David Rivers of Mordialloc in Melbourne is such a spoilsport. Just as I’m about to launch into the Adelaide-based Southern Cross Bioethics Institute (SCBI) and their controversial ’surveys’ into subjects like abortion and therapeutic cloning, David comes up with this excellent letter to the Age. How dare he do all my work for me?

A Catholic organisation, the Southern Cross Bioethics Institute, commissions a survey into attitudes to therapeutic cloning and, hey presto, finds that most Australians (51 per cent) oppose it. But this finding contradicts all previous independent surveys suggesting 80 per cent support it.

Southern Cross previously commissioned a survey into attitudes to abortion, and similarly concluded that most Australians (63 per cent) opposed abortion on demand. Again, this contradicts a number of independent surveys finding up to 80 per cent support for abortion on demand.

Rivers then asks the key question:

How can this one organisation repeatedly make findings that contradict all previous surveys on the same topic? Either the findings are a foregone conclusion, or the figures are rubbery. This survey needs to be seen for what it really is - a religious lobby group’s attempt to influence the political agenda. (Age, 23 Aug. 2006)

There’s no doubt that Rivers is correct in describing SCBI as ‘a Catholic organisation’, although the Institute constantly wails that it’s ‘independent, non-sectarian, autonomous’ and entirely above-board. But apart from the odd Anglican, Lutheran and Jew adding flavour to the mix, SCBI’s personnel list looks like a Catholic house of horrors.

One of the SCBI’s leading lights over the years has been Dr John Fleming, a former Anglican who defected to the Catholic Church in the mid-1990s, evidently attracted by its relative medievalism. Other stars include Catholic ethicist Nicholas Tonti-Filippini, Bishop Anthony Fisher and Dr Joseph Santamaria. Even the lesser-known names are often prominent Catholics e.g. Anna Krohn, Director of the Catholic Pastoral Formation Centre in Melbourne and Tracey Rowland, Dean of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family. Several SCBI people have ties with more strident anti-abortion groups such as Right to Life Australia, the National Civic Council and its Australian Family Association, and Festival of Light Australia.

Writing in 2005, Leslie Cannold described the provenance of SCBI in this way:

… [A] report by Online Catholics editor Kate Mannix says the [SCBI] is an initiative of Southern Cross Care (SA) Inc … Southern Cross Care is itself, according to Mannix, ‘a product of the Knights of the Southern Cross’ who describe themselves as ‘an Order of Catholic men committed to promoting the Christian way of life throughout Australia’. (The Age May 16, 2005)

The Knights of the Southern Cross (KSC) somewhat resemble a Catholic version of freemasonry. The chance of a KSC-spawned organisation taking an independent line on abortion, voluntary euthanasia or therapeutic cloning is nil. On matters such as these, SCBI is simply a mouthpiece for dressed-up Vatican policies.

Regarding methodology, I’d refer you both to Cannold’s article and to a more detailed piece by Eva Cox. And if you want to see a very intriguing comment about Sexton Marketing, which carried out the research on which the SCBI’s therapeutic cloning findings were based, have a look here (entry for 24 Mar. 2005).

No findings of the Southern Cross Bioethics Institute should ever be accepted without independent corroboration. David Rivers’ conclusion should be cast in bronze and hung on the Institute’s walls:

As a statistician once quipped: ‘If you torture your statistics for long enough, eventually they will confess’.

Filed in: Abortion, Catholicism