The U.K. Is Slouching Toward Bioethical Dystopia

You probably haven’t heard of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre. An academic institution based in Oxford, England, the Centre had provided an invaluable perspective on bioethics issues — abortion, stem cells, assisted suicide, and more — for the British population.

You are now even less likely to have heard of it, if you hadn’t already. That’s because this past summer, it closed. Its probable obscurity to Americans, and perhaps even to Britons, did not make its work any less important. In fact, there’s a strong case that its perspective is needed now more than ever, as the United Kingdom is careening toward madness on the issues in which it specialized.