed from the Government to penalise abortion agencies, which are flouting our law by referring women for illegal abortions, is long overdue.

UPDATES:

The Guardian, Abortion provider under fire from chief medical officer

ProLife Allaince press release, Report on BPAS Fudges the Issue of Legality of Spanish Abortion Referrals

Report into abortions scandal was delayed 'to spare Government embarrassment'(25/09/2005)

2005-09-08T21:05:00.000-07:00

Embryonic versus adult: News reports get it half right: Lord Winston says that embryonic stem cell research has been overhyped to persuade politicians, but no mention of successes using umbilical cord and adult stem cells

At last! Some sense in the stem cell debate! For years, groups like CORE have been pointing out that not only are embryonic stem cells unethical because they involve the destruction of human embryos, but they are also unnecessary because it is possible to use stem cells from umbilical cord blood (which is otherwise thrown away after birth) or adult stem cells taken from blood, bone marrow, fat, skin, hair follicles, dental pulp etc, etc. Moreover, so far embryonic stem cells have not been used in any treatment whereas adult stem cells have been used in a variety of treatments. Embryonic stem cells also face problems including being rejected by the patient's immune system as foreign tissue and causing cancerous tumours to form. Finally, today there was a breakthrough. In a speech to the British Association Festival of Science in Dublin, the Guardian reports, IVF specialist, [Lord] "Winston singled out claims surrounding research into embryonic stem cells as being particularly overblown."

And in The Times "I was concerned that parliamentarians - particularly in the House of Commons - have been convinced that it was just a matter of a few years before we would be able to transplant stem cells and cure a lot of neurological disorders, like Alzheimer's disease, for which I think it is going to be a hugely difficult problem and probably completely insoluble by stem cells."

Stephen Minger, an embryonic stem cell researcher at Kings also admits in the same Times article "It is true that Alzheimer’s is not a promising candidate for stem-cell therapies, but it was not scientists who suggested it was — that was all politics in the US driven by Nancy Reagan."

This is all very interesting, because I don't recall either the Royal Society or other embryonic stem cell researchers in the UK, like Stephen Minger, ever pointing out that Alzheimers is not likely to be cured using stem cells before. Recently I wrote to BBC Newsonline to point this out:

I also notice that the report quotes the Alzheimer's society - however the comment that embryonic stem cells are going to be useful in Alzheimer's is contradicted by stem-cell researcher Michael Shelanski, co-director of the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain at Columbia University Medical Center, the "chance of doing repairs to Alzheimer's brains by putting in stem cells is small." U.S. Rep. Dave Weldon (R-Florida), a practicing physician, agrees: "Whether embryonic or adult stem cells, Alzheimer's disease is one of the least likely where stem cells could be useful." When asked why ESC proponents claim it could treat Alzheimer's, one ESC researcher said, "People need a fairy tale."
ESC-based cure for Alzheimer's a "fairy tale"

The fact is that anyone following the stem cell debate has known for some time that embryonic stem cells can cause cancerous tumours to form, see: Scientific problems with embryonic stem cells (note the date, as long ago as 2001)

Good as it is to see the whole range of media reporting accurately about the problems with embryonic stem cells, it is disappointing that the articles do not mention adult stem cells, not even once, and the headlines "stem cells overhyped" give the impression that all of "stem cell research" is overhyped, whereas in fact, adult stem cell research has been too much ignored and left out entirely for example out of the "stem cell milesstones" that are sometimes listed on articles.

It is not that there is a shortage of articles about adult or umbilical cord blood success stories. They do appear occasionally in the media, whether in relation to blindness being treated using adult stem cells, or a paralysed woman who was treated, or clinical trials for heart disease in London using bone marrow stem cells. It is just that when embryonic stem cells are being reported, adult stem cells seem to have been forgotten entirely. Given that the public said in a recent YouGov poll that they didn't know enough about stem cell research, maybe it is time for a lot more coverage of the successes of adult stem cells featured on these websties stem cell research and Comment on Reproductive Ethics

2005-08-29T10:00:00.000-07:00

All the indications are that the more people know about the facts, the more prolife they become

It's great to wake up on a bank holiday morning and see a YouGov poll that shows that public opinion is strongly behind a restriction of abortion. The poll for the Daily Telegraph shows that only 2% of the public support the extreme position represented by the abortion agencies and proabortion lobbyists in this country who have a massively disproportionate influence on our laws, such as Marie Stopes and BPAS, who support abortion on demand on babies that are 6 months old and allowing abortion up to birth.

