The real significance of the current parliamentary Bill

Steve Maltz

You couldn't make it up! I'm not referring to the mock tabloid headline but the current state of affairs in our great nation that provides the story behind it. The link is the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill that is currently steamrolling its way through our parliamentary system, flattening all opposition in its path.

Let's be frank, this Bill is a bit of a mouthful, it hardly slips off the tongue does it? As a result it can appear an irrelevance, even to us Christians, who really should know better. A week ago I had little time for this. I am not a political animal, after all, I couldn't even give you the name of my local MP. Then on Wednesday I went to a meeting, "What Price Life?" convened by The Christian Broadcasting Council and it all changed. Here, eloquent speakers from the worlds of politics, medicine, law, the media and marketing took just an hour to shock me into awareness.

I realized that the issue wasn't just about tissue, there was something deeper going on, something that every Christian ought to be aware of, whether or not they understand the technical facts and arguments. The progress of this bill through the House of Lords should be enough to set alarm bells ringing. Now in my naiveté I always saw the Lords as a bunch of benevolent old duffers, full of common sense and wisdom accumulated over a lifetime of public service. Yet it seems something else was going on in this case, something strange and sinister. The Peers were not allowed to vote according to their consciences, due to a combination of pressure from the government and scientific institutions and relentless lobbying from some Lords with medical backgrounds. All attempted amendments to the Bill were crushed and it has now passed through to the House of Commons for the next stage.

So what is at stake here, what is this Bill all about? There is no time for a full explanation here, but instead let me draw some sketches of possible outcomes, if this Bill ever becomes Law. Children could be conceived just as spare parts for older siblings. Children could be produced without any legal need for a father - they could even have two mothers, neither of them related to the child. Millions of embryos would be legally killed pointlessly. Scientists could legally produce new species, 50% human and 50% animal, just to create embryos for experiments (These facts have been provided by www.passionforlife.org.uk).

Why did this Bill work its way through the House of Lords so effortlessly? The answer is on two levels. Firstly, it appears that the kind of research on embryos that the Bill would enable has been banned in the USA, Europe and most of the World, so think of the edge it would give our scientists if they got the green light to forge ahead, regardless of any ethical boundaries they might be crossing. So here is greed, ambition and personal interest at play. Secondly and more significantly we see the process of secularization of our society taking a massive leap forwards. We see human life, in the form of unseen, unregarded embryos, experimented on and destroyed without a whiff of conscience. We see the nuclear family, the bedrock of God's plan for human society, redefined into some sociological construct. We see Huxley's Brave New World, Godless and without restraint, ushered into a land that, just over a century ago, was sending out more missionaries than any other, to spread God's love and hope.

Yet many secular scientists tell us that the proposals in the Bill, concerning Saviour Siblings and animal-human hybrids are not even that vital for modern scientific research. There are other areas of research, such as with adult stem cells and umbilical cord blood, that are producing real results. Currently research using embryos has provided not a single treatment, but has resulted in the death of 2.2 million embryos, yet research using adult stem cells has provided over eighty treatments. Even the eminent scientist Lord Winston admitted that if human embryos were not available for research purposes, "it won't fundamentally alter the science of stem cell biology".

There are deeper issues at stake. There is no doubt that the current relentless and growing wave of violence on our streets can be connected to the breakdown of the God-given family unit, where a moral, ethical and spiritual grounding is imparted from generation to generation with parental love. So, you see, knife crime and human embryos are connected. Both have become issues as a result of the growing secularization of our society, away from the Judeo-Christian framework that helped to make us the great nation that we once were.

Are you stirred up, or at least willing to find out more about this? If so, then have a look at the website of CCFON (Christian Concern for our Nation) at www.ccfon.org.