Monday, December 12, 2011
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Sleepwalking through the great infanticide
Are we sleepwalking through the great infanticide?
Staff from a horrific abortion clinic have pleaded guilty to murder. What about the rest of the industry?
The human mind can hold onto blatant contradictions, but in order to do so it must block out certain unpleasant truths. One such uncomfortable truth has now come knocking at the door in Philadelphia, where a "house of horrors" abortion clinic wasdiscovered early this year. At this clinic viable babies were outright murdered after their births had been induced and they had been fully delivered. Clinic staff have testified that on hundreds of occasions, second and third trimester babies that were breathing, moving and even crying were slaughtered by having their necks slit or their spines severed.
Almost everyone agrees that killing newborn babies constitutes murder. That is also the law, which is the main reason why clinic owner Dr Kermit Gosnell may face the death penalty if convicted. In recent weeks, five of his staff have pleaded guilty to various charges including murder, and some may be sentenced to hundreds of years in prison.
And yet, late-term abortions, effectively right up to the moment of natural birth, are not illegal in Canada or in many parts of the United States. If Gosnell had chosen to act in medically acceptable ways by dismembering or killing the fetus within the womb just before removing it, he would likely be a hero in the eyes of many for providing an essential service that empowers women. Who knows, he could have gotten the highest civilian award -- a mere three years ago we bestowed the Order of Canada upon Henry Morgentaler, a man who claims to have personally performed over 100,000 abortions.
Is it just me, or is there something sickly schizophrenic about a society that huffs and puffs in outrage at the killing of a baby in the light of day, but quietly supports it when it happens in the darkness of the womb? We are talking about the very same baby here, at the exact same moment of gestation, the only difference being the location of the demise. If we can kill a baby within the womb, why not outside of the womb? Viable babies are being put to death in late-term abortion clinics all over the United States, perhaps some in Canada. We call it "abortion" but in the light of day, these actions clearly are "murder".
The Report of the Grand Jury in the Gosnell case included some photographs of the aborted viable babies that had been found at the clinic. As the mother of three children my heart went out to these poor little ones. Just eight weeks ago I welcomed into the world my own newborn daughter, and these babies looked just like her. Fully formed babies, physically perfect and utterly helpless, they came into the world relying entirely on the care of others around them. One Gosnell employee testified (p.114) about ten of these babies that were large enough for baby clothes:
Q. And what happened to those ten babies that came out from their mother, that were big enough that you could put clothes on and take home and take care of, that moved around, what did you see happen to them?
A. He killed them.
This is the shocking reality of every late-term abortion. Not one of the beautiful, innocent babies can ever be replaced, and I mourn for their lost lives. Clearly Gosnell's practice was horrific, but we must wonder why every late-term abortionist is not being charged with the same crime.
Many abortion proponents reacted to news of the Gosnell clinic by blaming laws which restrict access to abortion. Their argument was that when late-term abortion is illegal, as it is in Pennsylvania, then desperate pregnant women must resort to filthy and dangerous abortion clinics such as the one run by Gosnell. Indeed, Gosnell is also being charged with the deaths of two women, and scores of others suffered medical complications from his procedures. But something is missing from these arguments by abortion advocates, because the best clinic conditions would still not protect the lives of those tiny babies. Obviously, the loss of those lives is acceptable to those who defend such abortions because it is part of the price they are willing to pay for a woman's "choice".
Perhaps they would tell me that the "fetus" is not really a baby, not yet, not until... when? Every person has different criteria. Some believe it is not a baby until birth, others until the arbitrary point of viability outside the womb -- a moving target that is set by the current state of medical technology. At that uncertain moment, this baby-shaped "part of a woman's body" apparently transforms into a human being. These arguments fly in the face of common sense, and I wonder how many people really believe them.
Today more than ever, it is difficult to hold on to the myth that the fetus is just a part of the woman rather than a unique individual. Technology, science and medicine have exposed the truth to us with blinding clarity. With my first pregnancy I had an ultrasound at six weeks, a point when many women don't yet even know they are pregnant, and the screen already showed a perfectly formed little baby. Genetic testing would have confirmed that this baby had its own DNA separate from my own, and any biologist would confirm that it was a living organism, already far more complex than a whole range of other organisms. And just a few short weeks later, at around 24 weeks, my baby could have been born prematurely and possibly survived.
