About Us
The Anscombe Bioethics Centre is an Oxford-based research institute serving the Catholic Church in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Established in 1977, the Centre promotes the study of Catholic bioethics in service of the common good.
We engage with the moral questions arising from clinical practice and biomedical research, and publish academic books and articles on such topics.
We are a leading platform in the global conversation on bioethics, fostering dialogue among established and emerging scholars from different religious and philosophical traditions.
Our bioethicists regularly comment on breaking news stories in the media, and contribute to ongoing public policy debates.
Through regular talks, seminar series, and educational programmes, we equip people with the tools necessary for addressing the challenges of bioethics in the 21st Century.
Sincerest Thanks for Your Support
Staff are grateful to all those who sustained the Centre in the past by their prayers and the generous financial support from trusts, organisations, communities and especially from individual donors, including the core funding that came through the Day for Life fund and so from the generosity of many thousands of parishioners. We would finally like to acknowledge the support the Centre has received from the Catholic community in Ireland, especially during the pandemic when second collections were not possible.
We would like to emphasise that, though the Centre is now closed, these donations have not been wasted but have helped educate and support generations of conscientious healthcare professionals, clerics, and lay people over almost 50 years. This support has also helped prevent repeated attempts to legalise euthanasia or assisted suicide in Britain and Ireland from 1993 till the end of the Centre’s work on 31 July 2025.