
blogs


The Winner of the 2011 ICMDA Dignity and Right to Health Award
It is our great privilege and pleasure to announce that Dr. Olive Frost is the most worthy winner of…

Nursing Initiative: More tinkering at the edges?
In the face of a growing and alarming number of reports on poor standards of care for vulnerable patients…

Lord Falconer’s commission – help in reading what lies between the lines in their press release
Lord Falconer’s Commission on Assisted Dying is reporting today.
I have reproduced below their press…

Individuals and Organisations who refused to give evidence to Falconer Commission
The Falconer Commission on 'Assisted Dying', which publishes its report today, has been accused (quite…

What Falconer does not say about assisted suicide is even more worrying than what he does say
On New Year’s day, Lord Falconer (pictured) wrote an opinion piece for the Daily Telegraph with the…

Calls for action on care need to be heeded
When I wrote last July about how the findings of the Dilnot Commission into the funding of social care…

Charles Falconer’s bent jury
Charles Falconer’s ‘Commission on Assisted Dying’ is due to report on Thursday 5 January 2012,…

Ireland’s Gain, England’s Loss
A fascinating new comparative analysis of the effects of abortion on a whole country’s population…

‘Alcohol is blighting our communities’ says church poll
A YouGov poll published today on behalf of three major British Christian denominations has revealed that…

Sham euthanasia report from Canada should make us more wary
Charlie Falconer’s sham ‘Commission on Assisted Dying’ is due to report on 5 January 2012, over…

98% of abortions in Britain are technically illegal, and many will lead to mental health problems for women
One of the most comprehensive and systematic reviews to date into the link between abortion and mental…
Why helping a few women will harm many more: the untold cost of creating three parent embryos
It seems ironic that while ten or so women may be helped each year to have embryos free from mitochondrial disease (yes, the numbers are that small as a Government ‘estimate’ admits), many hundreds of other women will be put at real risk of harm to help them achieve this. There is a deafening silence […]
Why Lord Carey is so desperately wrong about legalising assisted suicide
Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, has surprisingly come out today in favour of Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill which is due to have its second reading in the House of Lords on Friday 18 July. Falconer advocates licensing doctors to dispense lethal drugs to mentally competent adults with a life expectancy of less than six months and a […]
Restoring or Enhancing
If you love sport, then this weekend offered a surfeit of riches! We were spoiled for choice, with football from Brazil, F1 from Silverstone, the opening stages of the Tour de France across Yorkshire’s moors packed with 2.6 million spectators and, of course, the Wimbledon finals. Something for everyone! Our household was gripped by the […]
Oregon – steady annual increase in assisted suicide cases sounds warning to UK
Lord Falconer wants to legalise assisted suicide for adults who are mentally competent and have less than six months to live based on the ‘Oregon model’. Since assisted suicide was legalised in Oregon there has been a steady annual increase in the number of prescriptions written for lethal drugs and in numbers of people killing […]
Twelve reasons to think twice about going the Oregon route on assisted suicide
Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill, due for a second reading in the House of Lords on 18 July, is purportedly based on the US state of Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act (DWDA). Dignity in Dying, the former Voluntary Euthanasia Society, who are backing Falconer, claim that everything is wonderful in Oregon. But is that really true? Over […]
Freedom of conscience in medicine is under sustained attack but is worth fighting for
I have previously highlighted the case of two Glasgow midwives who were disciplined by their NHS Trust for refusing to participate in abortion. Their Trust was found to be in the wrong by the Scottish Court of Appeal and the case has been referred to the UK Supreme Court where a further hearing is still awaited. A single […]
Might the large disparity in premature birth rates between black and white women be partly explained by abortion?
Prematurity is associated with a wide variety of health risks. In the UK, 7.8% of babies are born prematurely (60,000 per year) and this number is on the rise. The total cost of preterm birth to NHS is £2.9 billion a year, equivalent to that of smoking, alcohol and obesity. Reducing the rate of preterm […]
Three-parent embryos – an orange light doesn’t mean Go!
Any sub-heading to this blog post could ask a further question: ‘why should we be concerned about this issue anyway? After all, what’s not to like about new techniques that could stop a horrible disease, that seem to be safe (enough), that only involve manipulating a tiny bit of DNA on a tiny embryo […]
Why are men more in favour of abortion?
Most people assume that abortion garners more support from women than men. This is probably because being pro-abortion is seen as a pillar of feminism and calls to reduce abortion limits are usually attacked as being, in some way, a ‘war on women’. As one feminist claimed recently, any stance which seeks to limit women’s […]
Offer of sex change drugs to nine year olds should make us question therapists’ ideological presuppositions
Children as young as nine are to be prescribed drugs which delay the onset of puberty as the first step towards a sex change operation (Mail on Sunday and Daily Telegraph). Doctors at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust said a trial of the treatment on ‘gender dysphoria’ patients aged 12 to 14 had […]
Saving the NHS
Last Thursday the think tank Res Publica launched a report into the state of the National Health Service, and proposed that a greater role for mutual societies might be key in building a sustainable health service for the future. We are all familiar with the diagnosis – we have a growing elderly population, a dwindling […]
Talking about death – the importance of openness about one of life’s certainties
About two thirds of the way into Alexander Payne’s 2011 film The Descendants, Matt King (played by George Clooney) walks calmly into the hospital room of his comatose wife, Elizabeth. He closes the door gently and then proceeds to excoriate her for controlling and messing up the lives of everyone around her. This powerful scene […]