Given all that we know about the unborn human being, it is clear to me that force of will, rather than genuine ignorance, now seems to be the driving force behind abortion. Our society simply wants abortion to stay legal regardless of the facts. It is not that we don't know the truth; rather, that we don't want to be reminded. It's a strange madness, with teams of doctors struggling to keep premature infants alive in hospitals where just a floor away, babies are being killed and discarded.
Abortion requires our society to juggle a split personality. In Canada we frequently mourn the 158 Canadian Forces personnel who died in Afghanistan since 2002. And yet according to Statistics Canada, about 100,000 babies die from abortion every single year in our country, a total of about 3 million since 1969. In the United States, countless commemorations have taken place to remember the nearly 3000 people who died in the World Trade Center attacks. Those deaths led the United States to launch a whole war on terror. And yet, each year over a million babies lose their lives to abortion, for a total of over 50 million abortions since 1973. The result? Far more often than not, the words of our news-makers and decision-makers still support, rather than oppose, abortion.
In a society where morality often seems to have ceased, it is easy to become resigned and passive in face of the overwhelming tide against us. And yet… In the short movie "180" [180movie.com] that went viral on YouTube recently, one woman discussing the Holocaust asks a poignant question: “Where was the world, where was everybody?” It seems so incomprehensible now that six million Jews could be killed in concentration camps with so little opposition from the German populace. But one day, our grandchildren may ask us a similar question with regard to our own cultural challenges: where was everybody, where were we?
Speaking up for the truth might make us look like fools. And that is just the beginning. Today, it is a sad fact that opposing abortion can cost a person their job and even their career. You might also lose your friends, your standing in a social circle, your invitations to events. One day, your position on abortion could even cost you your freedom.
To me, as a former political refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia, all this sounds eerily familiar. Back then, most people in our country were also silent, and many feared the repercussions that would follow if they openly opposed the regime. But we had a few dissidents, and they made a world of difference. One of them, Vaclav Havel, eventually became the first president of a free Czechoslovakia.
The truth is a powerful thing; over time, throughout history, it has always won the moral battles, and I have no doubt that one day, abortion will be rejected and recognized as an unspeakable evil. Until that day comes the journey continues to require courage and sacrifice on the part of those who carry the responsibility of knowing the truth. It is up to us to awaken the conscience of our society, one person at a time.
Lea Singh is a Harvard law graduate and currently full-time mother of a young family. She writes from Ottawa, Canada.
Retrieved December 10, 2011 from http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/are_we_sleepwalking_through_the_great_infanticide
Muslims and Catholics Together? How Far Can We Go?
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By Robert Reilly |
SATURDAY, 10 DECEMBER 2011 |
Late last month, twenty-four Catholic and twenty-four Muslim leaders, scholars, and educators met on the east bank of the Jordan River for the second of the two Catholic-Muslim Forums, inaugurated by Benedict XVI in 2008 to encourage dialogue between the world’s two largest religions. How much can be gained from such encounters is hard to say. But the extremely astute Fr. Samir Khalil Samir has said, “dialogue is better than indifference and reciprocal silence.” The forum’s subject was “Reason, Faith, and Mankind,” a highly important topic. King Abdullah saluted the participants: “the forum is the outcome of ongoing initiatives to foster concepts embraced by both Muslims and Christians. . . .” There certainly are things in common, principally in morals, but the sources of those morals differ significantly in terms of the authority on which they draw. I often reflect upon the moving episode that my wife experienced in Cairo during the 1995 U.N. Population Conference. She and her colleagues from the National Institute of Womanhood were busy assembling papers opposing the U.N.’s pro-population control and abortion policies. The Muslim women staff of the hotel would voluntarily help my wife collate the sheets and assemble them for distribution. After several days, she tried to thank them. They responded, “Please don’t thank us; we should thank you for coming here to help save our country.” I have also worked closely with Muslims both in the United States and in the Middle East. If they discern you are primarily motivated by moral concerns which they share, the walls of separation quickly come down. But it can be difficult to go any further because of various theological problems. Thomas Aquinas counseled his fellow Dominicans about how to approach Muslims: you cannot appeal to them from our revelation, he said, because they do not accept it; and you cannot appeal to them from their revelation because we do not accept it; therefore, you must deal with them as natural men. By this, of course, he meant appeal to their reason. The problem is whether Muslims accept themselves as natural men. Muslims believe that all men are naturally Muslims. If you are not a Muslim, it is probably because you have been apostasized by your parents. In this view, people do not convert to Islam so much as revert to it. The essential issue here is the status of reason, which is why this latest forum was so important. Can we reason together? This was an issue Benedict XVI dealt with in the Regensburg Lecture. His answer: this is possible only in so far as we and they are Hellenized, which means that we both recognize reason as capable of apprehending reality.  