This means that discounting the 9% who don't know, a total of 89% think that there needs to be restrictions on the age at which a baby can be aborted. While some people continue to support abortions on babies at 6 months, a total of 64% think that the abortion law should be reduced from the current 24 week limit. The urgent question that has to be asked is why is it when there have been call after call for the abortion limit to be restricted that our abortion laws are still dictated by a 2% extreme proabortion fringe?

It's not as though this is the first poll that has showed that the public backs a serious restriction of abortion law (see Student LifeNet's neat collation of polling results). This is a natural consequence of greater information being available to the public about the sophistocated development of the baby.

Currently public and parliamentary opinion support either a 20 week restriction (which is arguably terribly late for anyone who knows how developed the baby is at this stage), or a 12 week restriction (inspired by the beautiful ultrasound pictures of the baby walking in the womb). I have no doubt that the more people know about the baby's development, the greater the demand will be that our laws are focused on the humanity of the baby.

Two years ago, I was telling one of my friends that I was arrested for showing a picture of a 21 week old aborted baby while I was a ProLife Alliance election candidate for the Welsh assembly elections. There is really very little difference between a 20 week abortion and a 21 week abortion, which just shows how inadequate a restriction to 20 weeks would be. A baby aborted at 21 weeks is an horrific sight and one which I do not wish anyone to see but any debate has to be weighted in reality not euphemism. I was asking her, how is it that we have child protection laws and yet we allow abortions of babies (nearly 3,000 abortions a year on babies over 20 weeks). I remember her response was "it's not a child". I said how is it not a child at 24 weeks, six months pregnancy, when the baby is perfectly formed and can survive if born prematurely ??!! I remember the look on her face. A year later, in 2004 after the articles that were in the papers previewing the Channel 4 documentary My Foetus, and calls from every quarter it seemed for a restriction of abortion, she wrote to me and said my views have completely changed, of course it is wrong, its about human rights not about choice.

2005-08-25T23:44:00.000-07:00

Why bother to advocate sex selection when no one wants it anyway, and the harms are at best predictable, and at worst incalculable?

It is reassuring that every public opinion poll has shown that the public are staunchly and overwhelmingly opposed to allowing parents to choose the sex of their child. A solid 80% of the public oppose sex selection. Even the HFEA was forced to acknowledge opposition, following a public consultation in 2003 (see CORE). This overwhelming opposition seems to have two explanations. On one hand, thankfully we are not a sexist society (whatever arguments can be had about equal pay), and parents frankly think it is absurd to want to have a boy rather than a girl or vice versa.

Children are loved and wanted unconditionally and this is exactly as it should be. This is not to say that parental expectations would not change if society encouraged parents to prefer children of a particular gender, which is why whatever the current views of social sex selection, the law should not be changed to allow it as it would inevitably generate a demand for it. The other reason for such deep seated opposition to social sex selection is because of the serious implications of demographic imbalance, sexist stereotyping, psychological harms to the child and the slide towards infanticide in cases where sex selection hasn't worked.

Anjana Ahuja wrote a superb piece in The Times on the eugenic whiff of sex selection. In her critique of what "family balancing" can possibly mean, and what measurement government could use to measure parental distress at children of a particular gender, and the demographic implications, she asked: "And is there potential psychological fallout? What message does it send to daughters when mum and dad are prepared to spend thousands to ensure that their next child is not female? How will the youngest daughter feel — like a mistake that her parents will pay money not to repeat? Perhaps not, but is anyone gathering evidence?"

The question about evidence is a good one. Mary Ann Sieghart for example took the opposite view in T2 the following week, arguing that social sex selection is "perfectly natural" (not for the 80% of the public opposed, it isn't!). In any case, the question about whether a parent may excitedly look forward to having a daughter or son is very different from making this a matter of public policy. Idle speculations about the gender of the baby during pregnancy shouldn't be made elevated from speculation to a parental right to have a boy or a girl, as the cultural preference for boys and feticide and infanticide of baby girls should unequivocally prove. Far from being guilty of a "knee jerk" reaction against social sex selection, as Mary Ann Sieghart suggests, it seems that favouring sex selection is a knee jerk reaction that fails to properly weigh the negatives and also acknowledge that sex selection has unpredictable harms associated with it that cannot be measured until we can see the demographic problem for ourselves, or we have a cohort of children who we can start to measure for psychological damage.

