At the beginning of the hearing, sitting with the Master of the Rolls, Lord Dyson and Lord Justice Elias, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge stated that, 'We are acutely aware of the desperate situation in which the appellants find themselves and we are very sympathetic.  But we know, and they surely know, that we cannot decide this case as a matter of personal sympathy.  We have to decide it as a point of law.’  Judgement is awaited.

The Falconer Bill
Lord Charlie Falconer is at it again.  In a carefully orchestrated ploy, the day after the final day of the Nicklinson, Lamb and ‘Martin’ Court of Appeal hearing, Lord Falconer tabled his Assisted Dying Bill in the House of Lords.  This first reading of the Bill received virtually no press attention, and there is no date scheduled for its second reading.  The Bill is a modified version of the conclusions of his sham 2010 Commission on Assisted Dying and that of Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act.  It would allow doctors to provide a lethal dose of drugs to patients judged to have less than six months to live and to assist the patients if they could not lift or swallow the drugs.  It is no surprise that the Falconer Bill is backed by the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Choice at the End of Life as well as the Dignity in Dying organization.

Assisted suicide in Switzerland
The slippery slope of bioethics – denied by some, but evident to most.  Here is another example.  In March, an 83-year-old man, a retired professor of petroleum engineering, became the first known Briton to end his life by assisted suicide at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland because he had been diagnosed with dementia, rather than a terminal illness, such as cancer, or severe physical disabilities.  He was in only the early stages of the condition.

Apparently Michael Irwin, a retired general practitioner and campaigner for the legalisation of euthanasia, assisted him in making the necessary arrangements, including a psychiatrist's report attesting to his mental competence because he was originally refused by Dignitas.  Dr Irwin has claimed to have helped at least 50 terminally-ill patients to die – he is a dangerous man.  Irwin has been sometime chairman of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society and President of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies.  In 2003, he was arrested following his confession that he had tried to assist a terminally-ill friend to die.  No charges followed, but in 2005 he was struck off the medical register after an inquiry by the General Medical Council.

Euthanasia in Belgium
The situation in Belgium, the next-door neighbour of euthanasia-friendly Holland, is getting worse. Belgium legalised euthanasia in 2002.  In 2011, there were 1,133 cases of euthanasia officially reported, which is equivalent to about 2% of the total Belgian deaths in that year.  The following year, in 2012, there were 1,432, an increase of 26% over the previous year.  Bear in mind, that like those from Holland, these Belgian figures do not include unreported assisted deaths, a generally recognised, though illegal, feature of both countries.

But such data are never enough for euthanasia enthusiasts.  Now a Bill has been presented in Belgium which would sanction euthanasia for patients with Alzheimer's, other diseases leading to advanced dementia, and general incompetence.  And even that is not enough.  Now the talk is about allowing children to access euthanasia.  Doctors would assess whether or not a child is mature enough to make the decision to end his or her own life.  Is it not perverse that a child might be allowed to choose to die, but still be disallowed to drive a car, vote in an election, or drink alcohol until they are 18 years old?

Euthanasia and assisted suicide worldwide
On 23 May, the Upper House of New South Wales in Australia rejected The Rights of the Terminally Ill Bill 2013, which would have permitted euthanasia, by 23 votes to 13.  On 31 May, the House of Representatives in the US state of Maine rejected an assisted suicide bill entitled, An Act for Patient-directed Care at the End of Life, by 94 votes to 43.  Three days later, the Maine Senate endorsed the Bill’s rejection.  However, Vermont has now become the third US state to approve assisted suicide.  The legalisation process in Vermont differed from that used in Oregon and Washington.  The laws in the latter were adopted after voter referendums, whereas Vermont is the first to pass such a law by means of a vote in a state legislature.  The new law is based on the Oregon model, but with fewer safeguards.

And on 12 June, Bill 52 was tabled in Québec’s national assembly.  The Bill has a subtitle, An Act Respecting End-of-Life Care, which anti-euthanasia campaigners claim is a euphemism for euthanasia, because, they maintain, the Bill will not relieve suffering so much as kill the people who are suffering.  Then on 1 July, President Francois Hollande of France reaffirmed his election pledge of last year to legalise voluntary euthanasia, even though France's national ethics committee advised him not to let doctors help the terminally-ill take their lives.  The President insists that the country will hold a national debate on the issue in the coming months and his government will submit a bill in the French parliament by the end of the year.

