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Wednesday, February 24, 2010

RTE Bias on Abortion

Scannal Programme was a Blatant Pro-Abortion Promo
24ú Feabhra 2010

RTÉ - Mícothrom agus claonta i ngaeilge agus i mbéarla araon.

It's no secret that RTÉ the tax-funded State broadcaster is openly hostile to the pro-life position. The station doesn’t even bother anymore to create the pretence of balance when covering life issues. The latest manifestation of this was on Scannal, broadcast on RTÉ 1 last Monday, 22nd February at 7.30pm. You can watch it on the RTÉ player if you care to.

Even the description of the programme on the RTÉ website lets the cat out of the bag. It states: “Scannal looks back at a story that gripped the nation and raised the issue of abortion once again, an issue subsequent Governments have failed to fully deal with through legislation”

The so-called failure to deal with the issue through legislation might have something to do with the fact that the majority of Irish people are opposed to abortion and that the controversial X case decision by the Supreme Court in 1992 failed to set any time limits for abortion and if legislated for would have to allow abortion up to birth.

Were the producers of Scannal remotely interested in balance they could have invited reasoned pro-life voices to make these and other points in defence of the right to life.

RTÉ insists on turning a blind eye to the compelling arguments against abortion. Whilst we heard about the difficult circumstances surrounding the X case and the injunction sought by the Attorney General at the time - and nobody belittles the emotional difficulties that faced Miss X and her family - we heard nothing on Scannal about the fact that the X case judges heard no medical evidence to justify the Supreme Court decision.

Similarly, we heard nothing about the health of women in the wider context of the abortion issue. For example in recent years, several studies have been published, and in particular a study from Finland in 2005, showing that women are more likely to commit suicide after having an abortion than whilst pregnant. One horrifying case that illustrates this is that of Emma Beck, a 31 year old English artist who committed suicide in 2007 after aborting her twins. Emma's suicide note read: "I told everyone I didn't want to do it, even at the hospital. I was frightened, now it is too late. I died when my babies died. I want to be with my babies: they need me, no-one else does."

In fact the link between abortion and negative mental health consequences has become so clear that the British Royal College of Psychiatrists recommended that abortion counselling leaflets be updated to include information about the latest studies showing the negative effects of abortion on women. Separately, research published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2008, concluded that induced abortion is linked to an increased risk of mental illness in later life.

Importantly, the fact that Irish women receive all necessary medical treatments during pregnancy here - even if it unintentionally results in the loss of the unborn - was not highlighted on Scannal. Nor was the fact that despite having no abortion in this country, Ireland is rated number one in the world in protecting women’s lives during pregnancy, according to the latest UN/WHO report on maternal mortality. Ireland, for example, is a much safer country in which to be pregnant than say Britain or Holland, where unrestricted abortion regimes exist.

But RTÉ didn't see fit to take on board any of that. Why? Because it wouldn't have helped the agenda that RTÉ constantly pushes in favour of abortion.

RTÉ never reports on the brutality of what abortion regimes entail in other countries, like for example the fact that abortion is legal up to birth in Britain. Do we want to follow England's abortion regime - one of the most liberal in the world - where babies are aborted simply because they have 'disabilities' like hare lips and cleft palates? RTÉ seems to think we should considering the open way it promotes abortion without limits.

RTÉ has never once presented a programme that set out to challenge abortion advocates who believe that unborn children are deserving of absolutely no protection throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy. Surely there is something very suspect here?

On every occasion without exception RTÉ builds it coverage of the issue around challenging the pro-life side to justify its position. This is a genuine scandal that the programme Scannal, if it was doing its job would investigate!

The way RTÉ treats the pro-life issue is becoming a major story in itself. If the station continues along the path of openly promoting abortion, pro-life activists will have no choice but to devote all their energies into making the public aware of the culture of ideological bias in RTÉ in favour of abortion.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Ireland and Stem Cell Research

Killing Embryos in Stem Cell Research Unnecessary, Expert Says : 22nd Feb 10


Professor Tommie McCarthy of the Department of Biochemistry, University College Cork (UCC), has taken issue with Dr Dolores Dooley’s recent dismissal of adult and induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) research as more effective and ethical alternatives to human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research.

Writing in "The Irish Times", he said a search of the world’s largest registry of clinical trials shows more than 1,900 current trials using adult stem cells, compared to only three hESC transplantation trials. Dr Dooley, who headed the recently disbanded Irish Council for Bioethics, had argued that hESCs are required as controls for adult stem cell research.