Mary Ann Sieghart's answer to the problem of psychological harm to children is that children will sense their parents' disappointment anyway if sex selection is not used. I don't see how this is an argument in favour of encouraging parents to be disappointed with their children and to seek out expensive fertility treatment. She also dismisses the problem of demographic disaster on the grounds that currently only a small number of British parents have a preference for one gender over the other, and that as the preference for gender goes both ways, it would balance out, with no more boys or girls being born. This seems at least a little shaky. It might be the case in 2005 when 80% of the public are opposed to gender selection, but can we really be sure of what parental demands will be in 2010 or 2020 if these trends are set in motion?

Anyone who passionately believes in gender equality should be appalled at any attempt to suggest that a child of one gender can be prefered to a child of the opposite sex. What happened to allowing children to develop their own interests and personalities? To reduce a child to a gender stereotype and ignore a child's personality, ability, temperament and development (surely much more interesting than gender) is absurd. Have we come so far in terms of gender equality and feminism only to reduce the potential of every child to whether we can dress them in pink or blue?

2005-08-21T17:15:00.000-07:00

Mick Hume is wrong - This is about ethics, not the personalities of parents

I've followed debates on genetics and embryology for the last five years. The main thrust of opposition to issues like embryo experimentation, human cloning, the creation of designer babies and social sex selection, has at least three major concerns. Firstly, that there is real physical and/or psychological harm to the child that is being created, secondly, that the implications for society are serious, and thirdly, that there are ethical alternatives which do not involve harm and will benefit all parties. I am not aware of anyone who has ever argued that controversial and experimental scientific practices need to be prohibited or subject to the most serious restrictions because of the personality of parents, but this incredibly is what Mick Hume tried to argue in The Times ("Well, fancy that! Children’s future decided by parents, not by committee") when he claimed that any regulation or protection of children by the state would be "treating prospective parents as irresponsible infants."

It's not necessary to have a degree in ethics to see that Mick Hume is wrong to say that the the case for restrictive legislation is based on "the authorities see[ing] parents as potentially selfish fashion victims who cannot be trusted to decide what is best for their own children." It has got nothing to do with whether parents are selfish or not. They could have the best intentions in the world and still advocate harmful procedures if they are being encouraged to do so, or the information is not available to them. There is good evidence that prohibition and restriction is necessary to prevent these highly experimental and in some cases frivolous techniques (and even Mick Hume acknowledges he personally would not use sex selection) being used. IVF specialist Lord Winston pointed out as long ago as 2003, in a speech to the British Association Festival of Science reported by BBC NewsOnline that a "lack of laboratory research into IVF means scientists are effectively "experimenting on children". He blamed the commercial focus of many IVF clinics for the lack of funding for IVF research.

As long as the state intervenes in highly experimental and untested ways, which may result in harm to the child that is born from IVF, the state has a duty to ensure that state sanctioned interventions are prohibited if there is evidence to suggest that the child may be harmed. The goal of everyone involved in IVF should be to protect children. If there is a conflict, the state's overriding concern must be towards the child is the primary victim of any treatment that goes wrong.

Mick Hume slates half of the House of Commons Science and Technology select committee for refusing to support the final report. Apart from the fact that it is absolutely right in a democracy that MPs should take a principled stance and cannot be just rubber stamping reports, he also grossly misrepresents the concerns of the Labour MP who branded it a “Frankenstein report”, when he says: "Perhaps she knows of parents keen to chop up their babies and make a monster out of the body parts."

Anyone who followed the coverage of the MPs objections at the time will know that they took the unprecedented step of condemning the report because of the shocking nature of some of the committee's recommendations - one of the most shocking was the creation of animal human hybrids. No where in his tirade does Mick Hume analyse in any depth the possible harm that could result from a demographic imbalance if parents routinely picked one child, or the implications for other children if parents seek a child of a different gender. Neither does he refer anywhere to issues like the proper boundaries of science (and everyone agrees that there are some), and the vast array of other concerns encompassed in the HFE Act which have little to do with fertility treatment, and much more to do with scientific experimentation.

2005-08-17T19:38:00.000-07:00

Who put these jokers in charge of decision making? Whatever else we disagree on, we can at least agree that there should be proper wide-ranging debate and a transparent, accountable, democratic Parliamentary process

I was amazed to be told recently by a senior journalist, who out of fairness I will not name, that I should not pursue a particular line of argument in an interview, because "the public won't be interested"! The line of argument I was pursuing is that decisions on major ethical issues and scientific experimentation - such as whether to allow the creation of designer babies, human cloning, or the creation of animal human hybrids - should be made by Parliament following thorough public and parliamentary debate, not by unelected bureaucrats behind closed doors, who are not accountable to anyone. It is perhaps true that our Parliament system is not entirely perfect, but at least parliamentary democracy gives the opportunity and hope that the best evidence will win out, rather than allowing a few individuals, without any particular qualifications, to make decisions about the future direction of humanity based on their own whims. I also find it impossible to believe that the public is not interested in the question about who is deciding on these issues. I find it incredible that any individual can steamroll over the democratic process or that decisions can be made behind closed doors. Far from being a boring point, the question of who is making these decisions currently borders on farce, which would be almost funny if it wasn't so serious.