Charles Everett Koop was born on Oct. 14, 1916 and grew up in South Brooklyn, surrounded by relatives – his grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins lived on the same street.  He was an only child and he could trace his ancestry to the seventeenth-century Dutch settlers of New York.

His interest in medicine started early.  He practised complex tasks with both hands and operated on rabbits, rats and stray cats during his teenage years.  Soon after graduating from medical school he was offered the post of surgeon-in-chief at the Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia at the tender age of 29.  He became famous for innovative surgery, such as separating conjoined twins and operating on premature infants, especially those with oesophageal atresia, a previously fatal condition.  He provided extraordinary care for the most helpless of patients.  His 1976 book, The Right to Live; The Right to Die, set out his thinking on the issues of abortion and euthanasia.  Such medical fame and pro-life stance inevitably brought controversy.  Though parents had the legal right to withhold treatment from their severely-impaired children, Koop believed that the medical and legal establishments had a duty to protect citizens against such neglect and discrimination, no matter what their age.

Koop’s evangelical, biblical Christianity was central to his life.  It helped him cope with the death of his 19-year-old son when he was killed in a climbing accident.  And it formulated his opposition to abortion, which he maintained was a violation of God’s law.  Nevertheless, while in public office, much to the disappointment of many within the pro-life movement, he failed to speak out publically against abortion – he considered it to be a moral and religious issue, not a health issue and he refused to use his public office as a pulpit from which to preach against it.

But I will always remember Dr Koop as the medical collaborator with the theologian Francis Schaeffer in their film and book project, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?  The book sits on my shelves and, from time to time, I still consult it.  It introduced me, and many others, to serious bioethical issues and it certainly changed my life – indeed, for me, Koop’s legacy is the reason why I am writing this piece now.

Edith Schaeffer
In March 2013, Edith Schaeffer, wife of Francis, died at her home in Switzerland, aged 98.  She was born in Wenzhou, China to George and Jessie Seville, missionaries serving with the China Inland Mission.  She met Francis at Beaver College, Pennsylvania and they were married in 1935 – they had four children.

In 1948, the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions sent them to Switzerland.  And in 1955 they began L’Abri, a unique community where people from around the world came to seek intellectually honest and culturally informed answers to questions about God and the meaning of life.

She wrote numerous books, including The Hidden Art of Homemaking – which sits on my shelves and greatly influenced my wife’s thinking on domesticity and motherhood.  In 2000, Edith was listed among the 100 Christian Women Who Changed the Twentieth Century.

Edith Schaeffer was a driven woman.  Anecdotes abound.  When cooking, she strived to make everyone’s favourite meal.  She would garden by torchlight at the end of a demanding day.  But it was her unwavering belief in the God of the Bible, the beauty of his creation and the dignity of every bearer of the imago Dei that were the real drivers of her extraordinary life.  Her contribution to twentieth-century evangelical Christianity, womanhood, creativity and the pro-life cause still resonates today.

Barbara Willkie
In April 2013, the pro-life movement lost one of its trailblazers, Barbara Willke.  She died in Cincinnati, Ohio at the age of 90.  She was the wife of Dr John Willke and together, as nurse and doctor, they educated hundreds of thousands of people around the world about the evils of abortion and its terrible after-effects.  With her husband she co-authored twelve books on human sexuality and abortion – I have one, Abortion – Questions & Answers, on my shelves.  This was regarded as essential reading in the early years of the pro-life movement.  In addition, the Willkes produced audio and visual teaching materials, which have been translated into 30 languages and they appeared together on TV and radio shows in 64 different countries.

Among the many tributes was this from Paula Westwood, Executive Director Right to Life of Greater Cincinnati, ‘Mrs Willke was a woman of courage and intelligence whose lifelong commitment to preserving the sanctity of human life is a moving legacy.  No one can fill her shoes.’

