The Irish parliament (or Dáil) has defeated an proposed interim measure concerning abortion, which (according to The Journal.ie)
would have provided an interim legislative arrangement as required by the Council of Europe, for termination of pregnancy where as a matter of probability a real and substantial risk to the life of the pregnant woman exists.
The measure was defeated 104 votes to 27! The Catholic bullies are in good heart today — which reminds me of the remark by Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France:
He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.
Sadly, the Irish parliament did not even try to imagine themselves into the lives of women faced with the prospect of dying, because they are pregnant. The flourishes of Roman Catholic ethics get the required genuflection; women are denied justice. This is what happens when the Roman Catholic Church gets control of a place. Remember this! For more on this visit Jerry Coyne’s website here. To the glue factory with them! Inhuman thoughtless bastards, the whole fucking lot of them!
The orignal post follows:
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From the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Office:
The death of Mrs. Savita Halappanavar and her unborn child in University Hospital Galway on the 28 October last was a devastating personal tragedy for her husband and family. It has stunned our country. We share the anguish and sorrow expressed by so many at the tragic loss of a mother and her baby in these circumstances and we express our sympathy to the family of Mrs. Halappanavar and all those affected by these events.
In light of the widespread discussion following the tragic death of Mrs Halappanavar and her unborn baby, we wish to reaffirm some aspects of Catholic moral teaching. These were set out in our recently published Day for Life message on 7 October last, available on http://www.chooselife2012.ie.
- The Catholic Church has never taught that the life of a child in the womb should be preferred to that of a mother. By virtue of their common humanity, a mother and her unborn baby are both sacred with an equal right to life.
- Where a seriously ill pregnant woman needs medical treatment which may put the life of her baby at risk, such treatments are ethically permissible provided every effort has been made to save the life of both the mother and her baby.
- Whereas abortion is the direct and intentional destruction of an unborn baby and is gravely immoral in all circumstances, this is different from medical treatments which do not directly and intentionally seek to end the life of the unborn baby. Current law and medical guidelines in Ireland allow nurses and doctors in Irish hospitals to apply this vital distinction in practice while upholding the equal right to life of both a mother and her unborn baby.
- Some would claim that the unborn baby is less human or less deserving of life. Advances in genetics and technology make it clear that at fertilization a new, unique and genetically complete human being comes into existence. From that moment onwards each of us did not grow and develop into a human being, but grew and developed as a human being.
With many other religious and ethical traditions we believe in upholding the equal and inalienable right to life of a mother and her unborn child in our laws and medical practice. This helps to ensure that women and babies receive the highest standard of care and protection during pregnancy.
Indeed, international statistics confirm that Ireland, without abortion, remains one of the safest countries in the world in which to be pregnant and to give birth. This is a position that should continue to be cherished and strengthened in the interests of mothers and unborn children in Ireland.
Thus the Irish bishops as published in First Things. I had decided to put sanctity-of-life issues on the shelf for a while, and yet, here, in black and white, are several reasons for raising it once more. Indeed, the statement itself makes me very angry, and renews my sense that the church must be marginalised and kept far from the law. But the Catholic hierarchy will simply not be content until they see their principles applied everywhere, so that no one has any more control over their care than Savita Halappanavar was given by the paternalistic officialdom of the University Hospital in Galway.
These guys — the bishops, archbishops, cardinals et hoc genus omne, all apointed by the pope, to whom they owe their primary allegiance – actually think they have something worthwhile to say, and, for the life of me, I cannot understand why they think so. Here are a bunch of celibate men who dress up in frocks and all sorts of fancy finery, sometimes festooned with lace, telling people what they may or may not do when, as though they hold the keys of life and death. Well, they don’t and they even be allowed so much as to imagine that they do. Religions, in modern democratic society, should be strictly marginal pursuits, to be adopted or not, according to people’s preferences with respect to what they want to do with their free time, and kept out of the political and legal arena, where they have no right to speak generally for the law or for the way that countries should be governed. That they once again put in their oar where it inappropriately intrudes upon the ordinary lives of citizens is a scandal of disturbing proportions. No doubt they have a right to tell the people who participate in their churches what they ought to do, if they wish to live in accordance with Catholic moral principles, but they have should have no right to extend those principles so that they apply, willy-nilly, to just anyone. Whether in a minority or a majority within a society, they should have no right to do that, and they should be told firmly to mind their own business.