To take a few examples, three years ago, the Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology took oral evidence from the then former chair of the HFEA, Ruth Deech. During the hearing, the MP, Bob Spink asked about the massively controversial issue of whether a baby should be created in order to provide tissue for another child, he asked: "Should that decision have been taken by the HFEA or should it have been brought back to the democratically accountable Parliament to be discussed?" To the amazement of the MPs on the select commmittee, Ruth Deech actually said, and I kid you not: "The fact that the HFEA took that decision protects Members of Parliament from direct involvement in that sort of thing". It is quite something to tell MPs to their face that they aren't capable of making complex decisions and that they need protection! She was immediately asked, "How can it be democratic if you are preventing the democrats, the Members of Parliament who are elected to make difficult decisions on behalf of society as a whole, and protecting them from having to make such complex, fundamental decisions?"

As a second example, it is often repeated ad nauseam that the HFEA is the greatest organisation in the world and a model for the world to follow, usually it has to be said by the HFEA themselves. This isn't borne out by the number of scandals involving embryo mixups, black twins born to a white couple, etc etc, but around the time that the Government was pushing through human cloning legislation in Parliament, (although they liked to call it CNR, cell nuclear replacement, so no one would think that it was cloning) the Government were also saying that there would be very strict regulation about which licences were issued, so it was very interesting to read in the appendix to the Science and Technology committee's Fourth public report, the admission from a scientist about how exactly he got his licence from the HFEA. He says that because the HFEA in fact did not know whether or not to issue the licence "the HFEA looks to the Medical Research Council for specialist input, who in turn ask for my view, with the result that I am asked my view of a ruling which I am seeking." Very rigorous. The argument has always been that if expertise does not exist in this country on cutting-edge science then we should be looking for peer review internationally, drawing on some of the expertise available on this superb website on Stem cell research.

Thirdly, The Times reported that the Times had obtained documents under the Freedom of Information Act and discovered that the HFEA had passed a secret ruling on designer babies to allow bone marrow to be taken from the child, without publicising this rule change. In fact, the HFEA's own lawyers had argued "in a pretrial submission that such screening involves “no adverse effect for the baby — indeed no invasive procedure relating to the baby”, because only cord blood is used. This is not true when bone marrow is involved." Josephine Quintavalle, of Comment on Reproductive Ethics,the pro-life group that has brought today’s case, said that the HFEA had “moved ethical goalposts” without consulting or even informing the public. “We were categorically promised during all legal hearings that tissue-typing would result only in non- invasive applications, dependent exclusively on harvesting stem cells from the designed baby’s umbilical cord blood,” Ms Quintavalle said. “The HFEA resisted with self-righteous indignation any accusations that saviour siblings were being set up as future bone marrow donors. Now the HFEA has completely changed its mind by suggesting that bone-marrow donation is OK after all. Bone-marrow donation is invasive and can be painful and never more so than for a tiny newborn baby, who derives no benefit from the procedure and is unable to give consent. “The concept that a baby should be created with this specific purpose in mind goes beyond the comprehension of compassionate and civilised citizens.” The authority ought to have done much more to make its decision public, she added. “The ethical decisions of the HFEA should be blazoned across every newspaper in the country, instead of being cunningly buried in committee meetings.”

2005-08-12T07:11:00.000-07:00

The gorgeous little girl on the front of The Times who proves that PGD for late onset diseases is wrong

Any parent if asked if they want to protect their child from disease is obviously going to respond enthusiastically and without reservation with "yes, of course!". What a loaded question! No parent wants to see a child suffering. However, we should be wary of any attempt to pressurise public opinion by using this good parental impulse as an argument to justify testing and eliminating those embryos which may have a genetic predisposition to some late onset condition. The murkily named acronym PGD (preimplantation genetic diagnosis) is eugenics dressed up as medicine, used not to treat but to determine who should be allowed to live and who should die. Screening sounds a benign medical practice, the sophistocated preserve of medical experts, but it is neither benign nor sophistocated when it is used to destroy embryos which may, perhaps, possibly, one day, hypothetically, maybe get a condition that may by that time be entirely curable.