But Prof McCarthy said that was incorrect, because adult stem cell research has been in progress for decades without hESCs. Dr Dooley’s argument about hESCs as controls is purely relative because human iPSC research (which emanated from equivalent research in mice) will advance rapidly with or without hESCs.

“The justification that ‘all forms of stem-cell research need to continue and all are important’ is only academic, and academic endeavour, in my view, should never undermine the dignity of human life”, Prof McCarthy concluded.

The Irish Times. February 3.

Source: Family and Life

Monday, February 15, 2010

Minister Harney should learn from California's experience - Money spent on embryonic stem cell research is money wasted.

Source : Pro Life Campaign

There are three billion reasons not to allow the Supreme Court ruling in R v. R to be used as a cover to legalise research here involving human embryo destruction.

In 2004, Californian taxpayers agreed to fund embryo stem cell research to the tune of $3 billion in the hope of finding cures for chronic diseases and disabilities. But since then, not a single breakthrough has taken place.
Now the Los Angeles-based Investor’s Business Daily magazine is reporting that the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine set up to administer the $3b has started diverting the funds earmarked for embryo research into the ethically non-controversial adult stem cell research.

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling in Ireland stripping Constitutional protection from human embryos in vitro, the latest developments from California take on a significant added meaning. With her experience in other ministries, Minister Harney is in a position to appreciate the economic as well as the medical knock-on effects of making Ireland an international centre of excellence for the ethically non-controversial adult stem cell research.

Minister For Health Mary Harney may well try to rush through a regulatory framework allowing embryo destruction to meet the interests of the IVF and embryo research industries. She is on record as saying she has asked her officials to prepare heads of legislation and it is expected the proposed legislation will follow the recommendations of the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction’s 2005 Report. The membership of this Commission was outrageously biased in favour of allowing embryo destruction – they voted 24 to 1 for it, only Professor Gerard Whyte of TCD dissenting, click here to see his closely reasoned dissent.

Clearly the recommendations of such a biased body are not a fitting basis for legislation in a democracy, all the more so when such run contrary to the balance of opinion among the general public, measured time and again in professionally carried out opinion polls every year since the biased Report was issued, which have found a majority of around 70% support the Dáil passing legislation protecting embryos against destruction in clinics and laboratories.

But Minister Mary Harney may also defend legislation allowing the destruction of human embryos in vitro on the grounds that embryo destruction is needed to provide embryonic stem cells for research to produce new medical treatments.

This argument, however, has turned out to be as flawed as an appeal to the biased Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction Report. For years we have been bombarded by propaganda saying killing human embryos has to be allowed so research using stem cells got by that way may lead to new medical treatments. But now we are finding out this simply ain’t so. It’s been all promise, but no product.

In 2004 California approved Proposition 71, a ballot measure allowing the State to borrow US $3 billion to fund stem cell research using stem cells obtained by destroying human embryos. The money was to be used, its proponents said, to develop new treatments based on embryonic stem cell research. The State agency set up to manage this was the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

On 12th January this year, the Los Angeles-based Investor’s Business Daily magazine reported that because the research using stem cells obtained by killing human embryos has not produced any breakthroughs in medical treatments, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine ‘is diverting funds’ to the research approach that ‘has produced actual therapies and treatments : adult stem cell research.’

Adult stem cell research, the Investor’s Business Daily comments, ‘not only has treated real people with real results it also does not come with the moral baggage embryonic stem cell research does.

It goes on to comment that advocates of embryonic stem cell research have engaged in a sort of three card trick:

To us this is a classic bait and switch, an attempt to snatch success from the jaws of failure and take credit for discoveries and advances achieved by research (which) Proposition 71 supporters once cavalierly dismissed. We have noted how over the years that when funding was needed, the phrase “embryonic stem cells” was used. When actual progress was discussed, the word “embryonic” was dropped because embryonic stem cell research never got out of the lab. Click here to read the Investor's Business Daily article in full.

So if Minister Mary Harney or the voices of the IVF and embryo research industries in Ireland start arguing that we need a regulatory framework allowing embryo destruction in order to open the door for research promising breakthroughs in medical treatment, the answer is we already know what lies down that path. California three US $ 3 billion at it and there were no results and now the agency set up to get results is diverting the money into adult stem cell research so it will have some results to show.