Before you read the following, may I suggest that you go over to The Philosophical Primate and read what he has to say about the value of life. He begins like this:
… Eric McDonald has been writing a series of blog posts (one, two, three so far) criticizing arguments against assisted dying on the basis of “the sanctity of human life,” and further criticizing the very idea that life is “sacred.” Inspired by his conversation, I’d like to go considerably further, and argue that not only is human life NOT sacred, human life as such is not even valuable, or deserving of respect.
That seems to me to be about right. Human life, as in the phrase ‘living human tissue’ does not have any particular value, and is not, in itself, deserving of respect. What gives a life value are things like intentions, plans, projects, hopes, fears, anxieties, values, experiences of pleasure, future hopes and expectations, happiness, and even grief and loss. Just because something possesses human tissue and human metabolism does not, in itself, say anything about the value of such a life. The bishops think they have scientific grounding for their moral principles, simply because they can say that advances in science tell us that “at fertilization a new, unique and genetically complete human being comes into existence.” But so what? The idea that this fact, in itself, should be prescriptive for us is entirely unwarranted. Hume was right. He says that often when reading he notices that authors begin by speaking about facts about the world, when suddenly, without justification, they start speaking in terms of what we ought to do, as though there were some necessary connexion between the two. Well, there isn’t.
What is wrong with the Irish bishops’ attempt to give an explanation of how and why Catholics ascribe value to living human tissue, just on the strength of its being living and human, is that they seem to be unaware of the reasons for valuing life at all. From their standpoint, we could have a world of comatose or nearly comatose “people”, and such a world would have infinite value, because composed of masses of human life in this fairly marginal sense. This seems to me, on the face of it, completely dotty, and yet this is a clear implication of their statement.
The question is, in a competition between the woman and the foetus growing within her, which has greater value? The bishops’ answer is that their value is equal.
Some would claim that the unborn baby is less human or less deserving of life. Advances in genetics and technology make it clear that at fertilization a new, unique and genetically complete human being comes into existence.
Well, yes, some would claim that. I would. This is the supposed scientific basis for their claim that the foetus is of equal value to the woman (I refuse to call her a mother until a child is born), but this ignores entirely the fact that the woman, in whom the foetus is growing, has either planned or has not planned to be pregnant, has plans and projects that are related to it, and can be harmed or not by the foetus growing inside her. What she chooses to do with respect to that pregnancy is amongst those plans and projects, hopes and fears, and therefore the decision whether a pregnancy at this time accords with her plans and purposes is hers alone, and should remain hers alone to make. This may not make the tissue growing within her less human, for it is, after all, developing human tissue, but it does make it dependent upon the woman’s life plans, and if pregnancy is not something that is consistent with the woman’s plans for her life, then (without making any judgements whatever about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of her decision) a termination is clearly in order, before the woman’s life plans and hopes are simply dashed because of the need to care for and pay for the care of a baby. This is her business, not the business of the Irish bishops. As I say, they may lay down the law for their members, if they wish, and if their members will tolerate this, but whether those members choose to act in accordance with rules so laid down is an entirely different question. But as for others, the bishops have no jurisdiction and should be given none.
This is the reason I say, with respect to the Church of Scotland’s acceptance of abortion where the woman’s life is in danger, that this also is an intrusion into the life of individuals, an intrusion which is unwarranted and unacceptable in a democratic polity. Certainly, the Church of Scotland should have the right to speak to its members about what it considers morally legitimate in the light of its understanding of “God’s word,” but to try to extend such prescriptions beyond the bounds of its membership is an unwarranted intrusion into the lives of people who may not, and need not, accept those moral limits. There is no reason at all to accord clergy the status of moral experts. They are not.
If you read the Irish bishops’ statement closely, you can see that the principle of double effect is alive and well and living in Dublin. Notice how the terms ‘direct’ and ‘intentional’ function in this quote:
Whereas abortion is the direct and intentional destruction of an unborn baby and is gravely immoral in all circumstances, this is different from medical treatments which do not directly and intentionally seek to end the life of the unborn baby.
