News,
SPUC has presented a submission to the court of human rights in Strasbourg as it prepares to hear the case of an Irish woman who claims that the Republic's ban on abortion breaches the European Convention on Human Rights. The submission details previous court rulings that demonstrate that there is no human right to abortion and that individual nations are entitled to grant full legal protection to the unborn child. [SPUC press release, 19 August]
Dr Mo Mowlam, the former Northern Ireland Secretary, has died at a hospice in Kent. Dr Mowlam had difficulty with her balance as a result of radiotherapy to treat a brain tumour and did not regain consciousness after hitting her head during a fall earlier in the month. Her food and fluids were withdrawn several days ago. [This is London, 19 August, SPUC source] Liam Gibson SPUC's Northern Ireland Development Officer commented: "Naturally, we offer our condolences to Mo Mowlam's friends and family and pay tribute to the part she played in the Good Friday peace agreement. However, we regret her wish to introduce a review of abortion law in the Province which she conceded ran contrary to the will of Northern Ireland's democratically elected representatives."
A study produced by researchers from the University of Bristol and the Royal Hallamshire Hospital, Sheffield, has found that the vast majority of UK andrology and embryology laboratories do not comply with the World Health Organisations' recommendations for sperm testing. Only two out of 37 andrology laboratories complied with the recommendations which were introduced six years ago. The authors described the results as 'very disappointing and somewhat surprising'. [British Medical Journal, 20 August]
A Catholic group has written to 75,000 people asking for assistance in its campaign to have pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia academics removed from their positions in US Catholic universities. The Cardinal Newman Society has named academics such as Fr Kevin O'Rourke of Loyola University's bioethics institute, who has argued that it is morally permissible to remove food and fluids from disabled patients, and Daniel Maguire of Marquette University who stated on Irish radio: "The idea of a little cluster of stem cells being a person goes against the longest Christian tradition in existence and makes no sense at all." [LifeSiteNews.com, 18 August]
The US-based Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer has criticised a women's magazine for denying a link between abortion and breast cancer, lifenews.com reports. An article in Glamour magazine claimed that the link had been disproved. Karen Malec of Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer said: "If the link was 'disproved' why did British researcher Patrick Carroll present new research to the Joint Statistical Meetings in Minneapolis on August 10 showing abortion to be the 'best predictor of British breast cancer trends.'" She added: "We challenge Glamour to find just one scientist who has disproved the biological explanation for the link. No scientist dares to challenge the explanation because it makes good physiological sense." [Lifenews.com, 18 August]
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