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UK Government Behaving Like Nazis: Edinburgh Cardinal : 7th Nov 08
The UK government’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology (HFE) bill contained “grotesque,” “horrifying” and “nightmarish” provisions that are reminiscent of the Nazi eugenics policies, said the cardinal archbishop of Edinburgh.
Following his speech last weekend at a pro-life conference in Glasgow, Keith Cardinal O’Brien issued a scathing open letter telling MPs who voted for the bill that they are acting against the ethical developments of the last 50 years of human rights laws.
“I am appalled that you are promoting a Bill which seeks, by stealth, to create a regime where extracting tissue and cells from human beings no longer requires their consent or involvement”, Cardinal O’Brien wrote.
Referring to the post-war revelations of Nazi medical atrocities, the Cardinal said, “The hideous savagery of their experiments convinced the civilized world that such practices must be outlawed forever.”
The cardinal’s reference to National Socialism is based on the eugenics programmes that foreshadowed the Holocaust. Under the Nazi eugenics programmes, and later during the war, incapacitated and mentally ill patients were sterilized and later killed. In concentration camps, prisoners were forced to be subjects of dangerous and often fatal experiments.
In response to these atrocities, the post-war Nuremberg Code was adopted by all western countries to ensure that consent was the first consideration made when using human beings as test subjects in medical and scientific research. “The proposals in this Bill,” the cardinal said, “represent a breach of 50 years of ethical medical research. They by-pass the Declaration of Helsinki, the Human Tissue Act, the Mental Capacity Act and the Human Rights Act. Removing parts of people’s bodies without their consent utterly flies in the face of all BMA and GMC guidance on consent to research.” LifeSiteNews.com.
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