The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill left the House of Lords on 4 February and will enter the House of Commons within weeks. It threatens individual, family and societal life more than any other piece of legislation for decades.

A powerful lobby of medically qualified peers and science institutions such as the Royal Society and Medical Research Council, together with the government whip requiring Peers to support every aspect of the bill, have meant that all attempts to amend it have so far been heavily defeated.

Time is very short, and humanly speaking, the only hope now for curbing the bill's effects is a massive grass-roots protest to MPs. CMF is working closely with prolife MPs and other Christian organisations to ensure that our arguments are heard and that MPs understand the threats the bill poses before it is too late. This has brought a backlash against CMF and its members in the lead up to the debate with protests at public meetings, outside our offices (see page 3) and through the national press.

Threat to human dignity

The government has caved in to pressure from scientists and the biotechnology industry and proposes to create animal human hybrids ('cybrids', chimeras and mixed species fertilised embryos) in order to generate embryonic stem cells for research. Ironically, new research in both Japan and the USA published last November – reprogramming adult skin cells back to produce cells with all the potential of human embryonic stem cells – makes these plans obsolete but the government is pushing them through anyway. CMF is urging Parliament to ban hybrids and instead to invest in ethical therapies using adult and umbilical cord blood stem cells.

Threat to the family

There are proposals to allow 'saviour siblings' to provide transplant material for children with 'serious' as opposed to 'lifethreatening' conditions and to extend the indications for preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). These will further commodify children, using them as a means to an end. Removing the requirement to consider the need for a father for children created by IVF will further damage families and society. CMF is urging Parliament to ban the use of saviour siblings, to invest more heavily in umbilical cord blood banking as an ethical alternative and to retain the reference for a 'need for a father' for all IVF children.

Threat to life

Pro-choice MPs, abortion providers and institutions like the RCOG and BMA are pushing for further liberalisation of the abortion law. They aim to bring in abortion on demand in the first trimester by ending the requirement for two doctors' signatures, allowing nurse-led medical abortion in GP surgeries with completion at home, barring prolife doctors from seeing women with unplanned pregnancies and extending the Act to Northern Ireland. CMF is urging Parliament to reject all these and to support reasonable restrictive amendments like reducing upper time limits, ending discriminatory abortion of the disabled, and providing balanced evidence-based counselling independently of the abortion service.

The bill will have three main stages in the Commons and then any amendments pass back to the Lords for its agreement. When agreement is reached between the two Houses, and after royal assent, the bill will then become law.

Please take time

• Write - to your MP and to the PM. MPs take letters and visits from constituents very seriously and most are profoundly uninformed or misinformed about the contents and effects of this bill. Ask Prime Minister Gordon Brown for the government to withdraw the whip on the bill so that government MPs and Peers may vote according to conscience and on the basis of the evidence (a conscience vote on abortion has already been promised).
• Educate - your churches, pastors, friends and colleagues about the bill.
• Pray - for MPs and for all those in authority voting or advising on the bill, and for God to work a miracle through resistance to the bill to amend it and to bring down the 200,000 annual abortion rate.

You will find all the resources you require directly linked from the CMF homepage.