Cranmer on Gosnell

Cranmer has done an excellent post about the Kermit Gosnell trial.

"The nation cries out for a latter-day Shaftsbury or Wilberforce in Parliament who will bang on about this barbarism ad nauseam, day after day, week after week, until something is done about it."

Some of the comments are slightly confused though. It's perfectly consistent to be anti-abortion but pro-death penalty. After all, the babies haven't done anything wrong, and it's still possible to believe that we can do something that forfeits our right to live. I don't think the death penalty is appropriate though - I think there's too much potential for abuse with wrong verdicts and so on.

In fact, from a logical point of view, it's much easier to be pro-death penalty and anti-abortion than vice versa.

Abortion v Infanticide

An interesting article here.

My conclusion: Ethics fail.

Their logical conclusion "killing babies no different from abortion" is quite possibly valid, but not new - Peter Singer has been arguing it for years, and it was basically the Roman position thousands of years ago. However, their ethical implications are deeply skewed.

Having demonstrated that abortion and infanticide are morally equivalent, they have three options:

• They could try asserting that ethics are societally defined and conclude "isn't that interesting?" but maintain that one can be wrong and the other right.
• They could use the widespread revulsion against infanticide to say that abortion is therefore not just an issue of women's rights and is (at least in most cases) wrong.
• They could use the widespread acceptance of abortion as a product of women's rights to say that infanticide must be correct too.

Of course, I'd take the second option. We think infanticide is wrong because it is - that's what our consciences tell us. I strongly suspect that the reason that the proponents of abortion are so shrill and so irrational in their defence of it is that deep down they know it to be wrong as well.

More Bits and Bobs - Abortion and the Titanic

This is a very interesting article (HT to Anglican Mainstream).

A large majority of French women say that there are too many abortions in their country, and that abortions "leaves psychological traces that are difficult for women to experience" according to a recent national poll.

The study, which was done at the behest of the French Right to Life Alliance (l’Alliance pour les droits de la vie - ADV), found that 83% of women believe that abortion does lasting psychological damage, and 61% believe that there are too many abortions in France.

Sixty-seven percent said that women should be educated about the possibility of putting their children up for adoption as an alternative to abortion.

Unrelatedly, Al Mohler wrote an interesting article about why so many women and children survived the Titanic (and why the film was wrong), but so few survived the Lusitania.

Put plainly, on the Lusitania the male passengers demonstrated “selfish rationality.” As TIME explains, this is “a behavior that’s every bit as me-centered as it sounds and that provides an edge to strong, younger males in particular. On the Titanic, the rules concerning gender, class and the gentle treatment of children — in other words, good manners — had a chance to assert themselves.”

Note carefully the assumption here that “the rules concerning gender, class and the gentle treatment of children” are ascribed to “good manners” and “socially determined behavioral patterns.” In other words, the male decision to give priority to the welfare of women and children is just a learned behavior, a social convention.

Is that all there is to it? There is a huge question looming in this — is it right for men to act with care and concern toward women and children, or is this just an outmoded relic of Victorian morality?

Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill

I know it's a few days since the bill was passed, but I'm still busy revising.

I found praying about the bill immensely difficult after it was passed (though I guess it still has to get through the House of Lords). As far as I can tell, the majority of MPs voted for a bill which will probably result in the deaths of thousands of innocents who cannot defend themselves. So what should we pray about it?

The first thing, it seems to me, is repentance for all the times we haven't spoken up, and for our complicity in electing them. As a student, I have two MPs, but only one vote. One of my MPs voted against some aspects of the bill, the other one has been known to campaign for a removal of all time limits for abortion and the legalisation of euthanasia. Did I speak publically against him at the last election? No. Am I therefore complicit? To an extent. And I need to repent of that.

The second thing, which quite surprised me, is how refreshing it can be to pray Psalms about God's justice at times like these. We are witnessing the government largely go against the will of the people, and taking a course of action which they know may well lead to large numbers of innocent deaths. Passages like Psalm 10 just seem so appropriate...