The real message of the Californian experience, then is that Ireland has a golden opportunity to put substantial resources into adult stem cell research to make Ireland an international centre of excellence in this field of research which is actually producing the goods.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

On the abortion debate

Mugged by Ultrasound : Why so many abortion workers have turned pro-life.

BY David Daleiden and Jon A. Shields
Source: The Weekly Standard
January 25, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 18

Abortion rights activists have long preferred to hold themselves at some remove from the practice they promote; rather than naming it, they speak of “choice” and “reproductive freedom.” But those who perform abortions have no such luxury. Instead, advances in ultrasound imaging and abortion procedures have forced providers ever closer to the nub of their work. Especially in abortions performed far enough along in gestation that the fetus is recognizably a tiny baby, this intimacy exacts an emotional toll, stirring sentiments for which doctors, nurses, and aides are sometimes unprepared. Most apparently have managed to reconcile their belief in the right to abortion with their revulsion at dying and dead fetuses, but a noteworthy number have found the conflict unbearable and have defected to the pro-life cause.

In the aftermath of Roe v. Wade, second-trimester abortions were usually performed by saline injection. The doctor simply replaced the amniotic fluid in the patient’s uterus with a saline solution and induced labor, leaving it to nurses to dispose of the expelled fetus. That changed in the late 1970s, when “dilation and evacuation” (D&E) emerged as a safer method. Today D&E is the most common second-trimester procedure. It has been performed millions of times in the United States.

But although D&E is better for the patient, it brings emotional distress for the abortionist, who, after inserting laminaria that cause the cervix to dilate, must dismember and remove the fetus with forceps. One early study, by abortionists Warren Hern and Billie Corrigan, found that although all of their staff members “approved of second trimester abortion in principle,” there “were few positive comments about D&E itself.” Reactions included “shock, dismay, amazement, disgust, fear, and sadness.” A more ambitious study published the following year, in the September 1979 issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, confirmed Hern and Corrigan’s findings. It found “strong emotional reactions during or following the procedures and occasional disquieting dreams.”

Another study, published in the October 1989 issue of Social Science and Medicine noted that abortion providers were pained by encounters with the fetus regardless of how committed they were to abortion rights. It seems that no amount of ideological conviction can inoculate providers against negative emotional reactions to abortion. Such studies are few. In general, abortion providers have censored their own emotional trauma out of concern to protect abortion rights.

In 2008, however, abortionist Lisa Harris endeavored to begin “breaking the silence” in the pages of the journal Reproductive Health Matters. When she herself was 18 weeks pregnant, Dr. Harris performed a D&E abortion on an 18-week-old fetus. Harris felt her own child kick precisely at the moment that she ripped a fetal leg off with her forceps:

Instantly, tears were streaming from my eyes—without me—meaning my conscious brain—even being aware of what was going on. I felt as if my response had come entirely from my body, bypassing my usual cognitive processing completely. A message seemed to travel from my hand and my uterus to my tear ducts. It was an overwhelming feeling—a brutally visceral response—heartfelt and unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics. It was one of the more raw moments in my life.

Harris concluded her piece by lamenting that the pro-choice movement has left providers to suffer in silence because it has “not owned up to the reality of the fetus, or the reality of fetal parts.” Indeed, it often insists that images used by the pro-life movement are faked. Pro-choice advocates also falsely insist that second-trimester abortions are confined almost exclusively to tragic “hard” cases such as fetal malformation.

Yet a review of the literature in the April 2009 issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology found that most abortions performed after the first trimester are sought for the same reasons as first-trimester abortions, they’re just delayed. This reality only intensifies the guilt pangs of abortion providers.)

Hern and Harris chose to stay in the abortion business; one of the first doctors to change his allegiance was Paul Jarrett, who quit after only 23 abortions. His turning point came in 1974, when he performed an abortion on a fetus at 14 weeks’ gestation: “As I brought out the rib cage, I looked and saw a tiny, beating heart,” he would recall. “And when I found the head of the baby, I looked squarely in the face of another human being—a human being that I just killed.”

In 1990 Judith Fetrow, an aide at a Planned Parenthood clinic, found that disposing of fetal bodies as medical waste was more than she could bear. Soon after she left her position, Fetrow described her experiences: “No one at Planned Parenthood wanted this job. I had to look at the tiny hands and feet. There were times when I wanted to cry.”

