
blogs


Same sex parenting vs heterosexual parenting: research revisited
A controversial study on gay parenting published this summer generated such an outcry of protest on its…

Social myths about abortion after rape
The Elliott Institute has just published a powerful article titled ‘My Rape Pregnancy and My Furor…

BMA issues disingenuous statement on pregnancy counselling
Last week there was some media coverage, and plenty of twitter action, on a Parliamentary debate about…

Defeat for pro-euthanasia lobby as Massachusetts rejects assisted suicide on ballot
The US state of Massachusetts voted 51%-49% in a referendum last night to reject the legalisation of…

Lessons in Language
I was intrigued to read the following short tweet a couple of weeks ago by the pro-abortion organisation,…

Peter Singer backs abortion for curbing population growth
Peter Singer is an Australian moral philosopher and currently Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University.…

School contraceptive jabs to 13 year-olds without parental consent – a dangerous and ill-informed strategy
School nurses have given implants or jabs to girls aged between 13 and 16 more than 900 times in the…

Government ministers and MPs wade in on Liverpool Care Pathway
The controversial Liverpool care pathway (LCP), a framework used to manage patients who are imminently…

The demographic time bomb is most marked in Japan
The demographic time bomb – whereby the elderly population assumes a greater and greater proportion…

Ten questions you never hear asked on the media
I was on the Radio Four Today programme last week debating Lord Falconer (listen here for Radio Four…

Specialists in Palliative Medicine need to act swiftly to respond to these five key concerns about the LCP
Yesterday I mentioned that the Association for Palliative Medicine (APM) had announced plans to launch…
‘Suicide tourism’ gets public backing in Switzerland – but what for British laws?
Voters in Zurich, Switzerland, have rejected proposed bans on assisted suicide and ‘suicide tourism’. A proposal to restrict access for foreigners to assisted suicide only to those living at least one year in the canton was rejected by 78.4 per cent of voters. A second popular initiative launched by fringe conservative parties the Federal Democratic […]
HIV & AIDS treatment as the new prevention Tool: new findings should be treated with caution
News broke in the morning of Friday 13th May 2011 of the results of a ten year study by the United States National Institutes for Health (NIH) into the impact of early antiretroviral treatment (ART) for people living with HIV infection on reducing their risk of transmitting the virus to their sexual partners. Setting up two […]
Gerald’s final breath – a review of the BBC’s ‘Inside the Human Body’
Watching Inside the Human Body tonight was certainly a fascinating experience, looking at how the human body regulates its own function from birth to death, by way of various unusual examples, including a woman who only eats crisps and a man who swims in glacial lakes in conditions that would kill you or I. But […]
HPV vaccine Goes global
A year or so ago my twelve year old daughter was told that all her class were to be given the vaccination against the sexually transmitted HPV virus, assuming they consented to it. All her peers went ahead, probably with little thought on it. However we did stop to think about it, and discussed it […]
Disabled people fear change in assisted suicide law
Changing the law on assisted suicide would put pressure on disabled people to commit suicide, according to new research. The new ComRes poll found that 70 per cent of disabled people were concerned that such a change would lead to ‘pressure being placed on disabled people to end their lives prematurely’ The survey, commissioned by […]
Highlighting disparities in maternal care on International Midwives Day
Today is International Midwives Day, and many organisations are using this to highlight the awful disparities in maternal care, and maternal and infant mortality around the globe. As we blogged yesterday, there is the additional, largely overlooked tragedy of still births. And all of these issues could be addressed, in large part at least, by […]
How could anyone object to teaching schoolgirls to say ‘no to sex’?
MPs have voted 67-61 in favour of a bill introduced by Conservative MP Nadine Dorries, which wants schools to ensure that sex education for girls includes ‘information and advice on the benefits of abstinence from sexual activity’. The ten minute rule bill proceeds to a second reading next January but is unlikely to become law […]
Stillbirths: tragedy and controversy
New figures from The Lancet reveal the tragedy of the scale of stillbirths, estimated at around 3 million worldwide, every year; or more than 8,200 stillborn babies a day. This vast number eclipses deaths from AIDS/HIV and many other diseases that get far more money. Perhaps not surprisingly, 98% of these are in low- and […]
YouTube video of assisted suicide could sway vulnerable people
The Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail have both reported on the tragic story of a British couple in their 80s who died in a suicide pact at their home in Victoria Australia last Thursday. Don Flounders, 81, suffered from mesothelioma, which is an incurable form of lung cancer and his 88-year-old wife Iris, who was not suffering […]
The health risks of obesity – a challenge to Christians
Having just returned from a Christian medical conference where large (especially male) abdomens were very much in evidence I was interested to see that the two lead stories on the BBC health pages this morning deal with the health consequences of obesity. The first story, published yesterday, reports on a study from the Mayo Clinic […]
Russia leads the way in dealing with demographic time-bomb
I warned recently that unless something is done to reverse current demographic trends, economic necessity, together with the ‘culture of death’ ideology which is becoming more openly accepted, may well mean that the generation that killed its children will in turn be killed by its own children. In other words legalised abortion will lead to legalised […]
More fiction and hype about embryonic stem cells as scientists fear withdrawal of funding in patent scrap
Stem cell scientists are kicking up an enormous fuss over a ruling expected very soon from the European Court of Justice about patents for embryonic stem cells. They are up to their usual tricks hyping up the therapeutic potential of these cells for a variety of degenerative diseases and the BBC is obliging in its […]