Notice how they carefully separate intentions here. The “direct and intentional destruction of an unborn baby” is carefully distinguished from “treatments which do not directly and intentionally seek to end the life of the unborn baby.” Quite aside from the emotive use of the word ‘baby’ in this context, when there is as yet no baby in existence, there is no clear reason for making this sort of distinction. It is difficult to see how the words ‘direct and intentional’ are doing any genuine work here. And, indeed, if you followed my discussion in my last post, in which I quoted Aquinas’ use of the principle of double effect, what makes an act direct and intentional is not any particular feature of the case in question, but the way in which that case is described, a fact which has very alarming consequences, for it can be used to justify practically anything. The precise problem here is that the bishops cannot give an unambiguous account of what constitutes the direct and intentional destruction of a foetus from one which is not. This is not only ambiguous, but it is also duplicitous, because they think they are making a distinction when they plainly are not; and this duplicity results in the kind of tragedy that occurred when the medical experts and administrative and ethical staff at the Galway University Hospital could not determine whether or not what they would be doing would amount to the intentional destruction of an unborn “baby.” If you must use morally loaded language, this distinction will be, for some people, almost impossible to make. And it is this kind of ambiguity that the Irish bishops have simply failed adequately to explain, and this is a fault of Roman Catholic ethics generally. If Helga Kuhse is right in her book The Sanctity of Life Doctrine in Medicine, there is no way to do this, in any event. There will always be a nimbus of vagueness over what is being done and why it is being done. The Irish bishops can’t give it up, because it’s written into the title deeds of their church, but it is this, precisely, which causes all the problems, and similar tragedies to the one which befell Savita Halappanavar will doubtless follow, since the bishops simply have not made it clear how such distinctions are to be made in clinical situations. I do not think that they can. It is a bankrupt proceeding which distorts moral decision making over which the church should have no control in the first place.
But then for them to say, after an entirely useless death was compassed by Roman Catholic moral incompetence, that
Indeed, international statistics confirm that Ireland, without abortion, remains one of the safest countries in the world in which to be pregnant and to give birth.
Rubbish! A woman was deliberately killed because Roman Catholic doctrine is incoherent. Were I an Irish woman — which, thankfully, I am not — I would want to see the law changed in such a way that the Roman Catholic Church has no say in what is contained within it. Allowing churches to play this kind of predominant role in a society is a guarantee that situations like this will crop up again whenever there is a question as to how doctrine gets applied in individual situations. Since there is no clarity in the doctrine, it will be applied idiosyncratically, with, in some cases, tragic results. But it should be remembered that there are going to be tragic results that will never come to public notice, simply because they pertain to the lives of women ruined by an untimely pregnancy and birth, or by the birth of babies whose brief lives will be filled with misery and will never have the chance to have a life at all.
I will end this post by making a brief comment on the underlying assumptions that are being made by the bishops regarding the humanity of the foetus. The foetus does not have a human life in a relevant moral sense. It may have the potentiality for developing and being born, and then, with care and education, achieving the status of such a life, with all the rights of respect that are due to human beings. What makes a human life valuable is not the mere existence of living tissue. A biological entity with human genomic properties is not, in itself, a human being. Indeed, other animals may have lifes of great value, and it is speciesist in the worst way to suppose otherwise. What makes our lives valuable is that we have a life to live, with values, life-projects, plans, hopes, expectations and perhaps even some comprehensive idea of what makes one’s life of value. The foetus, has none of these. It is a human being in the process of development, and, as such, does not, and should not be granted, the full status of human being, for the very simple reason that there is another human being, in the full sense, involved, and her life plans, projects and values take precedence over the life growing within her. To suggest that she should subordinate all her plans and hopes to that life is simply ridiculous. Pregnancies happen for all sorts of reason. They can be the result of rape, pace some Republicans. They can result simply because the means of contraception are either unknown or unavailable. And there can be complications of all sorts in the course of a pregnancy which may require its termination. Defects in the foetus may be detected which would mean that a human life of no value at all might be brought to birth. It is astounding that a bunch of celibate men should get to make up myths and stories about the value of the foetus without taking the value or the rights of women into account at all!
To remove the decision from the woman as to whether to continue with a pregnancy or not, regardless of the consequences, is an unjustified interference in her life, and to give equal weight to the life growing within her is nothing more than a desperate attempt to keep women under control. There is no warrant for it, and this should be acknowledged. The claim that the bishops make, that
[w]ith many other religious and ethical traditions we believe in upholding the equal and inalienable right to life of a mother and her unborn child in our laws and medical practice. This helps to ensure that women and babies receive the highest standard of care and protection during pregnancy.
