The Select Committee reviewing Lord Joffe’s Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill was due to report on 4 April as CMF News went to press. The Mental Capacity Bill had gone through report stage and was due for a final vote before Parliament closed in the run up to the election. By the time you read this major decisions may well have been made – but the debate will run and run and the Spring 2005 edition of Triple Helix carries a number of articles on euthanasia, eugenics and related issues to spur your thinking.
Opposition Leader Michael Howard’s call for the upper limit for social abortion to be lowered to 20 weeks fuelled a huge pre-election debate on abortion at a time when Stuart Campbell’s amazing ultrasounds of babies walking in the womb are still in the public consciousness. This may be the best opportunity we have had since the 1967 Abortion Act was passed to secure more legal protection for these most vulnerable of human beings.
Medical advances mean more babies born prematurely are surviving. In the best centres two thirds of those born at 23 weeks gestation will now live; and with this come hard decisions about withdrawal and withholding of treatment from sick neonates as highlighted in the recent high-profile case of Charlotte Wyatt. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics is currently holding a consultation to gauge public opinion on these complex ethical and legal issues, which will close in June and report by the end of 2006 (news.bbc. co.uk/1/hi/health/4334201.stm)
Meanwhile CMF’s response to the HFEA’s last consultation, ‘The regulation of donor-assisted conception’ is available on the website at www.cmf.org.uk/ethics/ submissions/?id=32
The latest CMF File included with this mailing covers autonomy, the principle that underlies so much contemporary ethical decision-making, and is a reminder that we are not our own masters but rather belong to God and are accountable to him to show compassion, respect and empathy and ensure protection for all human life.
John Wyatt
Medical Study Group Chairman
