Keith O'Brien Quotes
Our Prime Minister, Gordon Brown has given the Government's support to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. It is difficult to imagine a single piece of legislation which, more comprehensively, attacks the sanctity and dignity of human life than this particular Bill.
O'Brien, Keith. "Easter Homily." St. Mary's Metropolitan Cathedral, 23 Mar. 2008, Edinburgh, Scotland.
When a couple sought assistance from a fertility clinic, the best medical procedure to fertilize a few female egg cells with sperm. After a few days of development, the seemingly best embryo is selected for implantation in the mother. The others are usually frozen so that they can be used later if there is a miscarriage or the baby dies in childbirth. The Senator and a few other religious fundamentalists believe that the fertilized cell clusters are actually human beings. Therefore if there is a successful birth, the remaining ones should not be used for research using the embryonic stem cells. On the other hand, many are often discarded as most people do not see the cell clusters as a human being but as a potential human being just as a pile of bricks and a truck of cement is not a house but is a potential house if things are done properly.
This is a classic example of a legislator, concerned about the ethics and morality of certain types of scientific experiments, and not understanding the scientific meaning of the terms used, would also make illegal existing and important technologies and cures. In this case, he thinks of cloning as reproducing another exact human being, but we clone human cells every day to produce many of the beneficial medicines we use commonly. And the combination of animals and humans is common in many aspects of modern medicine. For burns the tissue of pigs is used to cover the wound and act as a scaffold on which human skin cells grow. There are millions of people in America and the rest of the world who are leading a normal life with a pig or a cow heart valve. There are ethical problems to be sure but most legislators have little clue as to what they are, and tend to want to outlaw whole areas of science out of their ignorance in in reaction to public pressure from others who do not understand what it is that they want to prohibit.
She was calling for universal legalization of abortion and addressing Catholic and Muslim representatives who were concerned about the morality of abortion.
Paul had been the Libertarian Party Presidential Candidate and in keeping with the libertarian philosophy of the party supported the right to abortion and was adamant that the Government should stay away from such issues of morality. However, in 2007, he tried to secure the Republican Presidential Nomination. At that time the religious right dominated the Republican Party and opposition to abortion was a litmus test issue. Paul flip flopped, but it did him little good. The issue of the fetus and protection of the law is not the simple issue that Paul made it out to be. Even the most ardent supporters of abortion has argued that a fetus ought to be protected both civilly and criminally in law. Where the disagreement lies is at what point in time and/or development does the fetus constitute life and deserve the protection of life and how society shall deal with the conflicting life and health interests of mother and fetus.
Cox’s 1974 prediction of the legal precariousness and temerity of the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision on abortion.
Keith Michael Patrick O'Brien was a Scottish Catholic cardinal. He was the Archbishop of Saint Andrews and Edinburgh from 1985 to 2013.