Adam Naming the Animals by Currier & Ives Is this the case? On the Muslim side, Ibrahim Kalin, a Turkish philosopher, certainly thinks so. In Jordan, he said, “Islam largely shares this notion of rationality with Judaism and Christianity.” According to The Tablet, he claimed that “the Qur’an teaches a natural law that would be quite familiar to Thomists. Charges of irrationality persist, he said, because Islam kept a balance of faith and reason while the Enlightenment tipped the focus of Western thought towards reason and science.” Would that this were so; then there could be a very deep dialogue, indeed. Unfortunately, Kalin omits that the one Muslim theological school that roughly fits his description, the Mu’tazilites of the early ninth century, were irreparably crushed, starting with caliph Al-Mutawikkil around the year 850 AD. This is the period of de-hellenization to which the pope has referred. After that, the notion of natural law became anathema in Islam, because of its view of God as omnipotent pure will, unconstrained by anything, including reason. Fire does not burn cotton; God does. Gravity does not make the rock fall; God does, etc. Rather than avoiding the Enlightenment, this form of Islamic occasionalism beat David Hume to the punch by some 800 years. The denial of cause and effect in the natural world eventually devastated the Muslim realm, which looked to Allah as the first and only cause of all things. To suggest otherwise became a form of blasphemy. While I would agree that there are invitations to natural theology in the Qur’an, there are also several less inviting things. For instance, in the Qur’an’s account of creation, there appears an interesting detail. In Genesis, God parades the animals in front of Adam, who then names them, and these names are what they are. In the Qur’an, it is Allah who names the animals, not man. Man does not have this power to name. This is symptomatic of the difference between the two views of man in Genesis and the Qur’an. The power to name is, in a way, the power to know. Joseph Pieper once wrote, “Reality becomes intelligible through words. Man speaks so that through naming things what is real may become intelligible.” If you cannot name a thing, can you know it? Can reality be intelligible to you without this power? Actually, the situation in the Qur’an is even worse. The angels complain to Allah in Surah 2 about his having created Adam. Allah then challenges them to name these very same animals. The angels cannot do it, and respond: “Oh, Allah, You who know all things, You know we do not know; we know only what You have taught us.” Not even pure spirits have within their reason the ability to apprehend reality independent of what God himself directly places in their minds. This seemingly little detail foreshadows what later develops within Islam: the epistemological inability to grasp reality and to know only that which God himself has revealed. Islam thus loses rational access to reality through a deformed theology, which in turn has produced a dysfunctional culture. Until these problems are addressed (the extent to which they still exist is displayed in the recent Arab elections), it will be very difficult toreason together. First they have to be able to name the animals. Robert Reilly, a new contributor to The Catholic Thing, is a former director of the Voice of America. He has taught at the National Defense University and served in the White House and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. His most recent book is The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist. © 2011 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org |
Retrieved December 10, 2011 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/?task=view
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Bishop grilled over right to die
Michael Cook, of MercatorNet, posts this video clip with this comment: One of the smartest spokesmen for a Catholic stand on bioethics is Australian Bishop Anthony Fisher. Here he is interviewed by a right-to-die activist. There are no softball questions and he hits most of them out of the park. (An analogy for American readers.)
As a commenter points out, the interviewer here is not a right-to-die activist representing a pro-euthanasia group, but the presenter for an Australian public television show. The clip's title, "Christian churches remain opposed to assisted dying" is symptomatic of the program's bias. The assumption seems to be that all right-thinking Australians favor physician-assisted suicide or 'assisted dying' - the irresistible tide of progress/history-on-our-side rhetoric - so why can't the churches fall in line?
Kudos to the bishop for keeping his cool and making the argument. Let's hope that, despite the biased presentation, some Australians are listening and beginning to have second thoughts.
Bishop Fisher is author of a new book, Catholic Bioethics for a New Millennium.
Monday, December 5, 2011
The Guardian (UK) outdoes itself in liberal-academic silliness
And the Telegraph rises, in its characteristic fashion, to the occasion:
Well, that didn’t take long – just four months to turn the summer rioters from the scum of the earth into victims. There we all were during those tense few days in August, glued to our TV screens as shops were looted and homes burned to the ground, misguidedly thinking that the police had lost control of the streets to a rag-tag army of opportunistic, feral criminals.
