Three-Line Whip For A First Class Monstrosity

"THE question of animal-human hybrids is far from being a furphy. In a few years time, scientists will be telling us it's absolutely necessary, it will help the crippled walk again - the usual propaganda." That was my opinion - as expressed to Senator Andrew Bartlett - in one of the many debates attending Australia's embryonic stem-cell catharsis in late 2006. The Senator was a central figure in the contretemps about, and the eventual passage of, a bill allowing researchers to use cloned human embryos less than 14 days old. Whether or not as a strategic sweetener for its opponents, Senator Bartlett, to his possible credit, amended the proposed legislation to ensure one recommendation of the Lockhart Committee - to also allow experimentation using animal eggs - was dropped. The Senator accused me of "continuing to push the animal-human hybrid" spectre and described my concerns - and those of Tony Abbott - as "not justified" and "grossly (and one has to assume deliberately) misleading." But Abbott and I were right.

The amoral utilitarianism driving so much of the embryonic research movement was then, and is now, vectoring logically towards hybridisation - as the official obsessiveness and the critical firestorms now surrounding Gordon Brown's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill in Britain clearly demonstrate. Prime Minister Brown's insistence on a jack-booted three-line whip, to say nothing of the standard "progressive" tactics of shamefully exaggerating prospects for medical cures and trivialising as furphies anything propounded by opponents, are factors making the debate in the UK especially ugly - but not unexpectedly so.

Charges of anti-Catholicism against Mr Brown might be kneejerk but evidence of it in the Labour Party generally is real enough. That's one reason the Prime Minister could struggle to convince many Catholic MPs and Cabinet ministers to tow even his thrice underscored line. Especially when Scottish Cardinal Keith O'Brien describes the Bill as "monstrous" and newspapers report that "big bruising Scottish whips, such as Catholics Tommy McEvoy and Frank Roy ... have made it clear they have a problem with being forced to vote for the Bill." It can be argued that statements of the Cardinal's sort are not helpful to the anti cause - owing to the now mastered art of marginalising critics with caricatures of what their concerns actually are. Thus a UK health official says, pointlessly but cleverly, that "this is not about 'creating monsters'." Nor was it when Senator Bartlett dismissed non-existent talk of "human-animal hybrids being created and roaming the streets." No. It's about the sacredness of human life and creation. That's all.