LIFE Lines

Debbie Purdy wanted a guarantee from the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) that her husband Omar Puente would not be prosecuted if he helped her travel to Switzerland to kill herself at the assisted suicide organisation Dignitas.

The trickle of evidence about the health outcomes of children born through IVF is becoming steadily stronger.

It has been revealed that GPs in some parts of the country are prescribing Implanon, a contraceptive implant, to girls as young as thirteen.

Michaela Aston, a spokeswoman for LIFE, commented that
:

This almost unbelievable story has reignited the debate over sex education, and is a highly potent illustration of how our current approach to the subject is failing young people. LIFE spokespeople have been very busy commenting in the media.

For National Marriage Week, the Daily Telegraph carries an excellent editorial on the value of marriage in a time of recession and uncertainty.

This blog tackled the same topic last year.

A West Country GP and member of the Optimum Population Trust - a sinister body with whom this blog has
crossed swords previously - is refusing to help her patients have more than two children.

While she is within her legal rights to do so, the reasoning on which she relies is bizarre and wrong, as this article makes clear.

After 2 weeks in a coma, a woman recovers following a kiss from her husband.

What a great sign of love and the instinct to protect and preserve each human individual.

Where there's life, there's hope.

Finally, a human embryonic stem cell treatment trial has started up. One of the most frequently made pragmatic arguments against embryonic stem cell use – that it was essentially a blind alley offering little hope of real cures – now looks a little shaky. Now, this is only one trial (as against around 2000 trials and more than 70 working treatmentsfrom ASCs).

Note: this Lifeline reflects the author’s personal thoughts, and not any official policy of LIFE.

If we are going to mention sex at all in schools, then some kind of ideologically loaded approach is inevitable. As alluded to in the first part of this LifeLine, the morally neutral approach is itself based on an ideological perspective, and a particularly barren and damaging one at that.

The phrase, “whacking moles” is sometimes used to refer to a pointless or futile task – try to “whack” a mole on the head with a hammer, and it will just dive back into the hole, only to stick its head out of another hole. As an example, it has recently been used to describe fighting insurgency by throwing ever more military hardware at the problem. It could equally be used to describe the Government fighting the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe, by throwing ever more contraception at the problem.