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In the News

  • The Gospel Coalition: Physician-assisted dying threatens doctors and gospel witness in Canada
    January 26th, 2017

    Physician-assisted dying, or assisted suicide, has been a much-debated topic in North America over the past few years. Collin Hansen recently dubbed it one of 2016’s most important theological stories. With legislation working its way through the courts on both sides of the border, this issue is likely to continue to dominate the headlines for several years to come.

    On June 17, 2016, the Canadian Parliament passed Bill C-14 into law, effectively amending the Criminal Code in order to permit certain forms of physician-assisted dying. According to the amendment a person may receive medical assistance in dying if they meet all of the following criteria...

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  • Telegraph: Theresa May is preparing to abandon plans for a British Bill of Rights, sources suggest
    January 26th, 2017

    Theresa May is preparing to abandon plans for a British Bill of Rights after Britain leaves the European Union, Government sources have suggested.

    Ministers have confirmed that the Government's plans to scrap the Human Rights Act have been shelved until after Brexit.

    However sources told The Daily Telegraph that the plans may now be abandoned entirely because Brexit will significantly strengthen the sovereignty of British courts.

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  • BBC: Netherlands government to counter Trump abortion funding ban
    January 25th, 2017

    The Netherlands is to set up an international fund to support abortion services hit by President Donald Trump's order to cut US foreign aid.

    Lilianne Ploumen, a Dutch minister, said it would set up "a well-financed fund" to allow other governments, businesses and charities to donate.

    The Netherlands would do everything in its power to help women "remain in control of their own bodies", she said.

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  • Federalist: Doctors said abort my disabled child, but he became #MyUnintendedJoy
    January 25th, 2017

    During the final presidential debate, Hillary Clinton defended her support for late-term abortion by referring to women she knew who had made "most heartbreaking, painful decisions" to choose late abortion after receiving difficult prenatal diagnosis. I agree that aborting her child is the most heartbreaking and painful decision for a mother given a prenatal diagnosis. However, as the 44th annual March for Life this week reminds us, there is an alternative.

    My son, Thomas, was prenatally diagnosed with a "fatal" chromosomal disorder at 22 weeks in utero. A fetal MRI revealed that Thomas had multiple brain abnormalities, including a dandy walker malformation, a missing corpus callosum, a malformed brainstem, and, perhaps most sad for me, he had no eyes. I was crushed that I would not be able to look into my baby’s eyes.  When advised that he would most likely pass in the womb, I was devastated and angrier than I have ever been in my entire life.

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  • Conservative Woman: Phillipa Taylor: 2017 will see further controversy over abortion
    January 25th, 2017

    2017 will be another busy and challenging year on beginning of life issues. Here is a taste of what to expect:

    October 2017 marks the 50th Anniversary of the 1967 Abortion Act. Throughout the year this significant anniversary will generate media publicity, events, stories from women and will fire up campaigns by those who want to see the laws tightened up (or at least adhered to) and by those who want to relax the law on abortion even more.

    Expect to see more focus this year on the operation of UK abortion clinics in the UK and Africa, and new research on the link between abortion and preterm births. There will be further Parliamentary debate on the discriminatory provision in the Act that permits abortion to term for disability, with the committee stage of Lord Shinkwin’s Abortion (Disability Equality) Bill and the We’re All Equal campaign in support of the Bill. It will be fascinating to see what happens in the US under the more overtly pro-life Trump administration.

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  • Guardian: Right to refuse gay weddings protects against other discrimination, inquiry told
    January 25th, 2017

    The government’s marriage equality bill specifies that ministers of religion would be able to refuse same-sex weddings because otherwise it risks creating a right to refuse weddings based on disability or race, the attorney general’s department has revealed.

    The department warned a Senate inquiry into the government’s same-sex marriage bill exposure draft that removing a provision allowing ministers to refuse gay weddings could create a host of unintended consequences.

    The government bill contains a section that allows ministers of religion to refuse to solemnise a marriage that is not a union between a man and a woman.

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  • Gatestone Institute: Nomination for nobel prize: Reverend Gavin Ashenden
    January 25th, 2017

    The section of the Quran that a Muslim student recited at the church service points out the Islamic belief that Jesus was not the Son of God. Even in today's Britain, this does not seem quite the view that leaders of the national church are supposed to propagate.

    "The justification offered that it engages some kind of reciprocity founders on the understandable refusal of Islamic communities to read passages from the Gospel in Muslim prayers announcing the Lordship of Christ. It never happens.... apologies may be due to the Christians suffering dreadful persecution at the hands of Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere. To have the core of a faith for which they have suffered deeply treated so casually by senior western clergy such as the Provost of Glasgow is unlikely to have a positive outcome." — Reverend Gavin Ashenden, The Times.

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  • Time: The Netherlands wants to set up its own international fund for abortion access
    January 25th, 2017

    The Dutch government says it wants an international fund to finance access to birth control, abortion and education for women in developing countries.

    Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation Lilianne Ploumen announced the plan Tuesday in reaction to an executive memorandum U.S. President Donald Trump signed a day earlier. It reinstituted a ban on U.S. funding to international groups that perform abortions or provide information about abortions.

    Ploumen wants to launch a new fund that could be supported by governments, businesses and social organizations to "compensate this financial setback as much as possible."

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  • Premier: Majority of Brits believe sex education should be compulsory in Christian schools
    January 24th, 2017

    New research has indicated that more than eight in ten Brits think that sex and relationship education (SRE) should be taught in Christian schools.

    The research, commissioned by children's charity Plan International UK, found that 85 per cent of those polled think that SRE should be mandatory in state schools and 82 per cent agreeing that it should also be compulsory at faith schools.

    But the survey, conducted among 2007 adults, also found that of those who received SRE at school, only 27 per cent found the classes informative.

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  • Agenda Europe: Surrogacy and child trafficking: The ECtHR corrects itself...
    January 24th, 2017

    One of the most appalling miscarriages of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), a Chamber Judgment through which the Court’s Second Chamber would de facto have turned surrogacy and illegal child trafficking into a "human right" has fortunately been overturned: a Grand Chamber of the Court that has reviewed the case Paradiso and Campanelli v. Italy today found that – contrary to the Chamber’s assessment one year ago – the decision of Italian authorities to withdraw from the custody of an Italian couple a child that was not biologically related to either of them, but which they had bought from a Russian "reproduction clinic" for the price of 45.000 Euro, did not violate anyone’s "human rights".

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