12 Arise, LORD! Lift up your hand, O God.
Do not forget the helpless.
13 Why does the wicked man revile God?
Why does he say to himself,
"He won't call me to account"?
14 But you, O God, do see trouble and grief;
you consider it to take it in hand.
The victim commits himself to you;
you are the helper of the fatherless.
15 Break the arm of the wicked and evil man;
call him to account for his wickedness
that would not be found out.
16 The LORD is King for ever and ever;
the nations will perish from his land.
17 You hear, O LORD, the desire of the afflicted;
you encourage them, and you listen to their cry,
18 defending the fatherless and the oppressed,
in order that man, who is of the earth, may terrify no more.

Psalm 10:12-18 (NIV)

This link is great for confirming the right-wing bits of my prejudice. 92% of Conservative MPs voted for children needing a father. 82% of Labour MPs voted against, with only slightly weaker patterns on the abortion issue. I prayed, and I think I was right to pray, that every single MP who voted against the unborn would lose their seats at the next election.

Abortion - The Choice

I watched this documentary following 5 women going through abortions, with lots of interviews. Wow. I don't think the makers take either side, but it is very powerful. It's available to watch online for another few days.

Just watch (except for the bits where you have to look away), and just think about the word "conscience"... I think people know whether abortion is right or not...

It's really good seeing the BBC producing something sensible like this for a change!

"Emergency Contraception"

I was chatting to an A&E doctor recently, who used the phrase "emergency contraception", and it struck me just how bad a phrase it is. Here are some basic dictionary definitions (from wiktionary):

contraception - the use of a device or procedure to prevent conception as a result of sexual activity

conception - 3. The initiation of an embryonic animal life; the fertilization of an ovum by a sperm to form a zygote

So contraception is acting to stop the sperm fertilizing the egg as a result of sex.

"Emergency contraception", however, is a hormone pill given to women after sexual activity, commonly called the "morning after pill". As far as I recall, the hormones don't actually do much to the egg or sperm cells; it's much more likely that they act by preventing implantation of the fertilized egg cell. And that isn't contraception.

"Emergency contraception" is what those machines on the walls in pub toilets are for (as far as I can tell). If a doctor was to provide emergency contraception, it would be as a result of someone running in saying "Quick, give me something. I think I've pulled"...

So why use a misleading term? Simple - "contraception" sounds a heck of a lot better than "abortion" or "termination", which themselves are nicer names for embryocide, just the same as "family planning" sounds like something sensible rather than being largely about planning families by killing unwanted members, which is what it often ends up as.

People would doubtless argue that using language like "emergency contraception" means that the choice becomes less emotionally charged, which is true. But is being emotionally uncharged a good thing? Surely if calling a spade a spade leads to decisions being emotionally charged, then it's right that they should be.

An extreme example. Someone who shoots innocent people without experiencing some degree of emotional charge is a psychopath. That is a bad thing. Some decisions, especially decisions involving ending life, should be emotionally charged. So call a spade a spade.

Abortion (again)

Just noticed this excellent piece by Charles Moore in the Telegraph. Some quotes...

It is not hard to imagine how a future Museum of London exhibition about abortion could go. It could buy up a 20th-century hospital building as its space, and take visitors round, showing them how, in one ward, staff were trying to save the lives of premature babies while, in the next, they were killing them.

...

If you want to do people wrong, you must first undermine the idea that they are people. The Nazis called Jews rats. The Hutu in Rwanda called the Tutsis cockroaches. Pseudo-Darwinian views promoted ideas about racial purity or mental or physical health which allowed those who lacked these qualities to be seen as "inferior stock".

There's also this piece by the (very English) Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor. As I've said before, I think abortion is the most important political issue, and if the left-leaning parties or newspapers want my business or votes, they shouldn't let anti-abortion campaigning be mainly the preserve of right-wingers.

