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NRL News
The Human
Fertilisation and Embryology Bill’s As I write, the British House of Commons is due on May 12 to debate the British government’s “Human Fertilisation and Embryology bill.” The bill represents one of the most comprehensive legislative threats to innocent, early human life debated to date. In brief, the bill, if unamended, will enshrine and extend the destructive and unethical use of human embryos, which includes human cloning, embryonic stem cell research, “saviour siblings,” and human-animal hybrids. Anyone vaguely familiar with British politics will be unsurprised by this new bill. Britain is usually one of the countries most willing to jump first into bioethical black holes as soon as they appear. For pro-lifers, the temptation to groan, shrug one’s shoulders, and lapse into depression-induced cynicism is always present. We should, however, take a leaf out of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s response to his staff when faced with Hitler’s surprise December 1944 offensive: “The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not of disaster. There will be only cheerful faces at this table.” The opportunity in the present situation is the chance to consolidate and extend a truly pro-life resistance, both within and without parliament. Parliamentarians have received an unprecedented number of communications from the public opposing the bill’s abuses. Several Church leaders have spoken out with unprecedented clarity and vigour in defence of embryonic children. “Fellow travellers,” that is, people with pro-life sympathies though not yet pro-life principles, have responded the bill’s radical proposals by saying, “No, this is going too far.” Even some of the governing party’s parliamentarians are rebelling against government coercion to vote for the bill. A halt to the frequent processions of the culture of death through the British parliament is not a matter of “if,” but “when.” By “when,” I am certainly not suggesting that we try to divine a date. Rather, it is a certainty drawn from the history of successful resistance movements. The success of the Roman resistance to Hannibal, the European resistance to Nazism, the Polish resistance to Communism, was due in great measure simply to the refusal of resisters to go away, to allow their message to become extinct, or to adulterate their identity and integrity. And what seems to dumbfound the anti-life lobby the most is not just the pro-life movement’s continued existence, decades after Great Britain’s 1967 Abortion Act and the United States’ 1973 Roe v. Wade, but how the idea of a “culture of life” has successfully competed with their empty rhetoric of “choice.” To abandon the pro-life fight to out of impatience would be to shirk our historic duty to the unborn and the vulnerable. We have been born in a culture of death to fulfil a mission to change it into a culture of life. We are not simply nameless pieces in a divine chess-match but never-to-be-repeated individuals—just like the embryonic children we are called to defend against the Human Fertilisation and Embryology bill. Anthony Ozimic is the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children’s political secretary. |