Tag Archives: life

The abortion debate

Posted on by

One of Heather’s recent posts (Lies make the baby Jesus cry) has attracted a few comments. This is odd because most of our readers rarely comment (shame on you) but in some respects unsurprising because the post was on the constantly emotive topic of abortion. In a nutshell, Heather expressed some doubt on the “testimony” presented by an anti-abortion website which described very late term and post-birth “abortions” (murder to normal people) as if they were regularly carried out.

The source had a statement which read: “Generally the practice at the time….and up until 2002 was to end the life of an abortion survivor by strangulation, suffocation, leaving the baby to die, or throwing the baby away.” Heather quite rightly (IMHO) pointed out that this was most certainly nonsense. Strangling a baby after birth is not an abortion.

Anyway, one of the commenters (Lee) has brought up a few points that I felt needed to be elevated beyond the comment thread and given a post all of their own:

Aren’t you talking about an old issue? The girl in the video was born in the 70’s…

Got to answer this yes and no. This is an old issue in that people have argued (and lied) about abortion facts and figures for a long time. The website Heather addressed stated this practice continued until 2002 (old only in internet time). The post itself was made on 17 December 2008, that isn’t even old in Internet time.

The woman in the video was born in 1977 (still not “old”) and yes, US Abortion law has changed between then and now. The “landmark” Roe vs Wade was in 1973 and allowed for an abortion to take place up to three months into the pregnancy. This is not final term and is not post-partum.

Killing a baby after it has been born is now, and was then, murder. In 1977 it was illegal to terminate a baby who was about to be born naturally, unless a doctor stated the mother’s health was at risk (Doe vs Bolton). You can argue that “corrupt” doctors would sign off on anything being a risk to allow a late term abortion but that is a whole different discussion – and can never be prevented unless you rate the mothers life as subordinate to the unborn child.

Maybe I misunderstood the point of your post.

It seems likely, but I actually think you got the point.

It seemed to me you were implying that the girl in the video is lying about the circumstances of her birth.

Yep. If Heather wasn’t implying this, she should have been.

Now it gets fun:

I watched the video (thanks again for the link), it seemed interesting, she didn’t seem to be lying…

Ok. You watched it and thought she was telling the truth. I watched it and thought she was lying. Where do we go from there?

People lie for all kinds of reasons and people will also present a lie as the truth once they have become conditioned to believe it. If the woman in the video was brought up to think they were the circumstances around her birth, she will believe it with all her heart and can easily pass a polygraph. It doesn’t make it the truth though.

I did some research.

So did I. This is why I think there is a healthy dose of lying for jesus going on here.

Not extensive…

Maybe you should try to do some more extensive research. False modesty is not a virtue.

I’m just a blog reader, but it was pretty easy to find information that proved what the girl in the video claims.

I can search the internet and find proof the Earth orbits the Sun. I can find proof the Apollo moon landings were a hoax and proof that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is false. Doesn’t make any of them true. What she describes is illegal, and was illegal in 1977. Who was prosecuted following this? Where are the court records of the trial?

I suppose lots of other people would have proved her birth certificate (signed by the abortionist) and her medical records wrong by now if she was lying.

How? Show me her medical records detailing her birth. Her birth certificate would have been signed by a doctor just like everyone else, it wont have “Abortionist” in big letters after his or her name. Equally, claims like this – which hit the emotional triggers of lots of people who want it to be true, rarely get subjected to scrutiny.

Crucially, read / listen to what is actually said. The woman claims she was born alive before the “abortionist” arrived and was transferred to a hospital. Her records will begin there. She (and her parents) can make any claims they want about the precursor events.

The claims are unverifiable. They are improbable based on law at the time. They are unlikely based on human nature. What conclusion do you draw from that?

Are you saying that these kinds of failed abortions didn’t happen, or don’t happen? (now there is a law against letting infants die if they survive an abortion…so hopefully they don’t happen anymore).

“Failed abortion” is a wide-reaching phrase. Abortions are carried out in the first trimester (and were in 1977) so it is monumentally unlikely a natural, live and viable birth could take place while in the abortion clinic waiting room. I would be surprised if you honestly thought that US hospitals in the 1970s left babies to die.

The US congress took it seriously:
Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2001 [Linked to http://www.nrlc.org/federal/Born_Alive_Infants/BAIPA_%202001_HJC_report.pdf]

The link to the Right to Life website speaks volumes as to the selected choices of information sources. The fact that Congress were convinced to “take it seriously” in 2001 doesn’t lend much support. The blog Heather referenced said this was still going on in 2002 and, there is a tendency to pass legislation on things that are already prohibited if there is enough political pressure to do so. With abortion there is certainly the political pressure.

It does raise one big set of questions though. Prior to the legalisation, and regulisation, of abortions how many babies were left to die, how many were born then strangled, how many mothers died due to complications, how many women died in back street abortions? (etc). Anti-abortionists are not “Pro-lifers” if the mother’s health is sacrificed for the baby. Banning abortion does not make it go away.

If you really want to reduce abortions, without going down the dreaded road of contracption, then plough all your funds into making society better for the parents. Improve healthcare, improve education, improve social supports – just be ready for when a certain section of society realise they get paid for having kids and breed like rabbits. Despite what the anti-abortionist propoganda claims, 99% of abortions are not “lifestyle choices” made by people who feel a child will cramp their demon-worshipping activities.

Will they be on the test?

Posted on by

Seeing or doing x number of things before you die has become a widespread – if daft – concept. (It’s not as if doing things after you die is a viable alternative.)

Today’s Guardian starts a “1000 artworks to see before you die” theme. It got up to artists whose names start with the letter C (going from Albrecht Altdorfer to the Chapman Brothers) today.

