I would like to call for three quiet cheers at the news that the Teenage Pregnancy Independent Advisory Group (TPIAG) has been axed by the Coalition Government. (Complacency is something always to be avoided like the plague by pro-life campaigners.)It was just under a year ago, as visitors to my blog might recall, that the previous British government accepted all the major recommendations of the TPIAG's 2008/2009 annual report.
Amongst the report's appalling major recommendations, accepted by the government, were the following:
- that all schools including faith schools must teach all aspects of sex and relationships education within the context of relationships in an anti-discriminatory way; they said that contraception, abortion and homosexuality are all legal in this country and therefore all children and young people should be able to learn the correct facts
- that sex and relationships education should include explicit links to young people's advisory services and provision of contraception and sexual health services and young people should be taught how to access such services
"We are very pleased that Church of England and Catholic Church are also supporting this move."(Fortunately, in a significant victory for SPUC and for the pro-life and pro-family movement, the compulsory sex and relationships education clauses in the previous government's Children Schools and Families bill were defeate - in spite of the support of church leaders in England and Wales.)
The TPIAG, of course, were referring to the Catholic Education Service and to the Catholic Bishops' Conference and England Wales. As I mentioned at the time, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) taught (whilst Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith):
"We must not forget that the episcopal conferences have no theological basis, they do not belong to the structure of the Church, as willed by Christ, that cannot be eliminated ... No episcopal conference, as such, has a teaching mission: its documents have no weight of their own save that of the consent given to them by the individual bishops."I do hope that the CES and the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales (CBCEW) will use the opportunity provided by the scrapping of the TPIAG to scrap their scandalous co-operation with the government on sex and relationships education which includes providing access to schoolchildren in Catholic schools to abortion and birth control drugs and devices without parental knowledge or consent. In place of such co-operation, the CES and the CBCEW should get its policies in line with the Catholic Church's key teaching document on sex education, The truth and meaning of human sexuality: guidelines for education within the family.
The CES and the CBCEW are handing our children over to the abortionists. It's the worst development in this country for hundreds of years.
When the CES/CBCEW policy is reversed, I will give three loud cheers.
Comments on this blog? Email them to johnsmeaton@spuc.org.uk
Sign up for alerts to new blog-posts and/or for SPUC's other email services
Follow SPUC on Twitter
Join SPUC's Facebook group
Please support SPUC. Please donate, join, and/or leave a legacy