The Times editorial on the 12th August drew a clear distinction between screening embryos and screening adults, also pointing out that:

"it would, inevitably, lead to the termination of embryos that would have grown into healthy adults. A proportion would develop cancer, but only after several decades of good health and with a range of treatments available to them, including, in the case of those at risk of breast cancer, radical surgery reducing their chances of developing the disease by 90 per cent."

The editorial goes on to point out that "Britain lags behind the US, Sweden and much of Western Europe in its breast cancer screening efforts." Clearly all research and funding and medical expertise should be channelled into the identification and treatment of disease not used to terminate the lives of potential sufferers. To eliminate an embryo that may get breast cancer in 40 years time doesn't say much about how society views breast cancer sufferers. Does a woman who gets breast cancer have no worthwhile life up to the moment in which the condition is first discovered? Does 20-40 years of life mean nothing at all? Is all this to be thrown away? And what about in 40 years time when there is a treatment for the condition anyway?

On the 1st November 2004, the front page of The Times reported on the first licences granted by the HFEA without any public or parliamentary debate, for screening for cancer. Katie Stevenson, a cute little girl, pointed at the reader with the imperiousness that children have. Her mother refused screening. If the screening had happened, there would be no Katie.

2005-08-06T13:22:00.000-07:00

Is self-regulation appropriate when there are reports that babies struggle to breathe after abortion at 18 weeks?

A shocking study in the August edition of the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology reveals that 31 babies were born alive following abortions on babies who were 18 weeks or older, with the babies struggling to breathe and crying in two cases. 13 babies died after an hour. One baby aborted at just over 19 weeks died after nearly five hours. There are no official national figures for the number of babies born alive following abortion, but it is inevitable that the national figure is much higher since the BJOG study only covered the North West region of England and the authors frankly admit that there is “significant underreporting”.

These revelations should have been front page news in every paper in the country in terms of the loss of life involved, the public's right to know, the proper scrutiny of medical practice and the major significance of the report for a thorough and informed debate on restricting abortion law. How many people for example are aware that late abortion involves the horrific procedure of feticide to kill the baby, which is recommended by the RCOG, or that babies can be born alive as early as 18 weeks? The Daily Mail, to its credit, reported the study on Saturday, but the seriousness of the issue – nothing less than the reporting of infanticide - demands much greater public attention and action to ensure that it is prevented from happening again.

It is an additional cause for concern that although these reports have been brought to public attention before, there has been no action to prevent these babies dying from neglect, despite the assurances of medical associations. In February 2004, The Sunday Times reported a study published orginally in the BJOG of a baby who survived three abortion attempts and was born alive at 24 weeks after his 24- year-old mother changed her mind about wanting the child after feeling it move on the way home from an abortion clinic. The attempted abortions had been carried out at the British Pregnancy Advisory Service’s Blackdown clinic in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. Although the clinic had told her an ultrasound scan had confirmed the child was dead, she went into labour that afternoon and the boy was born alive. The journal reported that this little boy is now a healthy two year old.

A few months later, in June 2004, the Sunday Times reported cases of babies who were born alive following abortions. One baby thought to have a severe abnormality was born healthy, but was not resuscitated when it stopped breathing. Another baby was left to die in a sluice-room, even though it was born with a heart-beat and was breathing. Another baby born at 25 weeks the day before he would have been killed through the barbaric practice of feticide. The ProLife Alliance noted at the time that survival rates of premature babies between 23-26 weeks are reaching the 90% mark according to a major US retrospective study published this year.

These reports prompted a successful motion at the BMA conference proposed by a number of medical students, calling on the BMA to "work with the GMC, NHS and appropriate Royal Colleges to ensure that babies born alive as a result of termination of pregnancy procedures receive the same full neonatal care as that available to other babies".

Even before the conference, the BMA protested vigorously that the motion was unnecessary because they already had guidelines to ensure that babies born alive received medical care. This echoes the RCOG guidance on the issue which states “The management of fetuses and newborn infants at the threshold of viability should be in accordance with the British Association of Perinatal Medicine’s Framework for Practice. It is professionally acceptable not to attempt to support life in fetuses below the threshold of viability." BBC Newsonline quoted Louise Silverton, deputy general secretary of the Royal College of Midwives as saying that: "There are guidelines to prevent the live birth of babies following late abortions. However, should the baby be born alive, it must receive the necessary life support, as would any other baby born at such an early gestation."

However the survey of the 31 babies struggling to live in BJOG frankly contradicts this by saying that "although midwives are bound by their code of practice, there are many who will still ignore signs of life at this gestation....Many terminations at this gestational age are performed on gynaecology units; the women being cared for by nursing staff rather than midwives, who are not governed by the midwives rules and code of practice, although the Births and Deaths Registration Acts and Public Health Acts apply to all."