Anglicans and Abortion

My friend Sean forwarded this onto me.

Important link.

It's an online petition protesting at Anglican support of the pro-choice organisation, the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice in the US, and encouraging the Anglican Communion to take a more explicit stance against abortion, as well as to take more practical action to help make abortion unnecessary. The group are also formulating a statement on the use of human embryos in stem cell research.

Abortion Legislation

The rationale behind current abortion legislation is interesting. Indeed, it seems completely to ignore what seems quite obvious about the nature of the fetus.

Instead it seems to focus on the issue of viability - how capable the fetus is of survival without the mother.

Of course, on one level, this seems to be a ludicrous idea - a baby is not capable of independent survival at least until it can crawl, and in almost every case, for a long time afterwards. But it seems to me that the specific issue here is the dependence on the mother rather than on other human beings. After 24 weeks, the baby would need help to survive, but that help does not have to come from the mother.

Abortion legislation then seems to rest on the idea that no-one has an obligation to help another. If someone is lying bleeding by the side of the road, we do not have to call an ambulance. If we do not want to support our children, we can put them into the care of social services. If we do not want to support elderly relatives, ditto. If we do not want to support non-viable fetuses, we do not have to. But since there is no-one else who can support them other than the mother, the fetus is killed.

And to an extent, that is a logical point of view, though harsh, and I have stated it harshly to make a point. It is the idea that we have a right not to be responsible for others if we don't want to, which we place more highly than the right to continued life.

I don't agree with that, of course. I think the act of bringing the child into existence confers a responsibility on those who did so to support it until it becomes independent, just as I think that that support confers the responsibility on the child to look after the parents when they can no longer look after themselves.

And neither does that point of view provide any justification for taking action to end the life of the fetus, which is what abortion is. Even if it was a valid point of view, it would only confer the right to mistreat the child by eating unsuitable or inadequate food, using drugs, etc. It would not give the ability to remove life, any more than society deciding it no longer wanted to look after Jews would give society the right to kill them.

Abortion - The Nature of the Fetus

(I am using the word "fetus" to denote the whole stage from fertilisation to birth. I am using the American spelling because the English only added the "o" to be pretentious, and the Americans then rightly removed it again.)

There are several important questions which ought to be asked about the fetus. Is it alive? Is it human? Is it individuated (i.e. a distinct human from its mother)?

"Alive" seems to be a binary state. Things are either alive or they are not. We do not see examples of things in everyday life which are "partially alive". We sometimes speak like that when things are in danger of dying, but that is not the issue here. The question is not alive/dead but living/non-living. There are also examples in nature of systems which are partially living, such as soil, but that is because they are composed of a large number of small living things, with other bits of dead and non-living material. That description does not apply to a fetus.

So is the fetus living? It is certainly living at the moment of birth. If it was non-living at any moment before then, there must have been a sudden point where it made the transition from non-living to living. We do not observe such a point in pregnancy. Therefore the fetus is living from the time of fertilisation to the time of birth.

Is the fetus human? This, of course, depends on the definition of "human". Our definition needs to include all instances of humanity, including babies and people who are asleep or in comas, which means that the definition would either have to be in terms of potential, e.g. "A human is a physical being which, at some stage in the past or future, might be able to tell a joke / relate to God / whatever." or in terms of genetics. All of these definitions apply to fetuses throughout pregnancy, unless fetuses are specifically and directly excluded from them. Hence it seems logical to conclude that fetuses are human.

Are fetuses individuated or are they "just part of the mother"? The same argument seems to hold as for living. Things are not partially individuated. Indeed, the use of the word "mother" above tells you that there are two distinct individuals - the mother and the fetus. If they were one individual, she would not be a "mother", and there would be no "father" either. And so, because they are individuated at birth, and there is no one moment of individuation, they must also be individuated at conception.

This does not of course mean that they are physically distinct. Indeed, the situation is in many ways comparable to the situation of conjoined twins, where there are two individuals in one composite body. Except in this case, of course, the body is mostly that of the mother.