Finally persuaded to quit by a pro-life protester outside her clinic, Fetrow is now involved in the American Life League.Kathy Sparks is another convert formerly responsible for disposing of fetal remains, this time at an Illinois abortion clinic. Her account of the experience that led her to exit the abortion industry (taken from the Pro-Life Action League website in 2004) reads in part:The baby’s bones were far too developed to rip them up with [the doctor’s] curette, so he had to pull the baby out with forceps. He brought out three or four major pieces. I took the baby to the clean up room, I set him down and I began weeping uncontrollably. I cried and cried. This little face was perfectly formed. A recovery nurse rebuked Sparks for her unprofessional behavior. She quit the next day. Sparks is now the director of a crisis pregnancy center with more than 20 pro-life volunteers.

Handling fetal remains can be especially difficult in late-term clinics. Until George Tiller was assassinated by a pro-life radical last summer, his clinic in Wichita specialized in third-trimester abortions. To handle the large volume of biological waste Tiller had a crematorium on the premises. One day when hauling a heavy container of fetal waste, Tiller asked his secretary, Luhra Tivis, to assist him. She found the experience devastating. The “most horrible thing,” Tivis later recounted, was that she “could smell those babies burning.” Tivis, a former NOW activist, soon left her secretarial position at the clinic to volunteer for Operation Rescue, a radical pro-life organization.

Other converts were driven into the pro-life movement by advances in ultrasound technology. The most recent example is Abby Johnson, the former director of Dallas-area Planned Parenthood. After watching, via ultrasound, an embryo “crumple” as it was suctioned out of its mother’s womb, Johnson reported a “conversion in my heart.” Likewise, Joan Appleton was the head nurse at a large abortion facility in Falls Church, Virginia, and a NOW activist. Appleton performed thousands of abortions with aplomb until a single ultrasound-assisted abortion rattled her. As Appleton remembers, “I was watching the screen. I saw the baby pull away. I saw the baby open his mouth. After the procedure I was shaking, literally.”

The most famous abortion provider to be converted by ultrasound technology, decades ago, is Bernard Nathanson, cofounder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, the original NARAL. In the early 1970s, Nathanson was the largest abortion provider in the Western world. By his own reckoning he performed more than 60,000 abortions, including one on his own child. Nathanson’s exit from the industry was slow and tortured. In Aborting America (1979), he expressed anxiety over the possibility that he was complicit in a great evil. He was especially troubled by ultrasound images. When he finally left his profession for pro-life activism, he produced The Silent Scream (1984), a documentary of an ultrasound abortion that showed the fetus scrambling vainly to escape dismemberment. This handful of stories is representative of many more.

In fact, with the exception of communism, we can think of few other movements from which so many activists have defected to the opposition. Nonetheless, the vast majority of clinic workers remain committed to the pro-choice cause. Perhaps some of those who stay behind are haunted by their work. Most, however, find a way to cope with the dissonance.

Pro-choice advocates like to point out that abortion has existed in all times and places. Yet that observation tends to obscure the radicalism of the present abortion regime in the United States. Until very recently, no one in the history of the world has had the routine job of killing well-developed fetuses quite so up close and personal. It is an experiment that was bound to stir pro-life sentiments even in the hearts of those staunchly devoted to abortion rights. Ultrasound and D&E bring workers closer to the beings they destroy. Hern and Corrigan concluded their study by noting that D&E leaves “no possibility of denying an act of destruction.” As they wrote, “It is before one’s eyes. The sensations of dismemberment run through the forceps like an electric current.”Jon A. Shields is assistant professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. David Daleiden is a student there.

Abortion and Ireland : Irish Examiner looks for headline in poll and ignores facts

A Red C online survey on abortion published in the Irish Examiner on the 21st January 2010 claims that 60% of 18-35 year olds support legalised abortion in Ireland.

Given the question posed, the results are not at all surprising. The survey makes no distinction between necessary medical treatments in pregnancy and induced abortion, (where the life of the unborn child is directly targeted). This in effect makes the findings meaningless and sheds no new light on public attitudes to abortion.

Polls, including one in 2009, that distinguish between standard medical treatments and induced abortion consistently show majority opposition to legal abortion.*

The latest Red C survey confines its interviews to 18-35 year olds. Clearly then the findings are not representative of the general population. Also, only 36% of the 18-35 year olds interviewed 'strongly' approve of legal abortion and not 60% as the Irish Examiner claimed.