If there is any doubt that the abortion law is out of date and urgently in need of restriction, then these stories of babies struggling to breathe should remove all doubts. The current law allows babies to be aborted for any reason up to 24 weeks (6 months) or up to birth on grounds of disability. The 24 week limit was based on the baby being able to survive at that point, so even from the flawed logic of the Abortion Act, the current time limit of 24 weeks is outdated and incomprehensible when premature babies can be born and survive after 21 weeks and these babies struggled to breathe after abortions at 18 weeks.

When the reality of babies being born alive following abortion is before us, we have passed the stage of esoteric debate about when life begins. It is blindingly obvious that these babies are alive and have human rights and that they deserve as much protection as any other child under child protection guidelines and international human rights law. Only a tiny extreme fringe thinks that it is acceptable to abort babies up to and including birth. The majority of people in this country are naturally appalled by the brutal reality of late term abortion. Dr. Stammers, senior lecturer in general practice at St. George's University Hospital in London was reported in the Mail as saying that even doctors who carry out abortions sometimes break down: "I know of obstetricians who have been doing abortions for many years who have broken down saying they cannot carry on any more. Despite all attempts at emotional neutrality, the heart does not work that way when you get a baby in front of you that colleagues on another floor of the same building would be trying to keep alive. For the parents it must be extremely upsetting, as it is for the doctors."

The humane response to these babies suffering and deaths is not to discuss, as the authors of the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology report do, with horrifying calm, whether these babies could be killed earlier using feticide, or to suggest that it could be up to the parents whether they prefer feticide or neonatal death, or to suggest that "the reasons why feticide is necessary should be made clear, along with the potential benefits". It is outrageous that parents could be presented with propaganda and euphemism about feticide. It should be blindingly obvious that feticide is as wrong as neonatal death, since it is only a legal fudge to prevent the doctors being prosecuted for murder.

It is overwhelmingly clear that we cannot leave it up to midwives and nurses involved in abortions to regulate themselves. The wider arguments about abortion will take more time, but there is immediate and obvious action that must be taken. The only humane response to knowing that babies can be born alive at 18 weeks is to outlaw abortion during the second and third trimester.

2005-08-05T08:04:00.000-07:00

Jasper Gerard, how many prolifers have you met?!

A year ago, in a flurry of articles about abortion in reaction to the news that abortion was going to be shown on TV by Channel 4, in a moving article expressing his own growing discomfort with abortion, (which I intend to expand on elsewhere) Times columnist Jasper Gerard wrote:

"If the law is ever to be revised, antis need a more likeable spokesman. Many display the warm understanding of the Rev Ian Paisley. Jepson would be perfect but she might need to lose the dog collar: the British like their debates rational, not religious."

It is a pity that in an article that was otherwise sensitive to the seriousness of the issue of abortion, Jasper Gerard reduces the issue to the issue of personality. To say that the prolife case is based on a religious view is a massive presumption, when in fact the opposite is true. The prolife case is explicitly not religious and based on rational argument and evidence based on the biological development of a child, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the physical reality of abortion.

No one needs celebrity endorsement to assess the issue of abortion. The facts of abortion as another Times columnist put it "scream to be debated". The truth of abortion eclipses whoever is speaking. I was interviewed briefly in the documentary "My Foetus". No one was interested in me. I have seen people walk past demonstrations using abortion images and their faces reflect gravity and shock, they are certainly not interested in something as trivial as the clothes worn by the spokesperson.

But even if it was about the spokesperson rather than the issue, the caricature Jasper Gerard refers to is not one that I recognise. The prolifers I know are doctors, nurses, teachers, students, solicitors, vets, computer programmers, pilots, tax consultants, accountants, artists, university lecturers, charity workers, journalists and political campaigners, to name just a few. In other words, an incredibly diverse group in terms of age, profession, temperament, political affiliation, interests and personality, some with religious belief and some with none. The issue is just basically about humanity and anyone with humanity can respond. As for the emotional warmth Jasper Gerard refers to, it is inescapably the case that if you believe what we do about abortion than your heart must go out to any woman affected by abortion.

