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Increasing survival of extremely premature babies again raises questions about upper abortion limits
The increasing survival of extremely premature babies is again raising serious questions about the 24…

Activists’ attempt to legalise abortion on demand up until birth is both unnecessary and unwanted
A campaign by activists to legalise abortion on demand up until birth hots up again this month, with…

End of Life Issues. What can we expect in 2017?
Things have been quieter than usual on the end of life front in the UK since the overwhelming defeat…

Sex and Relationship Education: should it be compulsory in schools or not?
The Government has just announced major changes to Sex and Relationships Education (SRE) in all schools,…

Regulator’s proposal to remove pharmacists’ conscience rights is unethical, unnecessary and quite possibly illegal
Should pharmacists be forced to dispense drugs for what they consider to be unethical practices – like…

Surrogacy – good rulings from Europe put the UK out on a limb
The disentangling of the UK from the European Union will inevitably, over time, put us more and more…

The age-old question: Science and political interests in the debate over abortion
Political agendas hiding behind science are nothing new. A particularly famous episode occurred in the…

Global Health – challenges for the coming year
2016 may have got a bad press in some parts of the media, but step back from the Anglophone world and…

Beginning of Life issues in 2017: what will we be talking about this year?
2017 will be another busy and challenging year on beginning of life issues
Abortion
October 2017 marks…

Bullying and NHS Culture
It seems hard to credit that an organisation whose primary focus is the care of the sick, disabled and…

Despite the marketing, egg freezing is not all it’s cracked up to be
IVF has become an almost routine procedure since the birth of Louise Brown in 1978. So much so that women…
Plan to sell morning-after pill to teenagers online this Christmas will lead to more sexually transmitted disease
A British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) campaign, launched today, encourages women to stockpile emergency contraceptive pills over the Christmas period. According to the Daily Telegrapha poster for the scheme, featuring the word ‘sex’ in fairy lights, asks: ‘Getting “turned on” this Christmas?’ And a dedicated website for the service is titled, rather bawdily, santacomes.org.Women wanting to […]
BMJ publishes Secular Medical Forum ‘advertorial’
On 30 November the British Medical Journal published an article by Colin Brewer, ‘a director of the Secular Medical Forum’ , titled ‘Secularism needs a distinctive medical voice’. The 900 word one page article, which appeared in the BMJ’s ‘personal view’ column, and claimed to be ‘not commissioned; not externally peer reviewed’, is essentially an […]
Is ‘faith healing’ costing lives?
As we approach yet another World AIDS day, it is worth stopping to reflect where we have got to this year. First the good news – new HIV infections are down, deaths are down, and the number of people on antiretroviral treatment is up. The UN High Level Meeting on AIDS in New York last […]
Tony Nicklinson deserves sympathy but hard cases make bad law
A severely disabled man from Wiltshire is to ask the High Court to allow a doctor to end his life. Tony Nicklinson, 57, is paralysed from the neck down after suffering a stroke in 2005. He cannot speak or move anything except his head and eyes and communicates through nodding his head at letters on […]
MDU warns against doctors providing medical reports to suicidal patients
The Medical Defence Union (MDU) in its latest advice to doctors (MDU Journal, Volume 27 issue 2 November 2011, Page 24) has published a case study to emphasise the point that doctors who supply medical records to patients who are intending to commit suicide could well be prosecuted. In February 2010 the Director of Public […]
The ‘new’ guidelines on abortion from the RCOG
Just as the leopard cannot change its spots, nor does it seem that the RCOG can change its controversial stance with its revised guidelines for the care of women requesting abortion. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) guidance on ‘The Care of Women Requesting Induced Abortion’ was first published in 2000. An updated […]
Hospital kills ‘wrong’ twin in selective abortion – both babies now dead
Children with special needs can be a great challenge to care for but a tragic story from Australia this week demonstrates that the search for the perfect child can have devastating consequences. Steven Ertelt in Melbourne relates the story on Life Site News. A hospital in Australia is making news for having killed the ‘wrong’ […]
Industrial Action: How should Christians in the NHS respond?
Many Christian nurses and allied health professionals have been asking me how they should act in the face of a mounting industrial dispute. Next Wednesday (30 November), around 100,000 health workers in the UK will join an estimated 2 million other public sector employees in a one day strike in protest about the government’s proposal […]
Spiritually confused care?
Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, recently spoke of the need to remember the spiritual needs of patients in NHS care – and was promptly accused of bringing back medieval exorcism! In the following week, the Royal College of Nursing published a new online training resource to equip nurses in spiritual care, after a survey […]
Adult stem cell research leaps forward whilst embryonic stem cell work slows
It has been an amazing week in the field of stem cell technology with five big stories hitting the news all at once. New doors of therapeutic promise are opening whilst at the same time other doors are slamming shut. I recently highlighted a New Scientist editorial, ‘In praise of stem-cell simplicity’, which gives a […]
Should ‘gay’ Christians be true to their feelings?
Last Wednesday’s Metro (a London newspaper) (p35) ran the story of ‘a burly rugby player’ who ‘suffered a stroke in training and woke up to find he was gay’ (See ‘Different strokes – 19st rugby player now gay hairdresser’) Mr Birch (pictured) was ‘straight’ and engaged to be married when he suffered a freak accident […]
Why legalising assisted suicide inevitably also legalises euthanasia
The Falconer Commission on ‘Assisted Dying’ is about to be put out of its misery when it reports later this month. Having been suggested by Dignity in Dying (formerly the Voluntary Euthanasia Society), paid for by one of its patrons and stacked full of euthanasia sympathisers by Lord Falconer’s own admission (and also for these reasonsdiscredited by the […]