Margaret White
Yet another stalwart of the pro-life movement has died – Margaret White died in April 2013, aged 93.  She was born in Whitby, North Yorkshire and qualified as a doctor at Sheffield Medical School.  Soon after marriage and a move to Lowestoft, she started sex education discussion groups in local youth clubs as well as a local authority family planning clinic.  The Whites later moved to Croydon, where Margaret served as an Assistant Medical Officer of Health for 12 years before going into general practice with her husband.  She became the central vice-president of the Mothers’ Union, a magistrate, a member of General Synod of the Church of England and among several other commitments, she was later elected to the General Medical Council.

But she will be best remembered for her voluntary work as vice president of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC) and her anti-euthanasia stance.  At times these resulted in television and radio debates where she was a fierce upholder of the pro-life cause – in one such encounter on BBC Radio in 1997, she even left the historian Dr David Starkey lost for words.  She was in constant demand to address conferences worldwide.  When one of her granddaughters, Anna, was born with Down’s syndrome, she set up the Lejeune Clinic in London offering tests, counsel, therapy and advice.  In her free time, she was a talented painter.  Dr White was a get-up-and-go woman, determined yet sweet.

She campaigned against abortion from the beginning in 1966.  In 1987, her book, Two Million Silent Killings was published – it too is on my shelves and makes for a gritty read.  For example, a random flick through chanced on p. 123, ‘If 470 baby rabbits were killed each day instead of 470 unborn babies, there would be riots in the street.’  We have lost a doughty, compassionate pro-life campaigner.

Robert Edwards
To date, some 5 million people worldwide can attribute their lives to Robert Edwards.  He, together with Patrick Steptoe, was the pioneer of in vitro fertilisation (IVF).  On the other hand, the failure of Edwards’ and Steptoe’s techniques has led to the death of perhaps 100 million human embryos.

Edwards, who died in April 2013, was born in Batley, West Yorkshire in 1925.  He studied at Bangor University and managed only a pass degree in agriculture and zoology, followed by a diploma in animal genetics and a PhD at Edinburgh, on the control of ovulation in mice.  After some post-doctoral studies in the US, he returned to a post at the National Institute for Medical Research in London.  There he dabbled in the causes of the ripening of ova, a prerequisite of IVF.  During the 1960s, research into human IVF was banned at the NIMR, so Edwards moved to the University of Cambridge to continue working on ova in vitro.  As a mere physiologist, he needed a medical collaborator in order to obtain human ova.  At a gathering of the Royal Society of Medicine in London, he met Patrick Steptoe, a gynaecologist from Oldham and a specialist in laparoscopy, a technique able to collect the human ova that Edwards needed.

In 1969, Edwards and colleagues produced the first evidence of human fertilisation in vitro.  He was fêted by the media and condemned by scientists, politicians and many others.  Edwards and Steptoe were refused Medical Research Council funding.  They persisted on limited resources for almost another decade, then in 1978, Louise Brown the world’s first test-tube baby was born.

Everyone likes a bouncing baby and much of the earlier criticism quickly disappeared.  Edwards and Steptoe founded Bourn Hall as a private fertility clinic just outside Cambridge.  Edwards, though himself the father of five daughters, was concerned to help the infertile.  He retired in 1989 and by then IVF had become part of mainstream medicine.  In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and in 2011, he was honoured with a knighthood.

I do not doubt that many infertile couples are enormously grateful to Robert Edwards for alleviating their infertility.  But for me, Edwards opened a Pandora’s Box of bioethical issues.  His work not only instigated IVF, it also sanctioned and encouraged the onset of 'inside-out' science – Edwards allowed the formerly, strictly 'inside' human embryo to be latterly relocated 'outside'.  Now it could be used and abused.  As a result, countless millions of human embryos around the world, have been knowingly wiped out.  IVF has been a modern scientific venture of irrecoverable loss.  Human embryos once enjoyed respect, protection, wonder and status.  Now those attributes are all gone, with barely an opposing voice, and all within a generation.  The human embryo should never be regarded as product, object, or means to an end.  In short, IVF has further encouraged the trivialization of human life, sanctioned and accomplished the destruction of human embryos on an immeasurable, industrial scale.  The human embryo as 'raw material' is a troubling concept – intuitively something seems wrong.  Essentially, it was the development of IVF as a treatment that bequeathed the human embryo to research scientists for experimentation.  What had previously been internal, IVF made external  – it was the realization of a novel 'inside-out' science.  We could now see it, study it, manipulate it, analyse it, store it, even create it, and finally destroy it.  This unprecedented access to the human embryo has not only revolutionized the ARTs, it has also ushered in this wholly destructive discipline of human embryo experimentation.  Edwards’ lifetime work did just that.

