have zygote news for you

It's pleasing, and a bit of a relief, to be able to report that sanity appears to have prevailed in the House Of Commons in both the abortion debate (in that the call for a reduction in the current 24-week limit has been rejected) and in the hybrid embryo research debate (in that a proposed ban has been rejected).

Needless to say the people advocating a cut in the abortion limit and a ban on embryo research are, broadly, the same people and fall, broadly, into the category called "religious loonies". If you're making statements like:

In embryos, we do have the genetic make up of a complete human being and we could not and should not be spliced together with the animal kingdom.

- and your answer to the perfectly natural questions "why not?" and "who says?" are along the lines of "because it says so in this book dictated by my imaginary friend to some Middle Eastern goatherds a couple of thousand years ago" or "because a celibate ex-Nazi in a dress in a jewel-encrusted palace in Rome says so", you need to realise that that's not good enough. I mean, the voices in my toaster tell me to kill women, but you've got to exercise a bit of common sense.

Just to name and shame a bit, Conservative MP Nadine Dorries campaigned and voted for a reduction in the abortion time-limit to 22 weeks, partly as a result of being heavily lobbied by Andrea Williams of the Lawyers Christian Fellowship; I know this as it was featured in the scary Channel 4 Dispatches programme In God's Name a few nights back, wherein the cuddly-sounding LCF reveal themselves to be the usual rabble of homophobic racist nutters, as expected. Ruth Kelly, the current Secretary of State for Transport, voted the same way, hardly surprisingly as she is a known member of the barking Roman Catholic sect Opus Dei, and therefore almost certainly turned up to the voting chamber wearing barbed wire suspenders, the kinky bitch. What is it with religious loons and underwear?