Fine, just so long as they acknowledge — which they in fact do not — that it is just one religious tradition among many, and that there is no reason that people must give their attention to religious beliefs, and therefore should have no prescriptive bearing on what values and purposes women are free to adopt with respect to their reproductive decisions, this would be fine. But to go on to say that “[t]his helps to ensure that women and babies receive the highest standard of care and protection during pregnancy,” especially after a woman has just died simply because of the ambiguity of this ethical tradition, is an egregious piece of self-justifying nonsense. Who do the bishops think they are kidding? Really, it does make the blood boil when these idiots come out with their half-baked justifications for a legal regimen over which they should have no influence in the first place. It’s high time that the Irish put these antediluvian men out to pasture, and told them to speak to the members of their churches, and even prescribe for them, if they like — that at least gives them the option of escaping medieval prohibitions if they disagree – but to keep their hands off the law, which applies, not only to Roman Catholics, but to those who do not share Catholic beliefs, and to many Catholics who do not share the peculiar ethical priorities of their leaders. The Irish bishops’ statement is not only an inadequate explanation; it is a clear demonstration of what is wrong, and provides sufficient reason to remove such things from the purview of religion, no matter how heavily that religion is represented in the population. Ireland is supposedly a democracy, but the bishops’ statement suggests that it is a theocracy. There is no place for theocracy in democratic governance, and it is high time bishops and other religious leaders were given the old heave-ho, and told to keep their sticky fingers out of matters that do not concern them.
I was impressed that your discussion of the PDE was illustrated so clearly. I had no doubts, but clearly you know what you are talking about.
We can only hope such religious leaders will be willing to admit they do not have the monopoly on moral values. That their judgments should be so terrible should be no surprise, they have no medical training to speak of. I was particularly irked when they tried to take credit for the standards of care in Irish hospitals, when their only contribution has been to saddle the hospitals with uninformed legislation. The glue factory comes to mind more quickly than the pasture for these vile people.
“The Catholic Church has never taught that the life of a child in the womb should be preferred to that of a mother. By virtue of their common humanity, a mother and her unborn baby are both sacred with an equal right to life.”
When I read this statement in the Catholic Register: http://tinyurl.com/c3o4bbs, my immediate thought was many Catholics and I were told/believe that he Catholic Church has taught that the life of a child in the womb should be preferred to that of a mother. Regardless of what the Church teaches or does not teach, the people who make decisions based on what the RCC says believe they should sacrifice the mother to save the unborn.
I second the last line of The Philosophical Primate’s post
Amen to John K.
My cynicism suggests to me that if her name had been O’Hallahan instead of Halappanavar, she would have got the treatment she requested.
Yes, I second that too, Veronica. These religious bullies should be shown the door — or the glue factory, whichever seems most apropriate! Of course, from the standpoint of the principle of double effect, the “baby” almost always has priority, since it is Innocent life with a capital ‘I’, which is doubtless why it seemed that preference is given to the “baby” — which is so very clear in the Phoenix case, because there was a striking difference of opinion amongst Catholic ethicists. The problem is that it is difficult to determine when it is or is not legitimate to prefer the woman. One would have thought, in the Phoenix, as in the Galway case, that the distinction should have been obvious, because there was no possibility of the foetus being carried to birth, so it would never have a life in the moral sense. But in the Phoenix case a nun was excommunicated over it, and in the Galway case a woman was killed. That’s how far this bullying “morality” is from morals. (I still insist here on distinguishing between a woman and a mother. A pregnant woman who wants a child is an expectant mother. A woman who does not want to have a child is not a mother in any sense, nor should the foetus be considered a child, for the woman’s intention is clearly that it should never become one.)
By the way, I gather we’re going to meet soon! See you in Ottawa. You are also speaking, I understand. Great!
Anyone who thinks a lentil-sized blob of largely undifferentiated cells has the same ‘value’ as a living, breathing viable human being is simply barking mad, and there’s an end to it. One might as well ascribe ‘value’ to a wart, or an intestinal polyp.
Eric, I agree with much of your post. This tragedy is a bad day. I haven’t seen any report of an investigation into precisely what happened, such as who took decisions when etc, but from this distance it does look like the outdated thinking of the Roman Catholic Church has contributed much to this. The statement of the bishops rather confirms it. What has happened seems so barbaric and primitive. As I have said elsewhere, I too challenge the PDE: it is duplicitous and Jesuitical. I agree whole-heartedly with your remarks about intention, as if intentions can be ‘clinically separated.’ It is not good enough. This tragic event was avoidable; the bishops’ statement is so cold.
Elsewhere on your blog, I read a comment which helpfully states the obvious about sanctity of life: either it is an absolute or it is not. As you know, I would prefer to redefine the term – a suggestion which has not received overwhelming support on your blog. However, as things stand for the Roman Catholic Church and perhaps my own, sanctity of life is an absolute but we can see that PDE is sophistry to protect that doctrine. The absolute is intellectually misplaced, perhaps based on the notion of ensoulment, but misplaced nonetheless and a woman has died. The absolute is a fake and the bishops know it. PDE is sophistry but their theology has led to the death of a healthy woman.