And there was another dark side to Edwards’ life.  He was a card-carrying member of the Eugenics Society, now known as the Galton Institute – he served on its Council and he was a trustee on three separate occasions.  Disability was clearly an issue for him – selecting the 'best' embryos was part and parcel of his IVF.  But he went further.  In 1974, he stated that, 'Any [scientific] method of potential value in raising human standards should be considered, and [human reproductive] cloning might contribute towards this end by providing pools of talent.'

Henry Morgentaler
In May 2013, Henekh ‘Henry’ Morgentaler, militant atheist and ‘Canada’s Father of Abortion’, died aged 90.  Morgentaler was a Polish-born Canadian physician and pro-choice advocate who fought numerous legal battles aimed at expanding abortion rights across Canada.

During World War II, Morgentaler, as a young man in Poland, was imprisoned at the Łódź ghetto and later at the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps.  In 1950, he and his wife, Chava, emigrated to Canada, but by his own admission, he was a proud womanizer and their marriage ended in divorce in the mid-1970s.  He married twice more.  Much later he stated in an interview that, ‘I’d say my whole life has been devoted to doing things to get me the love of women.’

In 1953, he graduated in medicine from the Université de Montréal and from 1955 he worked as a general practitioner though he soon began specializing in family planning.  He was the first Canadian doctor to perform vasectomies and to insert intrauterine devices (IUDs) and to provide contraceptive pills to unmarried women.  In 1969, he opened his first abortion clinic in Montreal and became a pioneer in the use of vacuum aspiration as an abortion method.  In all, he opened 20 abortion clinics and was responsible for training over a hundred abortionists.

In 1967, Morgentaler addressed the Canadian House of Common’s Health and Welfare Committee on the issue of illegal abortion – he declared that women should have the right to safe abortion.  He had not anticipated the subsequent avalanche of requests from women asking for his help in procuring abortions for them.

At that time, Canadian abortion was strictly against the law, but eventually, at personal risk of losing his career and the prospect of long-term imprisonment, he started performing abortions.  By 1973, Morgentaler claimed to have performed over 5,000 illegal terminations.  In 1983, he opened the first abortion clinic in Toronto and he was charged with procuring illegal abortions.  By 1986, his case reached the Supreme Court of Canada and in 1988 the Supreme Court ruled in his favour in the landmark decision of R vs. Morgentaler.  By this so-called Morgentaler Decision, the Court removed the few remaining protections for the unborn in the 1969 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which already sanctioned permissive abortion.  While the Morgentaler Decision did not give women a constitutional ‘right’ to abortion, it simply declared as ‘unconstitutional’ Section 251 of the Criminal Code that governed the entirety of Canadian abortion.  Thus the Court left the abortion question to Parliament to ‘pronounce on and to direct social policy.’  To date the Canadian Parliament has failed to pass any such abortion-related legislation and so any pregnant Canadian woman can legally terminate the life of her unborn child, during all nine months of pregnancy, for any reason whatsoever.  Canada remains one of the few countries with no legal restrictions on abortion.  In 2008, he was honoured with the award of the Order of Canada for securing the right to legal abortion on-demand for Canadian women.

His legacy is is one of great harm.  It is also ironic that he, as a Jew, escaped the horrors of the Holocaust in Europe, only to bring the horrors of abortion to the Gentile population of Canada.  To be described as ‘the arch-abortionist’ of that country is no honour.  Morgentaler clearly had no understanding, or fear, of Genesis 9:6.