LIFE Lines

What is there to show for ten years and £286 million pounds spent on a teenage pregnancy strategy which has focused primarily on easier access to contraception?

The idea that the recent rise in teenage pregnancy rates is merely a “blip” is a denial of reality. The teenage pregnancy strategy has never succeeded in establishing a long-term and significant downward trend in teen pregnancies (even with increased use of the morning after pill helping to mask the true number of teenage conceptions).

When President Obama overturned the ban on the US government using taxpayers’ money to fund research on new lines of embryonic stem cells, it was suggested that this was somehow “taking politics out of science”, allowing research to continue unhindered by ideology.

This is dangerous nonsense. As one leading American commentator has noted:

Objectors to embryo research are often accused of being anti-scientific or ignorant, fixated on ideology at the expense of science. It's a lazy straw man argument which shows up the condescension and bad faith of some (but by no means all) on the pro-embryo research side.

LIFE has consistently campaigned against research using stem cells derived from embryos; not only because such research is inherently wrong, but also because adult stem cells are far more useful, without the associated moral controversy. There is, of course, another reason: if we accept the manipulation of embryos for medical purposes, then where do we go from here?

Former Secretary of State for Health Patricia Hewitt is proposing a law that will provide immunity from prosecution for family members who help their relatives travel to foreign "suicide clinics".

When pro-lifers talk about adult stem cells (ASCs) as an effective ethical alternative to embryonic stem cells (ESCs) – particularly the relatively new technology of induced pluripotency – a frequently heard counter-argument is that we have only been able to make such rapid and promising advances because of the use of human embryos in destructive research.

A British-Canadian research team has published the early conclusions from another very promising study into induced pluripotency i.e. making adult stem cells behave like embryonic stem cells, thus giving us the capabilities of ESCs without destroying human life and without the harmful tumour formation that blights many attempts to use ESCs in therapy.

When pregnant women are told by their doctors that chemotherapy is required, they face a heart-rending choice, as chemotherapy is often fatal to unborn children. One woman made a very noble choice to refuse chemo and give her children a fighting chance, at the risk of her own life.

Dr Neil Scolding, Professor of Clinical Neurosciences at Bristol University, has written a brilliantly incisive article on the future of stem cell research in Standpoint magazine, arguing that as well as being unethical, embryo research is now also becoming increasingly redundant. An extract:

LIFE is opposed to the use of fetal and embryonic stem cells on principle not just because they violate the dignity of the human beings from whom the stem cells are taken, but also because it would seem that they are often unsafe.