News, Dana Rosemary Scallon, a prominent pro-life member of the European parliament from Ireland, has expressed her shock at confirmation that a draft regulation on international aid would oblige Irish tax-payers to fund abortions in the poorest countries, despite Ireland's pro-life constituti...

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News, Surgeons in London have successfully performed heart surgery on an unborn child. A team led by Dr Helena Gardiner from the centre for foetal care at Queen Charlotte's hospital used a technique developed by specialists at the Hammersmith and Royal Brompton hospitals, also in London, to un...

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News, In a landmark address to the Italian parliament today, Pope John Paul II condemned abortion and urged Italians to have more children. In his speech, which constituted the first time a pope had addressed Italy's national legislature since a secular Italian state outside papal jurisdiction...

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News, Legislators in Lithuania have sent a bill to liberalise the law relating to abortion and reproductive technologies back to the government for reworking without specifying any deadline. The move by the Lithuanian parliament yesterday means that legislators will not reconsider the bill bef...

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News, The president of the US conference of Catholic bishops has described the 1973 supreme court ruling in Roe v Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion, as "disastrous for our nation". In his address yesterday to open a four-day meeting of the US bishops in Washington D.C....

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News, A row has erupted among doctors at an English hospital over plans to abort a twin boy in the final weeks of pregnancy. A consultant at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle first proposed aborting the twin a month ago after the child was diagnosed with a heart defect which he conside...

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Outrage at revelations by test-tube baby expert—call for moratorium London, --The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children has expressed outrage at the revelations of Dr Sammy Lee, an embryologist who has worked for many IVF clinics, published in today's Sunday Telegraph. Dr Lee lists a catalog...

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News, Official statistics revealed by a British government minister yesterday indicate that 925,747 embryos have been created in the course of IVF treatment in Britain since 1991, of whom only 423,153 [46%] were transferred into a woman for implantation. Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, a government ...

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News, Reports from the US indicate that pro-life candidates have enjoyed great success not only in elections for congress but also in elections for state legislatures and governorships. A number of prominent pro-life state governors were re-elected, while Alaska, Minnesota and South Dakota wer...

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News, In a significant victory for pro-lifers at the United Nations, a vote on the extent of an international convention against human cloning has been put off until next year. Delegates at the UN in New York have been trying to agree on what guidance should be given to the drafters of an inte...

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SPUC welcomes delay to defective UN cloning ban London, --The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) has welcomed the US-led delay to a Franco-German proposal for a United Nations ban on cloning humans with the intention of their being born. Speaking from Brussels, Peter Smith, SPUC's ...

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News, It is reported that Sainsbury's, a British supermarket chain, has ended its participation in a government-backed trial scheme to provide the abortifacient morning-after pill free of charge to girls under 16 without parents' knowledge. A spokesman for the chain insisted that the end of th...

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News, It is reported that a terminally ill cancer-sufferer has become the first person from Britain to take his own life at an assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland. The 77-year-old man was given a barbiturate by staff at Dignitas in Zurich, which he then swallowed in an apartment rented by t...

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News, Lithuania's parliament is to vote on a bill to liberalise the law relating to abortion and reproductive technologies on 11 November. It is reported that the bill is the initiative of three private reproductive health clinics, one of which is owned by the daughter of Lithuania's prime min...

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News, The US government has extended the definition of "human subjects" to include embryos and foetuses in a charter directing the activities of a new committee to oversee research. The newly-established federal advisory committee will be concerned with experiments on human subjects and the ex...

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News, The Holy See's main negotiator at United Nations meetings since 1996 has entirely rejected claims by the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) that the UN convention on the rights of the child has established an international right to abortion. A brochure on the IPPF website...

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News, The countries which are applying to join the European Union are set to sign an agreement which ensures their full participation in the sixth framework programme for research. The so-called memoranda of understanding will mean that the EU candidate countries assume the same rights and obl...

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News, Police in England are to investigate an allegation of unlawful killing against a doctor who performed a late-term abortion on a baby with a harelip. Joanna Jepson, a 26-year-old Cambridge student who is studying to join the clergy of the Church of England, made the complaint after offici...

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SPUC expresses sorrow and concern at IVF errors London, --SPUC has expressed its sorrow and concern at reports of mistakes made during in vitro fertilisation at a London fertility clinic. Paul Tully, SPUC's general secretary, said: "Here we have yet another instance of human life being treated as a ...

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News, This Sunday (27 October) marks the 35th anniversary of the passing of Britain's Abortion Act. Since the Act came into effect on 27 April 1968, nearly 6,000,000 unborn children have been killed under its terms. Despite assurances by the original supporters of the bill in parliament that i...

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