
blogs


Prenatal Screening and Down Syndrome – million-dollar ethics
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics, an independent think tank on bioethics, launched their report on the…

Why is Royal College of GP’s so keen to decriminalise abortion?
In February the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) announced their support for the decriminalisation…

Puberty Blockers: a societal experiment built on sand
Stories abound on social media. Documentaries and podcasts open the lid on the growing phenomenon of…

Two giants are approaching; are we ready for them?
On November 23rd a radical bill to decriminalise abortion and impose it on Northern Ireland was stopped…

Surrogacy: A selfless gift… or something more?
Surrogacy is often portrayed as a compassionate and beautiful act, a selfless gift, where a woman carries…

New Abortion Advice to Schools: Fact or Fiction?
The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) has produced a new factsheet on abortion…

‘Abortion does not cause mental illness’. Discuss.
A new factsheet produced for schools by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG)…

A stark warning to UK doctors from Canada
A recent legal ruling in Canada is a strong warning for British medical professionals who conscientiously…

After Three Decades The Department of Health Recognises Fetal Pain
The eighteenth century philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, wrote of animals: ‘The question is not Can they…

The risks of neutrality on assisted suicide – lessons from abroad
Medicine has held a long-established opposition to assistance with suicide.
Ira Byock, an American Palliative…

Why the Royal College of Physicians will go ‘neutral’ on assisted suicide and why that matters
The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) is going to poll its 35,000 members to ask whether ‘they would…
Who Switched the Cutlery?
Miriam Brandon reflects on how God’s grace helps deal with paralysing perfectionist traits When you have scribbled down the start of a blog entry five times you know you may have a problem with perfectionism. I recently spent a week on a silent retreat; expected God to talk to me about big life questions: my future […]
Sex education programmes are largely ineffectual and do not reduce teen pregnancy or STI rates, says large new research review
Newly released this week, to muted publicity, was a comprehensive, reliable and rigorous Cochrane review of studies reviewing school-based interventions on sex education. This was a large review, combining peer-reviewed data from more than 55,000 young people from around the world. Some of its conclusions were startling and probably for many, unexpected. The studies in […]
A watershed Supreme Court ruling has shaken up consent laws – and may have unexpected spin-offs
Recent headlines in The Times and Guardian along the lines that ‘Doctors must warn patients of all the dangers before every treatment’ reflect one of the biggest legal changes to the doctor-patient relationship in a generation. The headlines were prompted by new guidelines issued by the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS), which themselves are a […]
There are powerful financial vested interests rolling out NIPT for Down’s Syndrome
The government yesterday approved a new test for pregnant women that will make it much easier to detect and search out any babies with Down’s Syndrome (DS) (see previous CMF blog posts here, here, here and here). According to the BBC, the non-invasive prenatal test (NIPT) will be rolled out by the NHS from 2018. NIPT […]
Changing the world one nurse at a time
How do you change the world? One person at a time, goes the old adage. According to a new report from the All Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health (APPGH), the answer is one nurse a time. Actually, it is much more than one nurse at a time. There are over 19 million nurses registered […]
The Sustainable Development Goals one year on: a great opportunity for the church to grasp
How do you transform the world? Marx thought it would be by the revolution of the proletariat regaining the means of production from the bourgeoisie. Motorola thought it would be ensuring that every man, woman and child on the planet had their own mobile phone number, while Facebook expect it to be by the ubiquity […]
Social Care Crisis: time for a modern ‘reformation of manners’
It seems that the world has made some broad progress on health in the last fifteen years, according to a new index that The Lancet has published. This SDG Heath Index promises to increase the level of detail and consistency in how data is collected from different nations so that real comparisons in development can […]
Three parent baby report leaves many unanswered questions
News has broken this week of the birth of the first baby to be created with DNA from three people, using a controversial new technology. The story has gained particular publicity and notoriety because the technique, developed to avoid passing on rare genetic disorders, is still experimental and it has created a five month old […]
The NMC Case against Pauline Cafferkey: a working example of ‘Compassion Deficit Disorder’ in nursing leadership?
It is hard to find anyone who thinks the Nursing & Midwifery Council (NMC) did the right thing in taking Pauline Cafferkey to a misconduct hearing. If you missed the story, Cafferkey is a nurse who volunteered to work in Sierra Leone at the peak of the 2013-2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. On her […]
Gene Drives: the ethics of destroying a species to save human lives
If one had the power to save millions of human lives by exterminating a whole species, could we and should we do so? Ethical questions like this have been around in one form or another in text books, seminar halls and popular science fiction shows for decades. With the advent of CRISPR/Cas9 technology offers the […]
Eugenics – could NIPT for Down’s Syndrome bring us full-circle?
Is it wrong to kill disabled people if caring for them costs more than identifying and destroying them? The Nazis believed killing in these circumstances was not only right but a public duty and the German public was softened up to accept it through a skilful propaganda campaign which began in the classroom. Leo Alexander, […]
How to make a story out of a non-story: hype, hubris and motherless embryos
I did not plan to write a blog on the ‘motherless babies’ story. I assumed that mainstream journalists would read at least some of the detail of new research that has combined sperm with non-egg cells to produce 30 mouse pups that then went on to have healthy offspring themselves, and to report the actual […]