LIFE Lines

The government is in the process of throwing more money and legislation at research using embryonic stem cells, but is it smart medicine or mindless ideology?

The sex education debate is back, in the shape of Channel 4’s “The Sex Education Show” and BBC Five Live’s “Let’s Talk About Sex”.

Clearly, all is not well, particularly as far as teenagers and young people are concerned. STI infection rates continue are on a firm upward trend, while teenage pregnancy and teenage abortion remain stubbornly high, despite hundreds of millions of pounds of investment over the last decade.

The remaining stages of this Bill will be debated in the House of Commons on 22 October.

Please contact your MP as a matter of urgency to let him/her know that you are opposed to efforts to liberalise our abortion legislation. Postcards and other briefing materials, as well as up to date news, can be obtained from the Passion for Life website.

Passion for Life

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.