News,

The second reading debate in the House of Lords on the UK government's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill got under way on Monday. The debate was adjourned after Catholic Labour peer Lord Brennan collapsed in the chamber shortly after making a speech. Many peers expressed concern at the proposal in the Bill to omit the requirement to consider a child's need for a father when conducting IVF treatment. Others stressed the objections to allowing hybrid embryos under the new legislation. The recent announcement that Professor Ian Wilmut, the creator of Dolly the sheep, has abandoned (human) cloning technology to pursue stem cell research with adult tissue was noted by several peers during the debate. [SPUC, 19 November] Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, has criticised the bill's plans to allow IVF treatment without the assurance of a father's involvement after the birth. In a letter to the Times he said that this provision "radically undermines the place of the father in a child's life, and makes the natural rights of the child subordinate to the desires of the couple." [BBC, 19 November, and Telegraph, 19 November] A statement by Cardinal O'Brien, Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, and Archbishop Conti of Glasgow raised the issue of the creation of animal-human hybrids which, they said, was a "dangerous and unnecessary precedent which does not respect the dignity of the human person." [Zenit, 18 November] Parliament will also the debate the possibility of allowing embryos which are the product of three parents to be implanted in women. The procedure is seen as a cure for mitochondrial disease and involves transferring the nucleus of a fertilised ovum with damaged mitochondria into an unfertilised ovum with healthy mitochondria. [Independent on Sunday, 18 November]

The Pope has called on health care professionals to give elderly sick people respect and support, and not to give way to the temptation of euthanasia. Speaking to participants in a conference called The Pastoral Care of Elderly Sick People promoted by the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry, Pope Benedict said that euthanasia was one of the more alarming symptoms of the culture of death. He also recalled the teaching and example of John Paul II, his predecessor. [Zenit, 18 November] Dignitas, the Swiss group which arranges assisted suicides, wants to extend its services to Germany. Ludwig Minelli, the group's head, told the Landbote newspaper that he had a contact in Germany who was prepared to risk prosecution to help seriously ill people to commit suicide. Last year, 57% of Dignitas clients came from Germany. [Reuters Africa, 18 November]

The head of Amnesty International in the UK has supported the organisation's new policy on abortion. In an interview for the Guardian newspaper, Ms Kate Allen dismissed the opposition of the Catholic church as nonsensical, and revealed that only 222 out of a quarter of a million British members had resigned their membership, while 105 had increased their donations. [Guardian, 19 November] The Catholic bishops of England and Wales have written to all Catholic primary and secondary schools and sixth form colleges saying that they should no longer have ties with Amnesty and should not raise money for it. Catholics are urged to continue to work for justice by putting into practice the social teaching of the Catholic Church by supporting other organisations. [Times, 16 November]

Professor Ian Wilmut, who cloned Dolly the sheep, has announced that he will no longer pursue cloning to obtain human stem cells for therapies. He has decided that there is greater potential in a technique pioneered using mice by Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University, Japan, in which stem cells have been developed from fragments of skin. [Scotland on Sunday, 18 November]

A pro-life group in Colorado has gained approval from the state's supreme court to start collecting signatures for a ballot proposal for a constitutional amendment that would define a human embryo as a person from fertilisation. In approving the language of the proposal, the court over-ruled objections from the pro-abortion lobby. Colorado for Equal Rights has six months in which to collect 76,000 signatures. Similar campaigns are being run in five other states. [Guardian, 14 November]

Quintuplets born to a Russian woman in a British hospital are doing well. The babies were delivered at 26 weeks by caesarean section by Dr Lawrence Impey of the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. He was contacted by the mother's relatives after her doctor in Russia had advised selective abortion for some of the babies. All medical costs have been met by a group of Russian philanthropists. [Mirror, 15 November]

To subscribe to SPUC's email information services, please visit www.spuc.org.uk/em-signup. The reliability of the news herein is dependent on that of the cited sources, which are paraphrased rather than quoted. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the society. © Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, 2018