The report also failed to draw attention to the known fact that 18-35 year olds start to increasingly identify with the pro-life position as they get older. This is borne out in all surveys on the issue.

All things considered, it was extremely misleading for the paper to run with today's front page headline declaring: 60% In Favour of Legal Abortion

The abortion debate is a very serious one and deserves more objective treatment than it received in today's Irish Examiner.

Scientists' Advance Further Renders Embryonic Stem Cell Research Obsolete

Scientists have made a major breakthrough using the process known as direct reprogramming that further renders embryonic stem cell research obsolete. Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have succeeded in transforming mouse skin cells directly into functional nerve cells.

With the application of just three genes, the new cells make the change without first becoming a pluripotent type of stem cell -- such as an embryonic stem cell. That is a step long thought to be required for cells to acquire new identities.

"We actively and directly induced one cell type to become a completely different cell type," said Marius Wernig, MD, assistant professor of pathology and a member of Stanford's Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. "These are fully functional neurons. They can do all the principal things that neurons in the brain do."

Bioethicist Wesley J. Smith also had good things to say about the ethical progress. "Please note–this is not an adult stem cell success. It is direct programming from one kind of cell directly into another," he cautions. "Still much work to do before it is demonstrated that the technique can be used in human clinical work–some scientists express doubts–but a great step forward. Good ethics do produce good science," he writes at his blog Secondhand Smoke.

Wernig is the senior author of the research, which will be published online January 27 in Nature.

Ireland and Stem Cell Research - Killing of embryos in human stem-cell research is wrong

Thu, Jan 21, 2010

The Irish Supreme Court recently judged that frozen human embryos are not among the “unborn” referred to in the Constitution, which binds the State to protect and defend the right to life of the unborn. The judges also called on the Oireachtas to introduce legislation to regulate assisted human reproduction and the Minister for Health, Mary Harney, has promised to introduce a Bill later this year, writes WILLIAM REVILLE

Advocates of human embryonic stem-cell research (HESCR) hope that these developments will soon give the green light to start up such research in this country. I am opposed to HESCR, primarily on ethical grounds and secondarily on practical grounds.

Biology shows that human life begins at conception when sperm and egg unite to form an embryo, thereby initiating a continuum of development that ends only in death. Science does not deal in ethics and cannot place a moral value on human life at any stage along the continuum. Many scientists believe, myself included, that human life has full moral value from the moment of conception, or at least sufficient moral value that it should not be deliberately destroyed. Many other scientists, probably a majority, believe that full moral value is only reached later along the continuum – at implantation in the womb or later. As the human embryo must be killed to obtain embryonic stem cells, I am opposed to HESCR.

Dr James Thomson, who discovered how to isolate human embryonic stem cells in 1998, has said: “If human embryonic stem-cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, then you have not thought about it enough.”

This “yuk factor” associated with killing embryos affects most people and I believe that we should not override this deep-seated intuition. In his book, The Future of Human Nature , German philosopher Jurgen Habermas says: “There is a long-established, widely shared, deep moral intuition that human embryos are not just cells like any other cells, as some argue, and we breach that moral intuition at our peril.” The deliberate killing of human embryos harms the respect for human life that we intuitively form around our coming into existence and may encourage a more general erosion of respect for life.

But people point to “surplus” human embryos left over from IVF procedures and ask why not use them for useful HESCR as they are destined to die anyway? Well, we are all destined to die, but this gives nobody the right to kill us prematurely and use our bodies for research. Also, “surplus” IVF embryos never asked to be created – they are an unfortunate by-product of IVF procedures. IVF techniques should be developed that do not generate “surplus” embryos and the embryos that already exist should be either adopted or allowed to die with dignity.

HESCR is primarily justified on the basis that it will cure many human diseases and therefore the benefit of the research greatly outweighs the harm done to embryos – the utilitarian ethic often expressed as “the end justifies the means”. Many scientists who carry out HESCR are intuitively repulsed by the idea of deliberately killing human embryos but override this feeling with the aid of the utilitarian ethic. On the other hand, principles-based ethics prioritises respect for human life and concludes that the hoped-for benefits must be sought in other ways that are ethical. Which brings me to the practical reason I oppose HESCR: we have very good alternative and ethical stem-cell approaches to curing disease – adult stem-cell research and induced pluripotent stem-cell research (IPSCR).

