Life After Death

66% of Labour, 62% of Liberal Democrat, and 42% of Conservative candidates would extend the Abortion Act to Northern Ireland (against the wishes of all the political parties there).

Euthanasia Next A third of Labour candidates (31% of Liberal Democrats and 19% of Conservatives) will vote for euthanasia - making it probable that this Parliament will legalise euthanasia, or the advanced directives which will usher in euthanasia.

This is the most anti-life parliament ever elected. As they plot to allow the killing of patients in a 'persistive vegetative state', let them remember the case of my former constituent, the Hillsborough victim, Andrew Devine, who would now be dead if the Tony Bland judgement had been applied to him. I vividly recall Andrew's parents telling me, when I visited them shortly after the Tony Bland judgement, that despite all the unwished-for vicissitudes which their family faced, they could never starve their son to death. Let them ponder the reports in The Guardian newspaper in March 1997, when Andrew's parents talked publicly about the improvements which had taken place in his quality of life. Despite recent reversals for the euthanasia lobby in Australia, let no-one doubt that Dutch-style euthanasia laws are already being discussed by politicians in the UK. In 1996, Sir Ludovic Kennedy, President of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, and a leading Liberal Democrat, was behind the motion seeking to commit the Party to euthanasia. In the courts, the pro-euthanasia lobby are using hard cases to soften up public opinion and to push through legislation (using the abortion laws as their model).

The Battle for 1998 and Beyond If ever proof was needed of the old juridical adage that "hard cases make bad law", it was surely the 1967 Abortion Act. Parliament was assured that legalised abortion would not lead to a general right to kill the unborn; that it was not a slippery slope.

Five million abortions later - and with the accompanying horrors of destructive experiments on human embryos, human cloning and genetic manipulation - those arguments are exposed as a monstrous deceit. In 1989, the euthanasia lobby saw the opportunity to exploit the hard case of Tony Bland. The lawyer, Lord Lester - a Liberal Democrat peer - was appointed as amicus curiae - an impartial friend of the Court. The Liverpool supporter, desperately injured at Hillsborough, was starved to death after Lord Lester asserted that "the artificial prolongation of corporeal existence" may degrade and demean humanity. He stated that life is only valuable as a vehicle for consciousness. This defines humanity and equates life with the ability to think. Insensibility becomes a fate worse than death itself and even becomes a disqualification for life. In the Bland Judgement, in 1992, that argument won the day despite a number of law lords expressing serious reservations about the case. Lord Mustill stated that "the withdrawal of nutrition and hydration was