News, 3 August 2006

Doctors in Buenos Aires, Argentina have decided not to perform an abortion on the 19 year old mentally impaired woman, reported in our news summary yesterday. The ethics commission of the hospital where the abortion was due to be performed decided that the pregnancy was too far advanced and that the operation would now be an induced childbirth instead. [Buenos Aires Herald, 3 August]

Experts have advised the British government to provide the flu vaccine to pregnant women this winter. The experts believe that the combination of flu and pregnancy can place potentially life-threatening stress upon the mother's cardio-vascular system. [Life Style Extra, 3 August] SPUC and other concerned groups note that some vaccines are made from cell lines created from the tissue of aborted babies.

The mother of a baby girl born after an ectopic pregnancy has told how she rejected her doctors' suggestion of an abortion. Claire Simpson gave birth to Molly in an emergency Caesarean section at Sunderland Royal Hospital after a scan detected that Molly was growing attached to the ligament tissue in the abdominal cavity. Mrs Simpson said: 'I was devastated when they said there as a problem because I thought I was going to lose her. They said that she could have Downs syndrome, dwarfism - all sorts of problems....I just kept saying she's still alive, she's still inside me and she's not going anywhere." [Daily Mail, 2 August] Note: it is extremely rare that ectopic babies survive: they usually implant in the fallopian (uterine) tube, causing it to rupture (if the baby is not removed first) after around 4-6 weeks of development.

South Korea is working to reverse its declining fertility rate by making it easier for military couples to have children. The army has announced better conditions regarding postings for newlyweds and families having a third child. Lieutenant Hong Kyung-moon, an army personnel officer, commented: "The low birth rate can seriously affect our economy, politics and even national security." [Reuters, 3 August]

An Australian trade union leader has likened destructive embryo experimentation to the lethal experiments conducted by the Nazis. Joe de Bruyn, national secretary of the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association, said: "Therapeutic cloning is the creation of human life for the express purpose of destroying it so you can obtain the stem cells and do research...That's no different to what Hitler's doctors used to do during the last century. They experimented on human life, and that's what this is." Mr de Bruyn's comments were in response to calls for the federal government to lift its ban on human cloning. Tony Abbott, federal health minister, told the National Press Club yesterday that the promoters of embryonic stem cell research were "guilty of over-peddling hope to vulnerable people". [The Australian, 3 August]

To subscribe to SPUC's email information services, please visit www.spuc.org.uk/em-signup. The reliability of the news herein is dependent on that of the cited sources, which are paraphrased rather than quoted. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the society. © Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, 2012


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