There has been quite a bit of activity and comment in Australia over the past few months on issues of bioethics and the Church.  A couple of recent notes:

The Australian government has set up a pregnancy-counseling hotline and Catholic groups are involved – raising the ire of abortion rights advocates and questions about Church groups giving information about, if not referring for, abortion.

Centacare has defended its role in the Government’s new pregnancy counselling service, saying the agency would be involved in developing a manual for counsellors and is "well suited" to the task.

The Catholic Weekly reports that Centacare Catholic Community Services, the official welfare arm of the Church in the Archdiocese of Sydney, was defending its role in a $15.5 million national telephone pregnancy counselling helpline after coming under attack by pro-choice organisations.

The critics claimed that the Church’s staunch opposition to abortion cast doubt on its ability to give women unbiased advice on pregnancy.

The chief executive officer of Centacare, Bernard Boerma, told the Weekly that although the Church’s stance on abortion is known, the Church also recognises the "value of a decision-making counselling model which is non-directive and independent".

In addition, there are controversies relataed to the morning-after pill and IVF clinics:

Meanwhile, the Australian reports that doctors and rape counsellors are concerned that Catholic-owned hospitals will not supply morning-after pills to women referred by rape crisis centres.

The report in today’s Australian cites the Code of Ethical Standards, compiled by Catholic Health Australia, which says direct referral of raped women to centres that offer the morning-after pill "should only occur if reasonable steps have been taken to exclude the likelihood of pregnancy".

Catholic health ethics spokesman Bishop Anthony Fisher was quoted as saying the ban was a logical extension of the church’s position on use of the morning-after pill.

But Karen Willis, of the NSW Rape Crisis Centre, told the paper that it was standard practice for a raped woman to be offered the morning-after pill, if there was a real risk of her becoming pregnant with her attacker’s child.

"To not offer someone the morning-after pill would be negligence as far as we are concerned," she said.

Following a recent report that the Canberra John James Hospital was withdrawing services to the Canberra Fertility Centre, which provides IVF services, the paper adds that the Queensland Fertility Group which also offers IVF has been told that it will need to find new premises following the takeover of the Townsville Wesley Hospital by the Catholic Mater Misericordiae Hospital.