Cardinal O'Brien: HFEA bill like Nazi practices

Briefing. The HFEA bill has been passed by the House of Lords; the number of Lords willing to vote for a small amelioration of it was a pathetic 39. Cardinal O'Brien is quite right to cite the historical experience of the Nazis: horror at what the Nazis did in their experiments set back the abortion/eugenics movement by thirty years. Now the time is up, and Dr Mengele is forgiven.

From SPUC: The British government's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is destined to become law. The House of Lords yesterday completed its third reading, approving all amendments by the House of Commons. [Official Report, 29 October] An attempt to restrict the research on human/animal admixed embryos was defeated. Lord Alton of Liverpool proposed that the bill should stipulate that such beings could only be used when there was no alternative. 202 peers opposed the amendment while 39 supported it. [Herald, 30 October] The leader of Scottish Catholics has compared the British government to the Nazis. In an open letter to Mr Gordon Brown, the prime minister, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, called the embryology bill misguided and compared its various provisions to the horrors of the Hitler regime. He writes: "The hideous savagery of [Nazi] experiments convinced the civilised world that such practices [had to] be outlawed forever." The cardinal urged Mr Brown to amend the bill "as a matter of great urgency and human decency." [John
Smeaton, 28 October] Lord Winston, the fertility specialist described the cardinal's remarks as unhelpful. [East Kilbride News, 29 October] The Catholic Archbishop of New York also referred to totalitarian regimes when writing about abortion. Cardinal Edward Egan described how Hitler and Stalin regarded certain groups as sub-human and likened this to the treatment of the unborn. [CNA on EWTN, 28 October]