If the media's impression of prolifers is skewed than whose fault is that? When has the media ever covered Student LifeNet, the network of prolife students in universities, which doesn't in the least resemble Jasper Gerard's caricature? Student LifeNet actively campaigns for better support for pregnant students, issues press releases which are expert and relevant, and a few years ago, when I was involved, donned Tony Blair masks to campaign against cloning (the sight of 15 grinning Tony's Clonies were simply irresistable, and appeared on news bulletins and even on Have I Got News For You) . It is perhaps understandable that the media as a whole isn't that fascinated in student news, but The Times has its own survey of Generation X, and Newsnight's recent student house gave huge publicity to a few students. The media is missing out on much more interesting news. It is more than tuition fees that affect students.

And then there is the ProLife Alliance which fielded candidates first in the 1997 election and again in 2001, and in the European elections in 2004. Even forgetting the democratic imperative for proper reporting and vigorous debate at election time, which should have guaranteed the ProLife Alliance fair coverage, the media were looking for a way to make the election more interesting and had a goldmine in the ProLife Alliance candidates - ordinary people inspired to stand for something they believed in, speaking from the heart, without the cushy support of a mainstream party machine.

2005-08-05T07:01:00.000-07:00

Sponsored skydive for ProLife

This is a picture of me just after I fell head first out of the plane at about 13,000 ft, over Cambridgeshire, attached to a professional skydiver, during a skydive I did a while back.

Don't be fooled by the huge grin! There's not much else you can do while falling at 120mph and you know that the picture will be captured forever.

The feeling of falling through blue sky is incredible and terrifying and exhilarating and terrifying and terrifying but once the parachute opens at 5,000 ft you feel tremendously and bizarrely safe, if a little disorientated.

On the promotional literature when I was researching the idea, it said that they would tell you how to open the parachute in case something happened to the professional skydiver, ie. he has a blackout or a heart attack. I don't think there is the least chance I would have the presence of mind to remember if the situation had arisen, but they never told us, and thankfully we touched down safely, without breaking any bones.

I've never bungee jumped, and I would never skydive without a very good reason, but prolife is a very good reason! If every person who thought human rights are important donated even a tiny amount, we'd be able to change the world. People said during Live 8 that if children were dying in England we wouldn't stand for it. Well they are.

If you are prolife, why not make a donation to the ProLife Alliance

2005-08-04T00:30:00.000-07:00

Opposition to designer babies misrepresented by media

I enjoy debate with anyone who grapples fairly with ethical issues, on the grounds that sooner or later the strength of arguments will win out. So despite being slightly perturbed by the subtitle, "Questions of life and death are too important to be decided by zealots and dogmatists", I wrote to Observer columnist, Mary Riddell, to point out that her article in the Observer entitled "Beware the moral minority" (March 27, 2005), contained a number of factual errors, when she wrote:

"It is iniquitous that couples like the Hashmis, now awaiting an imminent verdict from the House of Lords, have had to fight so hard to have a baby who can provide stem cells to cure their six-year-old son, Zain, of a serious blood disorder.... such cases are for parents and doctors, not for pro-lifers leeching their sanctity from other people's heartbreak."

This is the kinds of misunderstanding and inaccuracy that has been passing as fact in the media as a whole, whereas the reality is that the arguments against designer babies or "saviour siblings" is much more weighty and evidence based, certainly not irrational. I wrote to her to say that this is incorrect for a number of reasons:

1) the Hashmi family were not prevented from continuing with IVF, and have been trying for a number of years to have a baby that is a tissue match. The court case has in no way prevented them from continuing to do this (the Whittakers for example, went ahead anyway). However the Hashmi family have been unsuccessful.

It is inaccurate to imply that tissue matching is an easy solution. In November last year, it was widely reported that the Hashmis are instead appealing for bone marrow donation. I am sure you are aware of this, see TheGuardian

2) One of the major arguments against allowing the creation of saviour siblings is that it is unnecessary and the preferable medical approach would be to routinely collect and store umbilical cord blood which is currently thrown away, and also encourage more bone marrow donation. Those of us who oppose the creation of babies to provide donor tissue have been calling for the routine collection of umbilical cord blood for years. I joined the bone marrow donation register in 2003. If umbilical cord and bone marrow donation was much more widespread, Zain Hashmi may have been cured by now. There was a very good article on this in the Guardian in November last year:

3) Finally can I point you to CORE's reasons for the legal challenge, which I think cannot be described as anything but strongly rational?
HFEA designer baby decision unethical, unnecessary and undemocratic (26 July 2004)

I hope that if you accept my points above, you might be willing to include these points in any further article you write on this subject. It is wrong to misrepresent opposition as "pro-lifers leeching their sanctity from other people's heartbreak". There are serious ethical issues at stake for the baby that is created, and any rational analysis has a duty to factor this into deliberation. It is not clear to me how the heartbreak of parents in this dilemma is helped by tissue typing methods which are much slower and ethically problematic compared to society being committed to developing a readily available source of umbilical cord blood and bone marrow."

