THE death of Christopher Reeve has reignited interest in stem-cell research. Charlotte Wyatt’s agonies were prime-time television. And the dilemmas of abortion have dictated the lines of Mike Leigh’s film Vera Drake, tipped for glory in the Oscars. Often, whenever life, death, ethics and white coats coincide in the courts, somewhere behind the litigation stands a committed body of religious “pro-lifers”.

They ride into the courtrooms under the banner of Burke’s famous dictum: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Their hearts are in the right place, but is their strategy? A quick audit of their forensic achievements over the past decade suggests that their dictum should be rewritten. If what they perceive as evil really is evil, then it seems that all that is necessary for its triumph is that good men instruct solicitors to issue proceedings against it in the Strand because their court campaigns have — with very rare exceptions — been counterproductive.

This is not to criticise their lawyers. Without exception the cases have been argued with consummate skill. Often the arguments have prevailed. But the causes would have been better off without the lawyers. Where there have been victories they have been pyrrhic. Often, too, the activists seem to have misunderstood what the courts are for. Where there have been successes, they have so far been public relations successes. The Rev Joanna Jepson, the curate who was granted a judicial review in the case of a late abortion on a woman whose foetus had a cleft palate, won the moral argument but no judge has yet decided whether the abortion was unlawful. All this is well illustrated by the sallies of the “pro-life” lobby against the legality of embryo manipulation.

A good place to pick up the story is with the Pro-Life Alliance’s contentions about the legality of creating human embryos by cell nuclear replacement. The details of the debate do not matter. Suffice it to say that after immensely expensive litigation the House of Lords dismissed both contentions.

This was followed by the case of Zain Hashmi, a sick boy whose parents wanted embryo screening to produce a healthy baby of the same tissue type with stem cells that might save Zain’s life. An application by Josephine Quintavalle, of the pressure group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, for a judicial review of the decision by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to permit the procedure, failed before the Court of Appeal. It was, too, a PR disaster. It looked as if Quintavalle, given a choice between the life of an eight-cell embryo and the life of a child, would choose the embryo. That looked, to most laymen, like loving ideas more than people.

While of course the campaigners objected to the procedures involved in both these cases, they had two wider objectives: to show that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 was too old to grapple with the new dilemmas thrown up by medical advances, and to rein in and make the authority more accountable. This was a democratic issue, they said: we cannot have an unelected body making such fundamental decisions about human lives.

The litigation achieved precisely what it sought to avoid. The House of Lords construed the 1990 Act liberally, breathing new life into it. It emerged looking far more elastic and capable of bending to fit the strange new shapes of biotechnology. But why invite legislation? New legislation will not favour the “pro-lifers”, and you cannot argue with legislation. It is advantageous to have big decisions made by the HFEA rather than by statute. You can run to the Administrative Court to complain about the authority; you can do nothing about the statute. One can imagine future Quintavalles looking wistfully back to the days of a relatively conservative and judicially accountable authority.

But all this pales into insignificance beside the latest own goal. Leslie Burke, a former postman with a degenerative brain condition, will at some stage have to be kept alive with artificial nutrition and hydration (ANH). He is likely to remain conscious and competent. He fears doctors might rely on sloppily drafted General Medical Council guidelines and, despite his wish to be kept alive, refuse to give him ANH. This is a legally foolish fear. Long established and uncontroversial common law principles would make it unlawful to withhold ANH.

He sought a judicial review. Mr Justice Munby agreed that the guidelines could have been better expressed. It was a technical success, but a disaster for the “pro-lifers”. It was inevitable that the judge would enthrone autonomy as the overarching principle in the law of the end of life, and he duly did, saying, in a judgment of great erudition: “The personal autonomy which is protected by Article 8 (of the European Convention on Human Rights) embraces such matters as how one chooses to pass the closing days and moments of one’s life . . . The dignity interests protected by the convention include . . . under Article 3, the right to die with dignity and the right to be protected from treatment, or from a lack of treatment, which will result in one dying in avoidably distressing circumstances . . . Important as the sanctity of life is, it has to take second place to personal autonomy; and may have to take second place to human dignity . . .”

That passage is the greatest gift the Voluntary Euthanasia Society could have asked for. It was handed to it by the “pro- lifers”. Autonomy tends to spread from areas where it is good to areas where it is deadly. Mr Burke will be no safer as a result of that litigation, and the euthanasia campaigners are closer to their objective. What was the “pro-life” lobby thinking when it supported this case? We have a fairly sensible and humane set of medical law principles. Ham-handed legal crusading is unlikely to improve them. This is no plea for silence when a response is needed. But it is not morally supine to be strategic.

The author is a barrister at 6 Pump Court, Temple