
blogs


Open letter to Sir Graeme Catto, Chairman of Dignity in Dying
I have just made a formal complaint about a polling question which I believe may breach several Rules…

Reprimanded by the GMC for sharing faith with a patient – Dr Richard Scott
On 14 June the General Medical Council’s Investigation Committee reprimanded a Christian doctor who…

Same-sex parenting: controversies with the latest research
A major new study on same sex parenting has generated a great deal of online debate, particularly in…

Rally for better palliative care & against assisted suicide & euthanasia – 3 July
Dignity in Dying, the former Voluntary Euthanasia Society, are planning a mass lobby of parliament on…

Why does it now take stories like this to prick our consciences on abortion?
Few people in Britain now raise an eyebrow over the issue of abortion and I was struck by two casual…

Presumed consent could become law in Wales by 2015
Controversial plans to introduce new legislation on organ donation in Wales have taken a big step forward.…

Most people with locked-in syndrome do not wish to die
Tony Nicklinson is 58 and paralysed from the neck down after suffering a stroke in 2005. He is seeking…

Locked-in syndrome case seeks to establish dangerous precedent
A case of ‘locked-in syndrome’ that is appearing before the courts goes even beyond assisted…

How many women really died from abortions prior to the Abortion Act?
A common argument from the pro-choice lobby is that legalising abortion in 1968 saved thousands of women…

Why is the BMJ editor making a case for the BMA neutrality on ‘assisted dying’?
The British Medical Journal this week published three articles aimed at neutralising medical opposition…

Wise and courageous call in continuing treatment of anorexia patient
A High Court judge ruled yesterday that it is in the best interests of a woman who suffers from ‘extremely…
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 […]