----

Mary Riddell was kind enough to write back and acknowledge some of my arguments while siding with the couple who wanted to create the donor-child, despite the evidence against this position.

2005-08-03T01:00:00.000-07:00

BBC interviews cardiologist but fail to ask him about cardiology

BBC News needs to adopt more of an interviewing format, like Newsnight or the Jeremy Vine show, where lots of voices get heard. The problem with the current BBC news bulletin format when it comes to controversial ethical issues, like embryonic stem cell research and human cloning, is that it gives too much weight to the reporter's own perspective while the people who are interviewed, have barely time to complete a sentence before the camera is whisked away.

A prime example of this was the BBC News report on the Korean cloning breakthrough in May. After presenting footage from Korea and Newcastle, while the news correspondent looked very happy, the news report devoted barely a minute to interview a cardiologist who opposes embryonic stem cell research and cloning. The cardiologist was broadcast saying: "In doing these experiments we have to understand first of all safety and secondly the implications both ethically and culturally and many patients may have difficulties with this sort of treatment".

It is impossible that during the longer pre-recorded interview, this professor of cardiology did not argue that messing around with embryonic stem cells and cloning (never mind the ethical issues) is a waste of time given the very promising developments using bone marrow stem cells to treat heart damage, which is being trialled in London.

It remains a mystery why this vital information was withheld from the public, but there was time for the news correspondent to approve wholeheartedly of cloning by concluding "The moral arguments will continue, but the hope is that one day this could revolutionise medicine", even though in the Korean scientists own report they said that these cloned cells will never be able to be used in treatment because they were cloned from patients and will therefore have the same condition.

see Heart Treatments: Adult stem cells v. Embryonic stem cells

BBC bone marrow Stem cells treat heart attacks (8th July 2004)

2005-08-01T20:33:00.000-07:00

Don't succumb to pro-euthanasia propaganda: Diane Pretty died peacefully

Watching Questiontime two years ago, it was reassuring to hear all the representatives from all the political parties, including Robin Cook for the Government, state their steadfast opposition to any law allowing euthanasia. What united all the politicians was not only a belief in what Robin Cook called "the first duty of the Government to protect the lives of its citizens" (a line incidentally from the beginning of the ProLife Alliance election manifesto), but the knowledge that, as Cook put it, it would be absolutely impossible to legislate to allow euthanasia and protect vulnerable ill or old people from non-voluntary euthanasia.

The impossibility of legislating to allow euthanasia was also responsible for the European Court of Human Rights unanimous ruling by seven Strasbourg judges that it would be practically impossible to withhold prosecution in the case of assisted suicide by a relative, since as Bruno Quintavalle, a barrister with the ProLife Alliance pointed out "the implications of her petition to allow her husband to kill her with state immunity did have colossal repercussions which go far beyond her personal tragedy." Evidence presented by Professor John Keown of thousands of cases of non-voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands, have also persuaded supporters of euthanasia such as the previous editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics for twenty years, Raanan Gillon, to oppose euthanasia.

The arguments against euthanasia are considerable, including the fact that very few terminally ill patients request it, many change their minds, and prominent disability rights activists speak against it, including Jane Campbell, commissioner at the Disability Rights Commission, Chair of the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE), co-founder and directer the National Centre for Independent Living (NCIL) and previously chair of the British Council of Disabled People (BCODP). You only have to read the list of Jane Campbell's achievements, never mind hear her speak passionately about her narrow escape from a Do Not Resuscitate order, to see that the way forward is helping disabled and terminally ill people to live, not to help them die.

In October 2004, the ProLife Alliance published opinion polling showing that 4 out of 5 MPs Against Voluntary Euthanasia. But recently pressure has been mounting to allow euthanasia, through living wills contained in the recently passed Mental Capacity Bill, and with more scare stories. On 1st July 2005, the Daily Mail ran a story called “Doctors: We no longer oppose mercy killing” which stated that Diane Pretty “developed breathing difficulties and gradually choked to death over more than a week.”

In fact the reality was very different for Diane Pretty:

"Dr Ryszard Bietzk, the head of medical services at the Pasque Hospice, Luton, where Mrs Pretty was cared for, said her death was "perfectly normal, natural and peaceful". He added: "There was no reason for police to be involved or notified. Diane was admitted to the hospice last Friday for a pre-arranged admission. Over recent weeks her condition had deteriorated and she continued to deteriorate following her admission until she died peacefully yesterday afternoon."