Human rights in the abortion debate

Today is the 16th October, here in NZ, and it's Blog Action Day again...or BAD, which always strikes me as a kind of ironic acronym to be using. Anyway, the focus this year is on Human Rights, a subject that covers an extraordinary number of areas.

One that concerns me greatly is that of abortion. Yes, I know all the old arguments as to why women should have abortion on demand and so on, and that men shouldn't have any say on the matter because they don't have to carry babies in their wombs (even though the babies wouldn't have got there in the first place if it hadn't been for the men), and that it's a woman's right to choose and all the rest of it. The arguments for abortion on demand have been running around like headless chickens for decades now, and are sound very tired and very hollow.

Too often those arguing for abortion on demand come up with straw men arguments. One such is claiming that those who are pro-life are all religious people, people who want to impose their religious views on everyone else. This isn't the case at all. Yes, there are plenty of people of faith involved in the abortion debate, but the reason they're there is because it's a matter of ethics, and ethics are very close to the hearts of people of faith.

Pro-life arguments are also about human rights, and the rights of the little human beings who are being carried in the wombs of their mothers are never given any credence by those in favour of abortion. Somewhere along the line, these evolving babies were turned into 'foetuses', blobs of jelly, or growths. Anything but what they actually are: potential human beings.  If we were to take a new-born baby and kill it, we would be charged with infanticide; this has been the case for many centuries. But somehow a baby - a human being - inside the womb is regarded by the pro-abortion movement as not a human being, and certainly not one with any human rights. According to the long-held myth - "it's a woman's right to choose" - the potential human being has no rights. (Many women who argue "it's a woman's right to choose" don't realise that this myth was propagated by a man originally, not by a woman.)

I know most of this will be pooh-poohed by women (and men) who favour abortion.  However, I'd like to suggest you read further on these straw-men arguments.  Even more I'd like you to stop and think about the human rights implications of abortion.  Where else in the world do we allow thousands of people to be killed day after day, hour after hour, without a major outcry?  Nowhere. If a tribe or a nation kills hundreds of members of another tribe or nation there is an international tribunal set up to investigate, even if it takes a decade or more to do so.  But because the abortion movement has so successfully redefined human rights when it comes to humans inside the womb, there is no outcry, except from those who fight against this evil year in and year out.

It's truly time for the ethical, human rights issues in the abortion debate to be honestly defined.  For several decades people have believed lies about the benefits of abortion, or the rights of women and so on. Lies eventually lead to nations being destroyed from the inside out. Don't let that happen to your nation.

Pillow Talk

One of the characters in the play our church is doing for its 150th anniversary celebrations is called Hopestill Pillow.  Yup.  And she was a real person and that was her real name.  Extraordinary.   Which set me to thinking about pillows as a topic, so I trolled through my clippings on Evernote to see what came up.  

First there's a tweet from the witty writer who goes by the name of Kim Kierkegaardashian.  He or she mixes the serious spirituality of Kierkegaard with the vacuousness Kardashain philosophy of life.  

Weary of people, weary of myself, so weary that I need an eternity to rest. That's why I always carry a pillow when I'm travelling.

 

And talking about neck pillows, another favourite tweeter, Alan Jacobs, wrote: I salute you, dude who walks around the airport with your inflatable neck pillow tied around your collar.   There's something daft about this sentence. 

 

On another tack entirely, Joan Acocella wrote an article on the grimness of the Grimms Brothers' fairy tales. There's a reference to pillows in this one: In “The Twelve Brothers,” a king who has twelve sons decides that, if his next child is a girl, he will have all his sons killed. That way, his daughter will inherit more money. So he has twelve coffins built, each with a little pillow. Little pillows! For boys whom he is willing to murder!

A super-preganancy pillow!

And in another article related to the after-effects of abortions, we read about Emily, who, after having had an abortion, began to have flashbacks in relation to live babies: Emily’s first flashback hit her violently when she had her first ultrasound while pregnant with a “wanted” child. As time went on, she would get frequent intrusive thoughts concerning her abortion when looking at the faces of her babies. After a time, she began to also experience habitual, obsessive, and scary thoughts about hurting her children. She imagined stabbing her children with a knife one by one, suffocating them with pillows, and strangling them.

 

In a piece by Lois Swagerty about churches sometimes forgetting what they exist for, we read:

One way the church may have its comfort zone stretched is when new elements of the community are welcomed inside.

“A young lady from the neighbourhood came in when she was high on drugs,” recalls Cindy Milbry, director of community outreach for Redeemer Lutheran Church in Toledo. “Pastor was doing the sermon and the girl  disrupted the whole process. Someone said, ‘Let’s call the police,’ but I told them, ‘This is what the church is for.’ Instead I took her downstairs and fixed her a plate of food. The next time she came in, she wasn’t as high, but she was still disruptive. One of the girls sat down with her and she fell asleep, so we got her a pillow and covered her up. People didn’t say as much.  Next time she came, she went up front for prayer and gave her testimony. She said the only peace she has is when she comes to the church. She’s learning that the church is a safe place to come and sit. And the congregation is learning that Jesus came for the unsaved, not the saved.”

