News,

Fertility experts have revealed a new procedure which they say could enable women who have passed the menopause or who have been rendered infertile by cancer to conceive using in vitro fertilisation (IVF). Dr Kutluk Oktay, assistant professor at Cornell University's Centre of Reproduction in New York, who pioneered the procedure with Dr Roger Gosden, a British expert, said that ovaries had been transplanted into the arms of two women and kick-started into producing eggs with the use of drugs. These two women, who received the treatment in the USA, have had eggs removed and hope to use IVF to conceive, though attempts at fertilising the eggs have so far proved fruitless. Dominic Baster, information officer at the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, asked: "How many new and unique human beings will be created and discarded before this procedure is perfected? This is a classic example of a perceived right to reproduce taking precedence over the sanctity of human life." [Metro, Daily Mail, BBC News online , SPUC London, 24 October] The Chinese company which is producing supplies of the RU-486 abortion pill for the American market has been found to have imported both contaminated and mislabelled drugs into the USA, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. Officials in Cincinnati, Ohio, detained one drug made by the Hua Lian Pharmaceutical Company earlier this year on the basis of false or misleading labelling, and another drug, produced by the same company, was found by the California Department of Health Services to be tainted in 1998. [EWTN News, 23 October ] Senator Joseph Lieberman, Democratic vice-presidential candidate in next month's US elections, has been excommunicated by a rabbinical court. The New York torah court declared that Senator Lieberman, who claims to be an observant Jew, had misrepresented and falsified the teachings of the Torah by, among other things, his support for partial birth abortions. The decision of the three Orthodox rabbis, constituting New York's beth din (house of judgement) is not necessarily binding on Orthodox Jewish communities in other parts of the US. [CNS, 24 October; from NewsMax.com ] A Catholic publication in the United States has reported that millions of children trick-or-treating this hallowe'en will be carrying donation boxes for UNICEF, the pro-abortion United Nations children's fund. The National Catholic Register mentioned that a sex education booklet partly designed by UNICEF and recently distributed in El Salvador provided information on abortion. UNICEF has participated in the distribution of millions of abortifacient intra-uterine devices around the world and in 1996 it announced its intention to distribute "contraceptives and drugs to terminate pregnancies" to "a million starving refugees" on the border between Rwanda and Zaïre. [Zenit news agency, 22 October]