The Catholics in government are getting uppity.
The Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill is going through the House of Lords (the unelected upper house).
Pro-life side of the argy (pron. ar-gee, Manchester for argument) here.
Among other things, it legislates to allow the production of hybrid human-animal embryos to establish stem-cell lines and removes the need for IVF providers to take into account the need for a father when considering a application for treatment.
The ‘pro-lifers’ in the Lords have tried in a series of amendments to stop, slow or dilute the provisions in the Bill. (Religion: noses out of science, please) Reading the debates, they all seem to have been defeated. So now the Catholic Cabinet Ministers in the Labour Government are making a fuss and threatening rebellion, this at a time when Prime Minister Gordon Brown is weakened by the recent resignation of a cabinet minister under something of a cloud.
In a past life I worked with these people, and their agenda has not changed. They tried to amend the law on abortion to lower the upper time limits, and while talking the language of the embryo’s right to life, they privately admitted that if they won this one it would be the first skirmish in abolishing abortion completely. They oppose IVF, bristle at contraceptive provision to teenagers, and embryo research is anathema. The bioethics commission would have been nothing more than another body to bog down scientific research.
If Labour’s Cabinet Ministers don’t like it they should resign from cabinet, speak and vote against it from the back benches. We elect a government to run this country and the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church has no place sticking its nose or strangely invented theology into it.
Prof Colin Blakemore, writing in today’s Observer about the implications of Craig Venter’s recent artificial genome breakthrough says:
There is no widely agreed regulatory framework for this kind of research. We need to debate this issue based on rational argument, rather than the kind of anti-scientific attitudes that we see emerging in Parliament around the new Human Embryology and Fertilisation Bill, and pushed by the Catholic church. Legitimate concerns about risk must not be hijacked by those who set religious convention above the value of science.
We should applaud the extraordinary scientific advance announced last week. And we should reflect on what this tells us about the nature of life. But we also need to think.
