LIFE Lines

The government has chosen to postpone some crucial HFE Bill votes until after the summer parliamentary recess (i.e. until at least October).

For more information see www.passionforlife.org.uk.

Passion for Life

Please continue to contact your MPs and members of the government about this crucial legislation.

If you want an update on any area of LIFE's work, then you can read all about it here in the 2007 Annual Report.

We admire principled people. Or at least, we think we do. If we think about it, the people we really admire are those who have the principles that we believe to be true, or beneficial, or at least relatively harmless.

A reverential attitude to “the facts” and “the science” pervades modern policy debates, reflecting the technocratic and utilitarian spirit of the age. In the Labour manifesto for the 1997 General Election, the party insisted that “what counts is what works”, and the phrase was frequently heard in the early years of the Blair government. On one level this desire to base policy on hard facts is commendable.

Evan Harris MP is a frequent and vociferous contributor to media debates over life issues. Often he is pitched against speakers from LIFE or similar organisations, and one of his favourite tactics is to suggest that the pro-life position lacks a sound scientific basis. In the recent debate over the need for a father, for example, he suggested that all the relevant evidence supported his view that children brought up by gay couples did not have worse prospects than those brought up by male/female couples, and challenged his opponents to show otherwise.

Left paralysed and unable to breathe without the help of a machine, Perry Cross’s life was devastated in a game of rugby 14 years ago. His search for a cure took him all over the world, crossing paths with Superman’s Christopher Reeves, and ending in a small clinic in Delhi, India.

A man whom I admire a great deal is the world renowned moral philosopher Professor John Haldane of St. Andrews University. A few years ago, the professor gave a talk on conscience and described our conscience as an ‘encounter with our very self’. As Haldane develops this idea, he talks about how conscience isn’t some warm fuzzy voice in our heads, saying ‘yes, that’s the right thing to do’. It’s an encounter with the whole self, our being, our beliefs, our reasoning and understanding.

Passion 4 Life are requesting that as many people as possible turn out this week for a mass lobby of Parliament. See the attached flier for details...

Recently I’ve lost quite a bit of weight. I still have a little bit more to lose, but I’m nearly there. I never really saw myself as fat or clinically obese – but I clearly was. Don’t get me wrong, I knew I was overweight and I knew that I should lose weight, but all the dieting, all the half-hearted attempts at doing anything about it, never resulted in much. I would eat well for a while and then go back to my old ways. Nothing would get better: if anything it got worse.

One of the fundamental problems with this research is that it is creating entities that may or may not be human; their real status is unknown. Thus, the question arises, is it an animal or is it human? Which laws, therefore, should apply to it? Should these entities be regulated under laws that pertain to human embryos or laws that govern animal experimentation?