And finally, a joke which touches on the friendly rivalry between Australians and New Zealanders:

An Australian rugby fan, a South African rugby fan and a New Zealand rugby fan are all in Saudi Arabia, sharing a smuggled crate of booze when Saudi police rush in and arrest them. The mere possession of alcohol is a severe offence in Saudi Arabia, so for consuming the booze they are all sentenced to death. However, after many months and with the help of good lawyers, they are able successfully to appeal their sentences down to life imprisonment. By a stroke of luck, it was a Saudi national holiday the day their trial finished, and the benevolent sheikh decided they could be released after receiving just 20 lashes.

As they were preparing for their punishment, the sheikh announced, "It's my first wife's birthday today, and she has asked me to allow each of you one wish before your whipping."

The South African was first. He thought for a while, then said, "Please tie a pillow to my back."

This was done, but the pillow lasted only 10 lashes before the whip went through. When the punishment was done, the South African had to be carried away bleeding and crying with pain.

The Australian was next up. After watching the South African's horror, he said smugly, "Please fix two pillows to my back." But even two pillows could take only 15 lashes before the whip went through and the Australian was soon led away whimpering loudly (as they do).

The New Zealander was the last one up, but before he could say anything, the sheikh turned to him and said, "You are from a most beautiful part of the world and your culture is one of the finest. For this, you may have two wishes!"

"Thank you, your most royal and merciful highness," the Kiwi replied. "In recognition of your kindness, my first wish is that you give me not 20 lashes but 100 lashes."

"Not only are you an honourable, handsome and powerful man, you are also very brave," the sheikh said with an admiring look on his face. "If 100 lashes is what you desire, then so be it. And your second wish"?

"Tie the Australian to my back."

 

Getting the facts right

Yet again, a television current affairs programme loads the dice against one side by showing archive material that doesn't actually relate to the topic in hand.  

On Close Up, on the 16th October, Mark Sainsbury and his team showed archive footage of an abortion clinic in the United States being burnt by an arsonist, and other footage relating to the murder of an abortionist in the same country.   But the discussion was about abortion in New Zealand, where pro-life activism has been peaceful.  

The inference was that the New Zealand pro-life movement was involved in the murder of abortion clinic doctors and in firing abortion clinics.  This isn't the case, and there has never been a murder of an abortion doctor in New Zealand.   

The only abortion clinic in New Zealand to have been damaged by fire was in Auckland.  This occurred in 1989, and the person who burnt the building has never been caught or convicted.   No one knows whether a pro-lifer was involved or not, including Alison McCulloch, the spokeswoman for the Abortion Law Reform Association, who appeared on the programme opposite Dr Norman McLean, a pro-life doctor from Invercargill.  

Of course, murder of abortion doctors and footage of abortion clinics being burnt is more dramatic than the facts.   It's on a par with using footage of Muslims 'enraged' by Western actions, or 'rejoicing' at deaths of Westerners, when the Muslims in the footage could have been anywhere in the world shouting about anything - who knows what.  

In reply....

About a week ago I copied a letter that appeared in the Otago Daily Times relating to an article on inducing cows.   Someone smarter than me has now replied to that letter in the following way: 

Cows moo and people choose.  Mooing is characteristic and an attribute of cows.  Choosing is an attribute of people.   Cows don't have the right to moo.  They just do.   People don't have the right to choose.   They just do.


The woman who wrote about being appalled that the cow did not have the right to choose to abort her calf is saying it is good as long as you choose.   People choose very bad things at times and society chooses to lock them up because they made the wrong choice.  'A woman's right to choose?'  We have been terminating our children based on a  meaningless slogan.

The cow has no choice

A woman who shall be nameless wrote a letter to the Editor of the Otago Daily Times - it appeared today, the 10.8.10.   Her letter misses the point of Simon Cunliffe's article, I think, and gives an odd response to his argument. 

In speaking of the outcry about the practice of farmers inducing premature calving so as to synchronise births and therefore increase milk production, [Simon Cunliffe] states that a discreet veil of silence is drawn over the 17,000-18,000 abortions carried out each year in this country. It seems an analogy is being drawn between the two situations, with an accusation of hypocrisy implicit, perhaps.

I was quite appalled to be informed of this common practice of inducing the premature birth of healthy calves. I am also a strong supporter of a woman’s right to choose, including abortion, when faced with an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy. These two situations are not analogous. The key difference is choice. Clearly, the cow has no choice in the matter whatsoever.

A little wordplay

Can't resist passing these on. They come from an ezine I get each week called Rumors (that's Rumours to those of us in the world who spell properly), and were supplied to the ezine by someone called John Severson. It may help to know that in the Anglican church, a narthex is the entrance or lobby area, located at the end of the nave, at the far end from the church's main altar. I'd never heard of the word until I went to England with my wife a couple of years ago, and kept coming across Narthexes in the larger Anglican churches we visited.

* Hymnastics: The entertaining body language of your song leader.
* Narthexegesis: Post-sermon commentary by the laity in the lobby after church.
* Pewtrify: To occupy a precise spot in the sanctuary seating for more than 15 years without once showing signs of sentient life.
* Hymnprovisation: The abrupt and unannounced transition from one song to another. It also describes what happens when the words projected on the screens are not singable to the melody the pianist is playing.
* Proliferation: A growing number of anti-abortion activists.

Ralph Milton, who writes Rumors, says it's a free Internet ‘e-zine’ for Christians with a sense of humor."
To Subscribe to it:
* Send an e-mail to: rumors-subscribe@joinhands.com
* Don't put anything else in that e-mail