So then, it seems most logical to me to conclude that the fetus is an individuated, but not physically distinct, living human.

What Makes Me Angry (1999)

This is an article I wrote in January 1999...

This evening I got quite angry. Let me explain why.

The Aztecs used to have a sacrificial system where they sacrificed people. They believed that when the sun went down, it was dying and it needed human life to be given to it to help it rise again the next morning, and so as sundown approached, the priests would tear the still beating hearts out of people's chests and hold them up to the sun. A lot of those who were sacrificed were slaves or criminals - it was, among other things, their version of the death penalty. Pretty grim, you might think. But it wasn't that that made me angry this evening. In fact, I don't think that has ever made me very angry. For one thing, it was a long time ago and for another the Aztecs got what they deserved (not to say that those who gave it to them didn't deserve as bad of course). Also, when I found that useful fact out from a book, I was at the age where I thought it was fairly cool.

In the Bible, God's people rebel against him many times. On one occasion, they rebel against him so consistently and badly that he kicks them out of the Promised Land. This is what God says:

The people of Israel and Judah have done nothing but evil in my sight from their youth; indeed, the people of Israel have done nothing but provoke me with what their hands have made, declares the LORD. From the day it was built until now, this city has so aroused my anger and wrath that I must remove it from my sight. The people of Israel and Judah have provoked me by all the evil they have done--they, their kings and officials, their priests and prophets, the men of Judah and the people of Jerusalem. They turned their backs to me and not their faces; though I taught them again and again, they would not listen or respond to discipline. They set up their abominable idols in the house that bears my Name and defiled it. They built high places for Baal in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to sacrifice their sons and daughters to Molech, though I never commanded, nor did it enter my mind, that they should do such a detestable thing and so make Judah sin.
Jeremiah 32:30-35, NIV

Human sacrifice, in this case the sacrificing of children to Molech, is the lowest of the low in terms of rebellion against God. It is even worse in this case because it it God's own people doing it. That is why God's message through Jeremiah was firstly (chapters 1-28) one of judgement on his own people.

Maybe you now see what I'm getting at. But I'll change the angle of approach slightly.

British law says that if a pregnant woman is shot and the fetus dies as a result, but the woman survives, then the gunman is responsible for manslaughter (accidental homicide) at the least. If it can be shown that he was aiming to kill the baby, then it's murder (deliberate homicide). I don't know many people who would think that an unreasonable judgement, though they would argue over the sentence.

Paradoxically though, if the man is a doctor then he can not only get away with but also be legally paid, by the government for the same action (terminating the fetus). If he has the consent of the mother, then it is approved of. If not but he thinks he should do so anyway, then it is still not treated as homicide.

This evening I sung a song which I had sung before and made me quite angry. It can be found here. I've not reprinted it here for copyright reasons.

The song picks up that abortion is effectively sacrificing children "on the altars of our gods" - i.e. we are putting our own convenience or health before the lives of those fetuses. Note I write "we". And our gods are ourselves. As has been said (to mean something different) "God created man in his own image. Now man is repaying the compliment." Over five million fetuses have been aborted under the NHS. That's about 9% of the population of Great Britain. I doubt even the Aztecs managed that many. And that's why I was angry.

But the last verse of the hymn points the way forwards, as do the next verses in Jeremiah, which refer to God restoring his people after judgement and repentance. We need, individually and as a country, to recognise what abortion is, and then to move on, to apologise to God and receive his forgiveness. Until that time, we remain under God's judgement.

Political Thoughts

I honestly can't see how anyone can think abortion is wrong and not also think that it is one of the most important political issues in the country today. To vote for parties on grounds of how they treat the comparatively poor (for example) ignoring how likely they are to reduce the number of abortions seems like voting for the Nazis because they were good at law and order.

