
blogs


Do Christians divorce at lower or higher rates than others?
It is widely assumed that Christians divorce at roughly the same rate as non-Christians. This ‘fact’…

Trickle of British suicide cases to Dignitas continues as Swiss vote for status quo
Switzerland's parliament voted against a bid to toughen controls on assisted suicide this week, rejecting…

Why does God allow suffering?
What causes suffering? Is just fate? Retribution? All in the mind? Random molecules?
These are some…

Patients with dementia and psychiatric illnesses included as Dutch euthanasia cases rise steeply
According to Dutch media reports today, euthanasia deaths in the Netherlands in 2011 increased by 18%…

What do Ludwig van Beethoven, Justin Bieber and Tim Tebow have in common?
A professor in a college ethics class presented his students with a problem. He said, ‘A man has…

Warning to UK – Oregon Health Plan steers patients towards suicide
Members of the pro-euthanasia movement frequently point to the US state of Oregon, which legalised assisted…

BBC article on ‘gay therapies’ is simplistic, misleading and ignores much of the available evidence
Should people with unwanted feelings of same-sex attraction seek professional help? And if so what kind…

Major split in LibCon Coalition over assisted suicide
The Liberal Democrat conference voted yesterday to back the legalisation of ‘medically assisted dying’,…

Liberal Democrats back Dutch style legislation which would lead to 13,000 British euthanasia deaths annually
On Sunday 23 September the Liberal Democrat conference debated and passed a motion on ‘medically assisted…

Abortion after rape – the issues and emotions involved are not as straightforward as most people presume
I was interested to see published this week a statement from the ‘Ad Hoc Committee of Women Pregnant…

Current law supports eugenic abortion for disabled people – our letter in today’s Daily Telegraph
I am one of nine joint signatories to a letter in the Daily Telegraph today arguing that the success…
Developing Health Course 2010 – part V
Day 8 and it’s surgery. John Rennie and Colin Binks gave such an encouraging presentation that we all now feel we could do a laparotomy! We learnt some other useful skills too, including suturing (useful or the laparotomy of course) and taking skin grafts, practised on oranges so it’s fruit salad for lunch tomorrow. The […]
Developing Health Course 2010 – part IV
Back for week two of the course, refreshed by a weekend off. A few of our international visitors enjoyed a trip round some of the sights of London – Herve from Benin was amazed to see how the British dress outside Buckingham Palace… Monday was trauma and orthopaedics day and we had a star-studded cast […]
What will it take for the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) actually to prosecute someone for assisted suicide?
The Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Keir Starmer, whose job it is to prosecute people who break the law, announced last Friday that he did not consider it to be in the public interest to bring a case against former GP Michael Irwin (pictured), for assisting the suicide of pancreatic cancer sufferer Ray Cutkelvin in […]
How seriously should we take the recent report from the RCOG claiming that fetuses cannot feel pain until 24 weeks gestation? Not very!
‘A fisherman once told me that fish have neither sense nor sensation, but how he knew this he could not tell me’ (Bertrand Russell) In a House of Lords debate on abortion in November 2007, Lord Clarke, commented, ‘I do not know whether fish feel pain or not, but (Bertrand) Russell’s point was that we […]
Developing Health Course 2010 – part III
Today is community health day and I’m currently in the back of the lecture theatre watching Alex Duncan’s amazing video of life in the back of beyond in Central Asia. He lived there for 6 years with his family, setting up a primary health care programme. It was hard graft but through his work, child […]
Developing Health Course 2010 – part II
Two more full days of the course – mosquitoes, worms, and other hazardous parasites yesterday and HIV and palliative care today. There is a bit of time at the end of the day to enjoy that rare event, the English summer evening, and Albert from Malawi has played his first game of croquet – ‘Give […]
Developing Health Course 2010 – part I
It’s been a wonderful couple of days at the Developing Health Course with the combination of excellent medical teaching and spiritual inspiration which makes this course unique. My brain is hurting a little after whistling through the whole of paediatrics in a day yesterday, and the whole of general medicine in an afternoon today! There […]
The case of Howard Martin shows why we should not accept any law allowing ‘compassionate killing’
Dr Howard Martin, a now retired Co Durham MP, was struck off on Friday by the General Medical Council (GMC) for giving excessive morphine doses to 18 dying patients. He has since admitted, in an interview with the Daily Telegraph that he deliberately hastened the deaths of patients in his care, some without their consent, […]
What the Sunday Telegraph doesn’t tell you about repeat abortions
I was quoted on the front page of the Sunday Telegraph this morning in an article reporting that 89 teenage girls aged 17 or under had had their third abortion last year. The article is accompanied by a strong editorial criticising government sex education policies and suggesting that we should actually be advocating sexual abstinence for teenagers […]
Three parent embryos? Calm down all!
The papers this morning are full of reports that researchers at Newcastle University have successfully produced ‘three parent’ embryos as a first step to preventing maternally transmitted mitochondrial disease. There are about 50 different known mitochondrial diseases which are passed on in genes coded by mitochondrial (as opposed to nuclear) DNA. They range hugely both […]
DPP guidelines due out soon – will they just be a licence for legalisation of assisted suicide by stealth?
Attempts in the House of Lords both in 2006 (Joffe) and 2009 (Falconer) failed to legalise assisted suicide in this country. The medical profession (BMA and Royal Colleges), faith groups and disability groups also remain firmly opposed to a change in the law. However we are now seeing fresh attempts to change the law in […]
Dog bloggers, MPs expenses, abandoned wheelchairs and an Old Testament prophet
The Cambridgeshire police recently failed to respond to a 999 call about a teenager who was being beaten up with a baseball bat – allegedly because they were short-staffed. But they could still afford to maintain a German Shepherd puppy called Lukas who writes a blog. Judge Sean Enright said the police response ‘smacked of […]