Adult stem cells can be prepared from umbilical-cord blood and from adult tissues. By and large, no ethical problems attend adult stem-cell research, which is forging ahead worldwide. Adult stem cells are much easier to control than embryonic stem cells and such research has produced more than 200 medical treatments. In contrast, no treatments are yet available from HESCR and it would be premature to expect any within 10 years.

Induced pluripotent stem cells, made by reprogramming ordinary adult body cells, eg skin cells, so that they change into stem cells, are the latest development in stem-cell research. Most indications are that such induced stem cells have as much potential in medicine as embryonic stem cells. By and large, IPSCR can be carried out without ethical problems.

Annual surveys of Irish public opinion carried out by Millward Brown IMS since 2005 show that the great majority of people want protection for embryonic humans enshrined in law. In the latest poll, 71 per cent of those who declared an opinion expressed a desire for legal protection for the embryo and 29 per cent saw no need for such protection ( Irish Times , May 15th, 2009).
William Reville is University College Cork’s associate professor of biochemistry and its public awareness of science officer – http://understandingscience.ucc.ie

© 2010 The Irish Times

Abortion, Ireland and Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch Report on abortion and Ireland - a lecture on political ideology and a mockery of human rights

It is not difficult to criticise the report issued by the increasingly controversial Human Rights Watch, a US based advocacy group which seeks to attack Ireland’s pro-life ethos.

By criticising Ireland’s law which protects the life of the unborn child and which ensures that Ireland is one of the safest countries in the world for pregnant women and their unborn children, this group has damaged its own credibility and is making a mockery of the concept of human rights.

However one need not be surprised by this report. Human Rights Watch has become an abortion advocacy group and this report is part of an ongoing co-ordinated campaign to push an abortion regime on Ireland. One only has to look at this group’s almost complete lack of interest in other serious women’s rights abuses. For example they appear to have little concern about China’s one child policy -where Chinese women are forced to undergo abortions and sterilisations by the Chinese state.

The Women’s Rights Advocacy Director for this organisation is on record for stating that she doesn’t believe in banning sex selective abortion – which results in the abortion of baby girls because they are girls. This practice is widespread in countries such as China and India. These views are extreme.

It should be noted that because of the lobbying of this organisation and others and their demands for government funding of abortion in the US, a large portion of the US population may well continue to be denied access to universal health care. This is profoundly disappointing.

The Irish public should see this report for what it is. A statement of political ideology rather than a genuine report on human rights.

An amazing video that will demolish any pro-abortion argument

This is truly an amazing video on the miracle that is life in the womb.

Stem Cell Research in Ireland

R -v- R Supreme Court decision regrettable but creates an opportunity to unite ethics and science in favour of a win-win solution

Those who believe that human life should be protected at all stages will be disappointed with the Supreme Court decision in the R v. R frozen embryos case that was made on the 15th of December last. The Supreme Court ruled that Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution does not afford protection to the human embryo prior to implantation.

The Government must introduce legislation to protect human life at its earliest stages of development. The human embryo is not potential life - it is human life with potential. Each one of us passed through this early stage of life on our way to birth. The very basis of democracy is respect for the equal dignity and worth of every human being under the law. Our first and most important human right is the right to life.

The fact that the Supreme Court ruled that the human embryo does not enjoy protection under Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution in no way impedes the Government from introducing legislation to protect early human life. There is precedent for such legislation in countries like Italy and Germany where protections for the human embryo were introduced despite there being no explicit Constitutional protection in those countries for human life at its fragile beginnings.

The Supreme Court decision marks the beginning not the end of the debate on how best to proceed. The totally unrepresentative composition of the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction (CAHR), which voted 24 to 1 in favour of destructive embryo research, is certainly not the basis for any legislation. Before legislation is proposed, the Government must address the glaring imbalance to date in the consultative process. We need legislation to protect the human embryo not the continued outsourcing of decision making to unaccountable quangos or to some 'regulatory body'.

We must not, as a society, pass over this opportunity to unite ethics and science in a win-win solution that could make Ireland a centre of excellence for adult stem cell research, which is ethically sound and scientifically very promising.The unfolding debate is not about those in favour of research pitched in ideological battle against those opposed to scientific advances. Pro-life supporters are just as enthusiastic about the promise of finding treatments for infertility and cures for diseases, but strongly believe this can be achieved without recourse to the taking of human life.
 
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