The bishops statement is political and painful to read. Their sense that they have a divine right to govern comes through. As long as they hold that position, they will be impervious to argument and challenge. Having spent a month or so reading and commenting on your blog, I feel that the best argument against the existence of God is the churches themselves. Most of the other arguments cut little ice – for me anyway – but the ethical/intellectual/philosophical track record of the churches is very damning.
Keep up the good work. We all need to be held accountable.
Sorry, what’s the PDE?
From previous post:
PDE = Principle of Double Effect
Also it irks me to see the continual appeal to SCIENCE by religious people who are making a RELIGIOUS “argument”. What science says about a fertilized egg is that it is a zygote, not much different than a skin cell (millions of which you just flushed down your shower drain, and left to die a slow agonizing death on your towel this morning) except for its potential for becoming all the different types of cells in a human. And of course even then, some skin cells also have this potential – as scientists – not the bishops are discovering. Note that at least in the portion of the statement posted here by Eric, the bishops are referring to a zygote not a fetus, and not even a blastocyst!! By this it is clear that ensoulment is the special characteristic that they are using in their definition of “human”, although interestingly they don’t mention this, preferring instead to appeal to “science”. It’s also amusing to see that the bishops – from now on called “men in dresses and pointy hats” think that microscopes – the kind that grade 8 school children get to use are “advances in technology”. I guess that from the medieval standpoint they are arguing from this may be true, but even Anton van Leeuwenhoek in 1677 had good enough technology (that he made himself) to see spermatazoa (sperm). And please, men in dresses and pointy hats, pray tell just what “advances” in genetics have been required to know that babies are made by the contribution of sperm DNA from the father and egg DNA from the mother? This has been known at least on some level since Gregor Mendel! Me thinks this science talk is a flagrant attempt by the men in dresses and pointy hats to gain respectability by co-opting a discipline they don’t understand or are willfully ignorant of, trying to impress/confuse their flock so they can remain influential in law making.
It makes me wonder if the recent mass emigration from Ireland to Canada is purely for economic reasons.
Scott, I really do appreciate your comment on this occasion. I worry, though, that when you say this, you are rather sticking your neck out a bit:
For, after all, isn’t this very like something that Michael Fugate said to you? I don’t know that the bishops know that either the idea of sanctity or the belief in ensoulment are fakes, and I think they really believe that the PDE is not only sophistry. In fact, there are occasions when the principle of double effect actually seems to make a difference, but the reason it makes a difference – and this is not easy for some people to see – is that other than sanctity of life issues are at the heart of things. For instance, when, in the course of pyramidal pain control, upping the amperage, as it were, each time, since the more (say) morphine is used, the more needs to be used. So, at any stage along the way, the doctor can easily say that s/he did not know that it would be that injection that would push the person over the edge. There’s a plausible scenario in which this may be true. Of course, what is pushing the doctor to titrate upwards is the condition of the patient, and the justification is the relief that the patient derives. But this should not be a consideration to strict sanctity of life rules. But it is. There’s the fake of the principle of double effect, because what the person is doing is hiding behind the notion of intention when what is really at issue is quality of life. But this is not supposed to enter into the matter at all.
However, let’s look at this a bit more carefully. You say the bishops know the whole thing is a charade. I don’t think they do, because they’ve been fooling themselves with clever metaphysics all their lives. It doesn’t take a stretch to believe that they really believe in what they are saying, cruel as it is. And they will continue to refuse to take responsibility too, because the whole business is tied together with sealing wax and strings. But consider what you said in response to some people who think you are hiding behind something that you call evidence and they can’t recognise as such. Could they not say of you, “He really knows its a fake. Must do, because there’s no evidence“?
For, after all, what counts as evidence for religious belief? We know now, or we can know, because scientists who study the development of religion explain it, that religious beliefs develop quite naturally given our basic psychological equipment. There is the fact, for instance, that we are natural teleologists, despite the fact that science has simply been unable to detect teleology or purpose in nature. We also seem to be intuitive theists. It is difficult not to agency to the things around us. There are also fairly reliable ways of showing how people will, given the right cues, accept as true minimally counterintuitive stories. There’s a really interesting book about this entitled When Prophecy Fails. I forget the authors’ names at the moment, but it is a fascinating study of the development of a cult based on messages from outer space, and how, as time goes on, it becomes more and more important to convince others (evangelism) of the truth of their beliefs, because, if you can convince someone else, it means that your own beliefs are not only rational (because you’ve reasoned someone else into belief) but also stand a chance of being true. (Thus the importance of Antony Flew.) But someone, knowing all this, looking on from outside, would say, “Well, that doesn’t seem to me like evidence.”