In reality, what we were witnessing was a protest by politically sophisticated, disenchanted and alienated young people driven to despair by police brutality. This, at any rate, is what we are invited to believe by a study commissioned by The Guardian, in collaboration with the London School of Economics, and published across eight pages of the newspaper yesterday under the heading “Reading the Riots”. Needless to say, the BBC ran with the story all day.
Read the full Telegraph story here. For the Guardian/LSE report, go here.
As for me, I am reminded of Theodore Dalrymple's scathing comparison of the aesthetic quality of Italian life with "its utter destruction in Britain, whose streets have been coarsened to a degree unequaled in Europe," with "profound social and economic consequences" (Our Culture, What's Left of It, p.199). Or Roger Scruton's account of the wanton destruction of England's urban centers by the arrogant and authoritarian mandarins of modern architecture. Accounts at least as persuasively applicable as the Guardian's tired and predictable 'analysis.'
It is hard to say what is more morally bankrupt and symptomatic of a society that has lost its moorings in a sea of moral and cultural relativism--the criminal behavior, the looting, burning, and destruction of homes, or the hopelessly reductionistic social science analysis, from which moral categories and understandings have been stripped in order to excuse and explain the inexcusable.
A more helpful analysis of the riots recently appeared in the book Out of the Ashes by David Lammy, Labour MP for the area of London where the riots broke out. No Colonel Blimp or even conservative, Lammy is willing to recognize the importance of family structure. In short, fatherlessness matters.
Friday, December 2, 2011
Heads in the sand over AIDS
Excellent article! What opponents of a behavior change strategy fail to see is that their own failed approach of promoting condom use (while dismissing abstinence and fidelity as unrealistic) is itself a behavior change strategy--in the African context, it leads to more sex with multiple partners at the same time and so to more HIV/AIDS.
Ideological blinders have led to millions of preventable AIDS deaths in Africa. In his new book, Dr. Edward C. Green, former director of the Harvard AIDS Prevention Project, describes how Western AIDS “experts” stubbornly pursued ineffective remedies and sabotaged the most successful AIDS prevention program on that ravaged continent. Drawing on 30 years of conducting research in Africa, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the world in international health, Green offers a set of evidence-based and experience-rich solutions to the AIDS crisis. He calls for new emphasis on promoting sexual fidelity, the only strategy shown by research to work. Controversial but important findings for health researchers, international development specialists, and policy makers.
Ideological blinders have led to millions of preventable AIDS deaths in Africa. In his new book, Dr. Edward C. Green, former director of the Harvard AIDS Prevention Project, describes how Western AIDS “experts” stubbornly pursued ineffective remedies and sabotaged the most successful AIDS prevention program on that ravaged continent. Drawing on 30 years of conducting research in Africa, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the world in international health, Green offers a set of evidence-based and experience-rich solutions to the AIDS crisis. He calls for new emphasis on promoting sexual fidelity, the only strategy shown by research to work. Controversial but important findings for health researchers, international development specialists, and policy makers.
Heads in the sand over AIDS
How many more lives, how many billions of dollars, will be sacrificed to western sexual ideology?
Every year since 1988 the joyful tidings of Christmas have been preceded by the increasingly upbeat message of World AIDS Day, December 1. This year’s theme of “Getting to zero” was launched last month by Hillary Clinton announcing that an “AIDS-free generation” was within grasp if the United States and countries around the world would team up on scientific advancements. President Obama threw an extra $50 million in that direction and he was joined by former presidents George W Bush and Bill Clinton in promising greater commitment to eradicating the disease. The catch-line, “beginning of the end”, was scripted in the White House. Bono, Elton John and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy leant their faces to the cause.
Unfortunately, the promotion seems to have fallen flat. Pleading financial crisis, the governments that are the mainstay of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria (US$21.7 billion pledged last year) have decided to cancel the next funding round and no new applications will be accepted until 2014. This certainly is tragic, since the Global Fund keeps alive nearly half (3.2 million) of the 6.6 million people living on life-saving antiretroviral (ARV) drugs, and efforts to prevent mother-to-child transmission are said to have some success. Progress has also been made against the other big epidemics. However, there are still 7.6 million people who need ARV treatment, and many of those are now unlikely to get it.
