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The nation is the better for policies and funding arrangements that encourage public and private providers of healthcare, including the Churches. The public may need to be patient with Church authorities as they discern appropriate moral responses to new technologies. This is a small price to pay.
Last week's medical error at Melbourne's Royal Women's Hospital threw into sharp relief Australians' 'split personality' in celebrating conception but turning a blind eye to the rights of the unborn. I am not writing from lofty heights. I had an abortion at age 30.
In seeking to fill a mother's empty womb, Nobel Prize winning biologist Robert Edwards developed a solution. In so doing he confirmed what all innovators know: that progress doesn't occur in a neat and orderly vacuum, and nor should it be halted for fear of what it might produce.
The media has reported that Australia's ban on couples using IVF to choose the sex of their children might soon be lifted. Some of the supporters of sex selection for non-medical reasons are fertility doctors for whom there is a considerable financial incentive.
Some Protestants question whether Catholics are Christians. Some Catholics say there is no salvation outside their Church. Identifiying the essentials of Christianity matters in today's post-Christian society, where young Westerners are bored with Christianity and they feel that they have moved beyond it.
The call by law professor Loane Skene for women to sell their eggs for embryonic stem cell research ignores medical evidence of the health risks, and international evidence that the legalisation of the sale of eggs leads to exploitation of women.
'Lee and Christine Rush are your average Ozzie couple, except that their teenage son Scott is on death row in Bali having been convicted of being a hapless drug mule. It will not go down well on the streets of Jakarta if Australians are baying for the blood of the Bali bombers one month and then pleading to save our sons and daughters the next month.'
When I turned twenty I thought the world could be changed like a pair of jeans ... At forty, I realised I'd better decide what I'd be when I grew up.
Many Australians have reservations about a government poster espousing such values with a quote from an English novelist, George Eliot, proclaiming "Character is Destiny". Others wonder about Simpson's Donkey as the emblematic carrier of these values. But how do schools train their students to be moral agents in the 21st century.
A far reaching social reform such as uniform fertility laws requires sustained debate. It's not up to legislators and medical practitioners to decide what constitutes a proper use of medicine. Medicine is fundamentally a social practice, one whose goals and purposes in which the entire community has a legitimate stake.
There are ethical alternatives to embryo destructive research. There are many possibilities of finding or developing stem cells of wide potentiality without involving embryo destruction. Human stem cells can be derived from umbilical cord blood, bone marrow, fetal tissue, and even from the nose’s olfactory-mucosa.