I do not say this to offend you, but to have you look at it from the side of someone like Steve Oberski, who suggested that you had been unintentionally funny in referring to certain things as evidence. The problem with religious belief — and I am not trying to argue you out of yours — is that it does not provide the kind of objective referent that the word ‘evidence’ seems to require. Jesus, for example, whatever else we say about him, is a fairly ambiguous figure. There’s no clear sign in the gospels, which seem to be really about Jesus as the Christ the Son of God, that Jesus himself actually spoke words that made this identification – which is one reason why it seems to me that there probably was a Jesus somewhere at the heart of the Christian myth. (If he had said it outright, and this was all just mythical construction, it would have occurred somewhere in the gospels.) But how would we go about showing that such an identification can in fact be made? What would be evidence that this is true?
Just the witness of the gospels is not enough, for they don’t make the identification, and would be suspect if they did. Paul’s spiritual Christ really doesn’t do it either, because he seems to be speaking of a mystical experience, and not about a man. And even if both the gospels and some other combination of Paul and the other NT authors did agree that Jesus = Son of God, this wouldn’t do it either, because arguing that it must be true because sacred scripture says so, is really arguing that something is sacred scripture because it has to do with someone who was the Son of God. There’s no uncircular way of picking that particular lock.
But this is precisely why I think that religious people are the wrong people to advocate for or against moral stands. Not that I don’t think the assisted dying side of the argument can use all the help it can get, but because religion is capable of standing on either side, and, right now, more likely on the negative side. Do you see my problem? If I say that it’s great that someone like Scott McKenna supports assisted dying and he’s a Christian, so this is a possible place for Christians to stand, then I’m saying, implicitly, not only that I’ll take support wherever I can find it, but that religion has a valid role to play in determining what our public morality, and so our laws, will say. (I’m not refusing your support, but I am saying that it comes with strings.) That’s why I have said, and say again, that even Christians need to recognise that their moral values cannot be derived from a book or a tradition, but from reasons. I don’t think the bishops are faking it, but I think they’re wrong. I don’t think you’re faking it either, but I don’t think it has a thing to do with God’s love or compassion or his gifting us with moral responsibility. There is simply no evidence that I can see of God’s love or compassion. And, as for morality, we are morally responsible, period, with or without God, and God doesn’t enter into it, because we have no way of knowing what God wants or expects of us. So long as people think of God as entering into this at some point, some people are going to think about it in precisely those terms, even if it is thought that moral responsibility can be separated from particular beliefs about the nature of God.
So, coming back to the bishops. My complaint is not that they are faking it. My problem is that they are not. They think it makes sense to go on about such recondite matters, trying to satisfy the minutiae of their moral rules while people are suffering. They are inhuman, and that is why I used language that I usually don’t use to express my rejection of them. They are, like old horses, perhaps, only good for glue. They are of absolutely no use in building a moral and caring society. What disturbs be is that the Dail seems to think they speak with authority. The fact that there are so many Irish parliamentarians who show more respect for the bishops than they do for those who would have saved a woman’s life, shows that there is much amiss in Ireland. What does surprise me is that they don’t seem to see the relationship between this and the sexual abuse crisis that convulsed the nation so recently. Have they no sense at all?
The world is a buzz with Kate and William’s “baby” less than 12 weeks in gestation. So far I’ve not seen anyone describe their “baby” as a mere “blob of tissue.” Everyone seems concerned that their baby not be harmed by Kate’s HG difficulties. That’s moral compassionate humanity in action. I’ve not seen anyone recommend that Kate solve her HG difficulties by “terminating” their baby. I’ve always been thankful that my mother did not terminate me when she was inconveniently pregnant wit me.
Al, that’s not compassionate humanity in action, that’s celebrity, that’s royalty, that, in fact, is a possible next in line to the throne. So, don’t go all squishy about this. Kate wants a baby. Not every woman does. And your “mother” could not have terminated “you”. All she could have terminated is the possibility that there would be a “you” here. So being thankful that “you” weren’t terminated, doesn’t make a lot of sense.