But even without the defection of the cash-strapped rich countries there was always going to be bad news to report. AIDS might be on the decline, thanks to treatment, but HIV infections are on the rise again after falling for several years. About 2.7 million people were infected last year, which is double the number brought into treatment, according to The Independent, and people are now becoming infected faster than they can be tested and treated. In Malawi, a small African country with a population of under 15 million, 70,000 new infections are expected next year.
The truth is that there can never be enough billions to “end” an epidemic driven by the sexual ideology of the same parties -- or their partners -- that are supposed to be curing it. This was rather sharply illustrated a couple of months ago with the publication of evidence linking the widespread use of progestin injections as birth control with HIV transmission in sub-Saharan Africa. But even without such a direct channel, the “sex positive” approach of the family planning networks in developing countries guarantees that the behaviour basically responsible for disease -- having multiple sex partners -- does not change.
It is no accident, then, that this week thousands of experts and acolytes are gathered in Senegal for the second International Conference on Family Planning to push forward the global family planning agenda. They too will be demanding billions from the first world’s governments and foundations. The director of the Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health, Dr Amy Tsui, who is also a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is a lead conference organizer.
One of the things they are talking about at the ICFP conference is, according to one report, “the prevention of HIV through multi-prevention technologies (MPTs) that protect against HIV and act as contraceptives”. They don’t have these MPTs yet, you understand, but they are working on them -- for instance, a vaginal ring that releases both an ARV drug and a contraceptive hormone. What it would cost to provide such technology to African women is anybody’s guess. In the meantime what they have, mainly, is the contraceptive injection, and the condom. One seems to be contributing to the HIV epidemic and the other has never stopped it.
What has shown the potential to stop the epidemic is well known: behaviour change strategies used in Uganda and (less famously) in Zimbabwe. Uganda turned its epidemic around in the early 1990s with its ABC programme focusing on abstinence for the unmarried and “zero grazing” for the rest. This has since been undermined by aid organizations pushing condoms. Zimbabwe in the ten years to 2007 brought its HIV prevalence down from 27 per cent to 16 per cent -- mainly, according to researchers, through reductions in extramarital, commercial, and casual sexual relations”.
Edward Green, the Harvard researcher, who stumbled upon Uganda’s secret in 1993 has been trying ever since to get recognition for behavior change as the most effective means of dealing with the AIDS epidemic. In his recent book, Broken Promises: How the AIDS Establishment has Betrayed the Developing World(2011), he recounts how, at an AIDS conference in Washington in 2004 his presentation received muted applause. But, when a female college student came to the microphone and exclaimed, “I think people should be able to have as much sex as they want, with as many people as they want,” she received a thunderous, standing ovation.
That is what the people of Africa and elsewhere are up against: not only a deadly disease but an international community that has such an investment in its own doctrines about sex and population that it will use all its political and economic power to impose them where they are most destructive. Already in Africa alone more than 46 million people have been infected with HIV and 18 million have died.
The developed nations should be ashamed to stage another World AIDS Day, let alone project its end, until our responsibility for this avoidable epidemic is admitted.
Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet.
Want to read more articles by Carolyn Moynihan Click on the links below
· Contraceptives mandate would make cowards of us all | 11 November 2011
· Bad shot: when will WHO warn women about the contraceptive jab? | 28 October 2011
· “I’m sorry I did not wait” | 19 October 2011
· Margaret Ogola: an African heroine | 30 September 2011
· Twilight on the moors | 27 September 2011
Retrieved December 2, 2011 from http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/heads_in_the_sand_over_aids
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
The Awfulness of Ayn Rand...and Malick's Sublime Film on Nature and Grace, 'The Tree of Life'
At the conclusion of his essay on "The Trouble with Ayn Rand," David Bentley Hart recommends skipping the new film version of Atlas Shrugged, the novel of a writer who, like Nietzsche, despised Christian morality and exalted selfishness, who thought Mickey Spillane a greater artist than Shakespeare, and of whose own novels Hart says that what puts them in a class of their own is how sublimely awful they are.
and here is Fr. Barron's review of the Malick movie:
Even so, the cardboard characters, the ludicrous dialogue, the bloated perorations, the predictable plotting, the lunatic repetitiousness and banality, the shockingly syrupy romance—it all goes to create a uniquely nauseating effect: at once mephitic and cloying, at once sulfur and cotton candy.Instead, Hart recommends spending our money on the latest work of a real artist with a deeply religious sensibility, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. You can see the trailer of Malick's movie here:
and here is Fr. Barron's review of the Malick movie:
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