blogs

The campaign to change surrogacy laws suffers a set-back
According to newspaper reports last week, a one year old boy has been left in limbo, as a ward of court,…

Defeat of the Marris Assisted Dying Bill – some reflections on how MPs voted
The Assisted Dying (No 2) Bill of Labour MP Rob Marris was the eleventh attempt in twelve years to…

Maternal mortality: is there a link with abortion legislation or not?
The question of whether restrictive laws on abortion lead to fewer maternal deaths, or more maternal…

Cut and Paste: A new revolution in genetics
Great excitement has been developing over the past few months about new opportunities to eliminate diseases…

Britain’s law on assisted suicide is not ‘broken’ and does not need ‘fixing’
On Friday 11 September MPs will vote on the Assisted Dying (No 2) Bill tabled by Labour’s Rob Marris.…

The assisted suicide of Gill Pharaoh reminds us that there are actually limits to choice
You can listen to my interview on this case on BBC West Midlands here.
Last week I was contacted…

The wisdom of Solomon is needed in today’s surrogacy cases
Disturbing stories on surrogacy are hitting the headlines on a regular basis at the moment.
Last…

Off Target? Do we have faith in the Sustainable Development Goals?
I remember sitting in a small room at Trinity Western University, British Columbia on a hot day in…

Disabled people assemble mass lobby to urge MPs to reject assisted suicide bill
Disabled people descended on Westminster today in droves to lobby MPs on Rob Marris’s Assisted Dying…

Excluding the spiritual from patient care: what is the NMC up to?
In some ways, it speaks of the nature of our times that we have created a special category of care…

Experts in care of the elderly speak out strongly against assisted suicide
The leading organisation representing health professionals caring for the elderly in Britain has this…
Mitochondrial manipulated births: a muted reception
For a prospect anticipated for almost 20 years, the announcement in a Guardian exclusive of the successful birth of one or more babies from one or other technique of what is usually termed mitochondrial donation therapy (MDT) had a more muted reception the following day than might have been predicted. It came second after the […]
When is a ‘synthetic’ embryo a real embryo?
Embryonic stem cell-derived embryos (ESCDEs) have been around for a long time. Last year, an ESCDE, assembled from mouse cells in vitro, replicated natural mouse embryo development in utero up to day 8.5 post-fertilisation. In mouse gestation terms, this amounts to the completion of gastrulation and the start of organ formation and neurulation. In February […]
You wouldn’t do it to a dog! Current fetal pain relief in NHS abortions
This blog should perhaps carry one of those BBC-style warnings, ‘some viewers may find the following content distressing’. This is because it deals with something most of us would prefer not to think about – the dispatching of an unwanted, late-second or third-trimester fetus, or ‘feticide.’ We do not here comment on the morality of […]
Moral flip-flopping over doctors and the death penalty
I have long argued that ethicists who advocate euthanasia while at the same time being opposed to capital punishment have a morally untenable position and recent events have once again demonstrated why if you think it is wrong for doctors to administer death as a punishment, it is logically inconsistent to agree that they can […]
‘Because you’re worth it?’ The BMA and the junior doctors’ strikes
Easter 2023 is likely to be remembered for a long time in the NHS. Straight after a four-day bank holiday weekend, with many senior doctors already on leave, the BMA called junior doctor members in England out on a 96-hour total strike, without exempting emergency cover other than for major incidents. Their aim? A 35 […]
‘Of Mice and Men’
The Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in 2018 really hit the headlines when Prof He Janjkui announced he had carried out heritable genome editing of twin girls in China to make them more resistant to HIV infection. In contrast, the Third International Summit in London in early March 2023 got far less press […]
When is a baby not a baby?
Last week Panorama ran an ‘investigation’ into pregnancy advice centres which they claimed give misleading information to pregnant women. They found 57 centres listed online, could find no fault with the advice given by 34 of them and sent an undercover journalist in to investigate three. The programme was, as is typical, biased and unbalanced. […]
Neuro-silicon interfaces: a new mode of being?
The idea of humankind being merely machines has a long history, stretching back to Julien Offrey De La Mettrie’s Man a Machine, published in 1747. The ‘man-machine’ of the 18th century was, of course, a clockwork automaton. It was not until 1945 that Norbert Weiner, in his ground-breaking Cybernetics – Or Control and Communication in […]
Desperate for organs
‘What can a man give in return for his life?’ asks Jesus rhetorically of his disciples and the crowds following him (Mark 8:37, RSV). In doing so, he implicitly acknowledges that people will go to almost any lengths to save their own skins. They will also do the same for those they love. If the […]
I’m a Christian working in the NHS. The system is broken. Here’s how you can pray for us
I’ve just got home from a shift in the emergency department (ED). The hospital is in ‘critical incident’ due to overcrowding, but it’s been like this for weeks. 100 people or more in a department designed for 25. Queues of ambulances are unable to offload for hours because there’s no space. Patients who have had […]
Podbabies: Who are they kidding?
Ectogenesis – the gestation of children in artificial wombs – has long been considered by many feminist writers as the ultimate liberation for women from the tyranny of reproduction and the limitations it imposes on women’s autonomy. It has also been said to be necessary to ‘challenge traditional patriarchal family structures, and thence all other […]
An appreciation of Sir Eldryd Parry 1931-2022
Sir Eldryd Hugh Owen Parry KCMG OBE, a CMF member, died aged 91 on 13 November 2022. I wanted to write a brief appreciation of his extraordinary life of service in universities in Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Ghana and the establishment of the Tropical Health and Education Trust (THET). His numerous achievements and awards are recorded […]