Unite And Fight

The grave doubts about three-parent babies expressed in yesterday’s Guardian by Zoe Williams serve to remind us that everyone from Germaine Greer to Beatrix Campbell has long articulated equally profound reservations about IVF in general.

What else that cost as much as IVF but which had such a failure rate – frankly, it doesn’t work – would be available on the NHS?  Add to that the fact that each year, 80 women who have become pregnant through IVF have abortions. Read that one over again.

This traditionalist-feminist alliance has been staring us all in the face for many years. As surely as the Old Right-Old Left anti-war alliance that just failed to happen over Iraq, not without blame on both sides, but which really does look as if it might keep both Britain and, possibly, America out of the war in Syria. If we do not take our eyes off the ball this time. The one against global capitalism is also now so obvious that it can no longer be ignored.

As the campaign against Page Three and "lads’ mags" really heats up, consider, if you can stomach doing so, how the male contribution to IVF is invariably produced.

At our expense, of course. We buy the visual aids, to which the supplying of the IVF industry within your NHS and mine must now be a very considerable source of income.

Probably even a commercially salvific one, since it is quite beyond improbable that most teenage boys these days ever set eyes on a top-shelf magazine.

Back in March 2009, even the liberal "Left" media finally realised what the rest of us had been saying for years. But in February of this year, the age limit was put up. Again. It had been put last February as well, when same-sex couples had also been given an entitlement. Only under the Conservatives. Of course.

Meanwhile, NaProTech, Natural Procreative Technology, is an ethical, healthy and far more successful alternative to IVF. Unlike IVF, in NaProTech no embryonic children are killed or exposed to harm in the laboratory, and couples’ relationships are strengthened.

As they are also strengthened by Natural Family Planning, which is more effective than anything else if it is taught properly, as is admitted even by the World Health Organisation, which is hardly a Vatican puppet.

NFP involves no poisoning of women in order to make them permanently available for the sexual gratification of men. It can only be practised by faithful couples, and its practitioners almost, if almost, never divorce.

As for Lily the Pink claims about things such as three-parent babies, we have been here before.

For example, the term "stem cell research" has persistently been used to mean scientifically worthless but morally abhorrent playing about with embryonic stem cells, together with the viciously cruel justification of this by reference to an ever-longer list of medical conditions.

It remains to be established whether stem cell treatment has led to the improvements that have been experienced by stroke victims in Glasgow. But there is no doubt that such cells are obtainable without any recourse to abortion.

For the real stem cell research involves adult and cord blood stem cells, is ethically unproblematic, and has already yielded real, demonstrable, demonstrated results.

But it struggles to secure funding, because it is of no interest to those who cannot forgive the Catholic Church either for having educated them or for having educated the wrong sort.

Any chance that these realities might be taught in secondary schools, Mr Gove? Or made the subject of responsible television documentaries?

Or featured in the press, much of which noisily parades its conservatism, its Catholicism, or both, while the rest noisily parades its feminism?

All of it at present is noisily parading its purported ability and willingness to challenge the supposedly distinct powers that be.