The question came up today about whether the government should pay for treatment for self-inflicted illnesses (such as smoking-related diseases, obesity, self-harm, parachuting injuries). My opinion is that there should be a compulsory healthcare insurance, the premium for which is dependent upon lifestyle factors but not on genetic factors (including gender, race, etc). Some basic level could be paid for out of general taxation to ensure that the poorest are provided for. So basically it comes out as an NHS which doesn't provide for lifestyle-linked stuff except in emergencies, but where insurance e.g. for riding a bike is readily available (thought it might of course require wearing a helmet). [ETA - I'm going off this idea; see comments. But I stand by the first one.]

Amazing Grace

I watched Amazing Grace last night. Great film.

Right, now who is going to do that for abortion?

Abortion Quote

I'm reading a very helpful book at the moment about how to speak lovingly with people who disagree with you. Here's a very very interesting quote about abortion:

When I listened to women describe their situations in depth in small listening groups, a surprising theme emerged. In nearly every case, the abortion was undertaken to fulfill a felt obligation to another person, a parent or boyfriend. My assumption that abortion decisions were prompted by practical problems - food, shelter, poverty, clothing - was not borne out. Instead, the woman felt bound to please or protect some other person, and abortion was the price she felt she had to pay.

Frederica Mathewes-Green, Real Choices quoted in Randy Newman, Questioning Evangelism?

the demystification of the person

From time to time, I come across the idea of demystification. As far as I can tell, it means that there's something everyone thinks is special, and someone explains why it's just ordinary. There's some areas (some conincidences, especially the kind that lie behind conspiracy theories) where I quite like doing it myself.

And then I come across it applied to normal people, and I really don't like it.

Here's the first big example I can remember getting annoyed about:

I was at teacher training college, and due to the government's cunning device to reduce the number of Physics teachers, I was having to teach biology (and specifically sex ed). The head of biology at the school, who was supervising me, told me that the school policy was to teach just the mechanics of what went on, without reference to relationships.

The text book, likewise, only referred to the mechanics of what was going on, though it called the process "making love" instead of "sexual intercourse", which was odd. To my mind, "sexual intercourse" is the closest polite term to meaning a purely physical act without necessarily reproductive consequences. But "making love" implies the context of love, which was not otherwise mentioned. Were they saying that this is all that "love" is?

My problem with the sex ed lessons was that, in removing the relational context from sex, they were implying that it was a merely physical act. They were taking something special, and making it seem normal.

Another example comes in what some medical schools teach about abortion. A not-yet-Christian "pro-choice" medical student told me that they are taught that the fetus is essentially a parasite on the mother's body - it depends totally on the mother for all its sustenance, potentially damaging the mother in doing so.

How is that different from a newborn baby, a disabled child, a seriously ill relative?

Yes, the dependancy relationships might be one way, but people consist of more than just their dependancy relationships. A fetus might be a bundle of cells that draws support from the mother at cost to the mother, but that does not mean that is all it is. Again, they are taking something special, and making it ordinary.

In many respects I agree with them. As far as souls and stuff are concerned, I'm a materialist. I think that I am a complex collection of atoms obeying the laws of Physics. But that is not the only level on which a description is possible. I can relate to other such complex collections of atoms obeying the laws of Physics. And while it might well be possible to reduce my interactions with them to the merely physical, to do so makes the description poorer.

On a physical level, I could say that many of the interactions between such complex collections of atoms are at a very high level of complexity, and to reduce them to simple mechanics is to simplify them too much.

In the same way, to reduce a film to a large number of photons passing through a complex coloured filter and scattering off a screen is a valid description, but in reducing the descrption to that level, it impoverishes it by missing off the detail of complex interactions that is the real point.

I could go further. I might be a complex collection of atoms obeying the laws of Physics, but by his awesome grace, I can interact at a complex level with the God who made the laws of Physics. Yes, it might be possible to describe that in terms of what the ions and molecules in my brain are doing, but such a description would completely miss the awesome glory of God.