Morning-after pills don’t cut teen pregnancy rates
Morning-after pills don’t cut teen pregnancy according to a new study due to be published in the Journal…
CMF members blog from Haiti
Over the last few weeks, nine CMF members have been working in Haiti, as part of a Samaritan's Purse…
Euthanasia bills fall at first hurdle
Last November I reported on the overwhelming defeat in the Scottish Parliament of Margo Macdonald’s…
The ‘ultrasound’ Jesus reminds us of the meaning of the incarnation
The creators of the 2010 ‘Christmas Starts With Christ' campaign say that its purpose is to bring attention…
How common is abortion to save the life of the mother?
Ireland’s ban on abortion was upheld this week by the European Court of Human Rights in a case brought…
A new exhibition touring the United States is highlighting lessons to be learned from the Nazi doctors
Most when remembering the holocaust will think of six million Jews but apparently this was only the final…
Two letters to the Times regarding Lord Falconer’s Commission on Assisted Dying
I have had two letters regarding Lord Falconer's Commission on Assisted Dying published on the Times…
Former Lord Chancellor misrepresents law on assisted suicide in national newspaper
Yesterday the Care Not Killing Alliance wrote to Lord Falconer, the former Lord Chancellor (pictured),…
ICMDA HIV Initiative 2010 Dignity and Right to Health Awards
The joint winners of the 2010 Dignity and Right to Health award are Dr Gisela Schneider from Germany…
More knowledge of fetal development leads to new US laws making late abortion illegal
In April this year the US state of Nebraska legislature signed off a bill that could weaken further the…
Chile’s president says country’s respect for life mandated great efforts to save lives of Chilean miners
I see that 26 of the rescued Chilean miners have just been welcomed to Manchester United by football…
Lucy Letby- a deep grief
This is such a deeply disturbing case. One of the most horrifying scandals to ever hit the NHS. A neonatal nurse killed seven babies and attempted to murder six more. The perpetrator being a nurse is causing our nurse and midwife members, and us in the CMF Nurses & Midwives team, real grief. First, we’d […]
Doctors on strike – reflections of a conflicted consultant
On 1 August 1983, my life changed forever. I started work in the NHS. I lost all that I had known of normal life and have spent the last 40 years working in a broken system. I am in no doubt it needs fixing. Navigating endless demands with inadequate resources has been costly. From the […]
Complete societal capture on abortion
The sentencing of a woman for two years imprisonment for performing a home abortion with pills obtained via a phone consultation raises lots of questions. However, the main question asked in an almost universal chorus of headlines was why are our ‘archaic’ and ‘unfair’ abortion laws still in place? ‘A woman has been jailed for […]
Mitochondrial manipulated births: a muted reception
For a prospect anticipated for almost 20 years, the announcement in a Guardian exclusive of the successful birth of one or more babies from one or other technique of what is usually termed mitochondrial donation therapy (MDT) had a more muted reception the following day than might have been predicted. It came second after the […]
When is a ‘synthetic’ embryo a real embryo?
Embryonic stem cell-derived embryos (ESCDEs) have been around for a long time. Last year, an ESCDE, assembled from mouse cells in vitro, replicated natural mouse embryo development in utero up to day 8.5 post-fertilisation. In mouse gestation terms, this amounts to the completion of gastrulation and the start of organ formation and neurulation. In February […]
You wouldn’t do it to a dog! Current fetal pain relief in NHS abortions
This blog should perhaps carry one of those BBC-style warnings, ‘some viewers may find the following content distressing’. This is because it deals with something most of us would prefer not to think about – the dispatching of an unwanted, late-second or third-trimester fetus, or ‘feticide.’ We do not here comment on the morality of […]
Moral flip-flopping over doctors and the death penalty
I have long argued that ethicists who advocate euthanasia while at the same time being opposed to capital punishment have a morally untenable position and recent events have once again demonstrated why if you think it is wrong for doctors to administer death as a punishment, it is logically inconsistent to agree that they can […]
‘Because you’re worth it?’ The BMA and the junior doctors’ strikes
Easter 2023 is likely to be remembered for a long time in the NHS. Straight after a four-day bank holiday weekend, with many senior doctors already on leave, the BMA called junior doctor members in England out on a 96-hour total strike, without exempting emergency cover other than for major incidents. Their aim? A 35 […]
‘Of Mice and Men’
The Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in 2018 really hit the headlines when Prof He Janjkui announced he had carried out heritable genome editing of twin girls in China to make them more resistant to HIV infection. In contrast, the Third International Summit in London in early March 2023 got far less press […]
When is a baby not a baby?
Last week Panorama ran an ‘investigation’ into pregnancy advice centres which they claimed give misleading information to pregnant women. They found 57 centres listed online, could find no fault with the advice given by 34 of them and sent an undercover journalist in to investigate three. The programme was, as is typical, biased and unbalanced. […]
Neuro-silicon interfaces: a new mode of being?
The idea of humankind being merely machines has a long history, stretching back to Julien Offrey De La Mettrie’s Man a Machine, published in 1747. The ‘man-machine’ of the 18th century was, of course, a clockwork automaton. It was not until 1945 that Norbert Weiner, in his ground-breaking Cybernetics – Or Control and Communication in […]
Desperate for organs
‘What can a man give in return for his life?’ asks Jesus rhetorically of his disciples and the crowds following him (Mark 8:37, RSV). In doing so, he implicitly acknowledges that people will go to almost any lengths to save their own skins. They will also do the same for those they love. If the […]