I was hoping it would at least show you the artworks in jpeg format, so I could save whole years of my life that would otherwise have to be dedicated to trainspotting objects from the Guardian’s art canon. The online Guardian just describes most of the art but, phew, the print Guardian has enough pictures to allow me a few months’ idleness.

In any case, I feel obliged to cheat. I think I’ve seen the Mona Lisa, for instance. I haven’t actually seen the Mona Lisa on the wall in the Louvre. But I’ve seen it many hundreds of times in reproduction, so it feels as if I’ve seen it. In fact, people who’ve seen it in the flesh (their flesh and its pigments on canvas) don’t tend to be impressed by the experience of shuffling along in a crowd of tourists. Although they can tick it off a mental list of “seen” things, which must bring its own satisfactions.

Google throws up lots of things to do before you die (215,000) e.g This site has a “100 things to do before you die” tickbox. This one refers to a more modestly-enumerated BBC 50 things to do before you die.

Swimming with dolphins seems to come in at number 1. Oh shit, that makes 51 for me then, as I will have to learn to swim properly first. It seems that a fair few of them are too demanding of aquatic-skills for me. Diving with sharks, for instance. Make that 52 things then, if diving is in there, although it’s unlikely I can perfect my swimming skills to scuba-diving level in the limited number of years I have left on this planet.

Oh shit, as far as I can make out, despite my life’s having been relatively incident-packed (or so I naively thought until now) I can only find ONE thing that I’ve done out of the fifty. I will never fit all the rest in. Plus, I’d better become a millionaire first so that I can afford the gap year life that seems necessary.

Seeing your life as a a giant scorecard must be almost the ultimate form of alienation. A life lived as an experience consumer, with things having no meaning in themselves, just being steps in pursuit of some arbitrary achievement.

No one except yourself is going to be impressed if you tick something off. I’m certain there isn’t a final test. Those people who think Pascal’s wager is a reasonable justification for worshipping God X might have a problem though. What if there’s a god who’s a cosmic experiences auditor and s/he will send you to hell if you haven’t used your time wisely ticking experiences off on your scorecard? In that case, you may have to work your way through every list on google.

An Olympic Sized Lesson

Posted on by

Some sad news today, with a bit of a reflection on the current fear-based legislative ideas that grips the west.

From the BBC:

Sixteen Chinese policemen have been killed in an attack on a border post near Kashgar city in the western region of Xinjiang, state media say.
Two men drove a lorry into a group of jogging policemen before attacking them with explosives and knives, according to the Xinhua news agency.

Without a shadow of a doubt, this is sad news and my condolences to the families of all those involved (on the massive off-chance Chinese people can even read this blog).

It shows that the evil of terrorism is truly a global problem. Oddly, China is on record as having an astoundingly appaling human-rights record. It has laws that would make almost anyone in the “free” west blink twice. It has oppressive laws controling how its citizens can (and can’t) behave, forced ID controls and monitors the activities (on and off-line) of its population.

In short, China has the anti-terrorist powers that most western governments would die for.

Did it prevent this attack? Obviously not. Is there any reason to think that people in China are safer from [terrorists|murders|paedophiles|insert bugbear of choice] than any western nation? Well, no.

If anything, history shows that the more oppressed a population becomes, the greater the “revolutionary” response — oddly the US is both an example of this and the figure-head of the New World Order. Terrorists (revolutionaries) find fertile breeding ground where one segment of society feels it is being treated unjustly and no amount of monitoring, surveillance, torture (etc) will prevent this. The current War on Terror is especially ironic as the “terrorists” hate the west because of our freedoms. In our goal to prevent them turning us into oppressive nations we are becoming an oppressive nation.

Well done us.

Is there a solution? If there is, I don’t have it. In the UK terrorism is outlawed by criminal law. Terrorism is a crime. Can a 100% crime-free utopia exist?

For me, the only reasonable solution is to accept the fact there will always be some level of crime (murder, terrorism, burglary etc) and find a situation where we can minimise its impact without destroying the freedoms we once considered universal and self-evident.

Is that difficult?

Test-tube life gets a step closer

Posted on by

The Guardian website announced this afternoon that Craig Ventner is about to announce the creation of a chromosome. The article headings are:-

I am creating artificial life, declares US gene pioneer
· Scientist has made synthetic chromosome
· Breakthrough could combat global warming

I have less than zero capacity to judge the legitimacy of this news item. It’s obviously ‘pop science’ journalism. That normally means that I apply my one-tenth-understanding to some science journalist’s half-understanding.

Mr Venter told the Guardian he thought this landmark would be “a very important philosophical step in the history of our species. We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before”.

That said, taking the news at face value, this does seem to be a potentially huge ethical issue. It could be really good or really bad, depending on the social and political context that such research is sued in.

I can’t help having a bit of a doom and gloom response. I don’t think our track record as a non-creator species is good enough to justify us getting even greater power over the nature of life. (I’ve read Mary Shelley, ffs.)

The Guardian’s mention of a solution to global warming just reminds me that global climate change is the perfect example of an issue where we humans have created a problem and refuse to solve it. (Maybe we haven’t solved it because we couldn’t create artificial life? Sorry, I can’t follow that argument even in sarcasm)

The people in power won’t even admit to the reality of climate change because it might cut their profits and the voting public might object to anything except untrammelled consumer growth so cut off their access to power if they even tried. These are two very short-term concerns that affect a small number of people but they are what determine the world’s response to global warming.

Is our species about to change? Are our leaders all about to become wise and beneficent masters of the universe? In that case, the power to create test tube life is safe in their hands……