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.

Being right/wrong

This seemed interesting:

"The more scientists understand about cognitive functioning, the more it becomes clear that our capacity to make mistakes is utterly inextricable from what makes the human brain so swift, adaptable, and intelligent. Rather than treating errors like the bedbugs of the intellect — an appalling and embarrassing nuisance we try to pretend out of existence — we need to recognize that human fallibility is part and parcel of human brilliance.
Neuroscientists increasingly think that inductive reasoning undergirds virtually all of human cognition. Humans use inductive reasoning to learn language, organize the world into meaningful categories, and grasp the relationship between cause and effect. Thanks to inductive reasoning, we are able to form nearly instantaneous beliefs and take action accordingly. However, Schulz writes, 'The distinctive thing about inductive reasoning is that it generates conclusions that aren't necessarily true. They are, instead, probabilistically true — which means they are possibly false.'
Schulz recommends that we respond to the mistakes (or putative mistakes) of those around us with empathy and generosity and demand that our business and political leaders acknowledge and redress their errors rather than ignoring or denying them. 'Once we recognize that we do not err out of laziness, stupidity, or evil intent, we can liberate ourselves from the impossible burden of trying to be permanently right. We can take seriously the proposition that we could be in error, without deeming ourselves idiotic or unworthy.'"

It comes from Hugh Pickens, and was part of an excerpt in last week's Boston Globe from Kathryn Schulz' book, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. The whole article is worth reading....all five pages of it.

The 'Yes' of Christmas

Interesting opinion piece in the Herald (and ODT) this morning from Colin James, entitled (in the ODT) Small Civilising Acts of Goodness.
Here's a quote:

The message of Christmas is often a "no", a Christianity of what must not be done, the wrongness of humanness. And there is much that is wrong.

The good news of Christmas is a "yes", a Christianity of what can humanly be done, the rightness of humanness. There is much that is right.

The wrong is so big that it questions the very notion of "civilisation".

Greens are mistaken to insist we must act now to save the planet. The planet will be here long after humans have run our ephemeral course. The right green message is to act to save humans from our uncivil instincts.

You can read the whole article on the NZ Herald online site.

What links to what

I don’t often check out the Digxa Mini Stores links that show up on my posts but I’d no sooner published the last post when three appeared on it. Curiously the third only turns up when you click on the particular post and separate it from the rest of the page.

Anyway, linked to the phrase Love Vacuum Cleaners is an eBay ad for 10 genuine vacuum cleaner bags Numatic Henry George. I had no idea what Numatic Henry George is, but it turns out that the Numatic Henry is a kind of vacuum cleaner, so cute that he couldn’t help but turn all your negative feelings towards vacuum cleaners upside down. The George bit of the name seems to be another member of the same family. (There's a picture of one of the family at the side.)

The second link appears on ‘Hate Humans Association’ and leads to a book called From Hate Crimes to Human Rights. I hope it isn’t also going to get me comments from people who hate other people. Ouch.

The third link came up in relation to the phrase: having your innards emptied regularly. And was for Nurofen Tension Headache Caplet! I seriously doubt that Nurofen Tension Headache Caplets would really do much for you after you’d had your innards emptied, but I guess they’d be better than nothing.

Rudyard Kipling

C S Lewis discussing Rudyard Kipling and his writing, makes this observation:

If all men stood talking of their rights before they went up a mast or down a sewer or stoked a furnace or joined an army, we should all perish; nor while they talked of their rights would they learn to do these things. And I think we must agree with Kipling that the man preoccupied with his own rights is not only a disastrous, but a very unlovely object; indeed, one of the worst mischiefs we do by treating a man unjustly is that we force him to be thus preoccupied.
But if so, then it is all the more important that men should in fact be treated with justice. If we all need ‘licking into shape’ and if, while undergoing the process, we must not guard our rights, then it is all the more important that someone else should guard them for us.

From They Asked for a Paper, a collection of various papers produced by Lewis over the years. This address was given to the English Association.

As always, Lewis discusses the subject with intensity and ease, with insight and detail, and, as always, he manages to produce some clear statements of his own that stand outside the subject.