The real reason why we won’t act on gender-specific abortions

Sadly, there’s nothing new about the prejudice against baby girls. In many parts of the world female infanticide has been practiced since time immemorial. But as Fraser Nelson explains in an important article for the Daily Telegraph, the problem is getting worse not better – and it is modern techniques that are to blame:

• “India’s 2011 census shows 7.1 million fewer girls than boys under the age of six – a gap that has almost doubled over two decades. So, rather than a function of villages being backward or poor, this is a phenomenon that grows more pronounced as Indians grow richer. Studies show that wealthier, better-educated Indians are more likely to have boys because they can afford the newish tools of ultrasound and gender-specific abortion.”

Female foeticide is not yet a major problem in this country – not to the extent of affecting the gender ratio. Yet it does happen:

• “...a few months ago, The Daily Telegraph showed the ease with which these gender-specific abortions can be acquired in Britain. Undercover reporters found private doctors willing to authorise such terminations, with some agreeing to falsify the paperwork. Doctors were caught on film agreeing to an illegal request – all the evidence needed for prosecution. The Crown Prosecution Service initially agreed.”

Then, last week, came the news that the CPS had decided that the prosecution would not go ahead, despite the fact that gender-specific abortion in this country is against the law. However, as Nelson explains, bringing a prosecution would require that the abortion law be upheld as it was originally intended:

• “In deciding not to prosecute the doctors exposed by The Daily Telegraph, part of the CPS’s argument was that doctors are given ‘wide discretion’ to ‘interpret’ the law. This is a polite way of saying that the law is almost entirely ignored. In theory, the mother’s health should be at risk before an abortion is authorised. In practice, Britain offers abortion on demand.”

In other words, the widespread availability of abortion in this country depends on a loose interpretation of the law. The implication, therefore, is that if the authorities were to uphold the law rigorously in order to prevent female foeticide, they would have to uphold it rigorously in other cases too.

Fraser Nelson argues that the solution is to make gender-specific abortion a specific offence against the law.

Any such move, though, would open up a debate that supporters of abortion on demand would not wish to take place. For instance, if it’s not OK to kill an unborn child because she is female, why is it OK to sanction her destruction because she has Down’s Syndrome?

These are questions that a ‘pro-choice’ society would rather not face – which is why we can expect this and any related issue to be quitely, but firmly, avoided.

How we die – the most important issue we never talk about

We’re all going to die, so why do we so rarely talk about it? There is, of course, the ongoing public debate about euthanasia – specifically, the assisted-suicide of terminally ill patients – where the focus tends to be on particular, and often rare, medical conditions.

But as well as the fact that we’re all going to die, it is also the case that we will all become terminally ill at the end of our lives – in that, at some point, our bodily functions will be so compromised as to make our imminent demise inevitable. This may all take place very quickly, for instance in the case of a massive heart attack or a fatal injury, but for most of us, the process of dying will take place over hours or days.

So the question is this: how would you like to be cared for when the time comes? Would you prefer a barrage of aggressive medical interventions to extend what little life remains to you? Or would you have nature take its course, with medical attention focused on the alleviation of pain and discomfort?

Most people would surely choose the latter – and the purpose of the Liverpool Care Pathway, as widely practiced within the NHS, is designed to give the dying that choice. It is explained here by Dr Peter Saunders on his Christian Medical Comment blog:

• “The Liverpool Care Pathway for the dying patient (LCP) is a treatment pathway used in the final days and hours of life which aims to help doctors and nurses provide effective end of life care…
• “Before a patient can be placed on the pathway the multi professional team caring for them have to agree that all reversible causes for their condition have been considered and that they are in fact imminently dying.
• “The assessment then makes suggestions for palliative care options to consider and whether non- essential treatments and medications should be discontinued.”

Last week there were a number of reports alleging that the NHS was using the Liverpool Care Pathway as a covert form of euthanasia. Some headlines even gave the impression that 130,000 elderly patients were being killed off every year.

Dr Saunders leads the Christian Medical Fellowship, which opposes euthanasia. If the NHS really was euthanising the elderly en masse, he would surely raise the alarm:

• “What we are seeing this week is a classic application of the ‘post hoc propter hoc’ fallacy, the mistaken notion that simply because one thing happens after another the first event was a cause of the second event.
• “It is certainly true that 130,000 British patients per year are dying whilst on the LCP. But it does not therefore follow from this that the LCP is the cause of their deaths.
• “If a patient is judged to be imminently dying and is placed on the LCP and dies within hours or days one can be virtually certain that the death was caused by the underlying condition.”

Though Saunders believes that we need to be vigilant against individual abuses, he is also concerned that the false notion of systematic abuse will only make the legalisation of euthanasia more likely:

• “…such claims run the risk of playing into the hands of the pro-euthanasia lobby who like to claim that doctors are killing thousands of British people with sedation, morphine and dehydration already and that legalising injection euthanasia will therefore change nothing.”

You are not a brain scan – challenging the rise of neurotrash

Now that most of us are Eurosceptics, it’s time that true conservatives also became neurosceptics.

Important claims are being made in the name of neuroscience – claims with profound political, ethical and cultural implications – but, which as Steven Poole explains in the New Statesman, are without foundation:

• “An intellectual pestilence is upon us. Shop shelves groan with books purporting to explain, through snazzy brain-imaging studies, not only how thoughts and emotions function, but how politics and religion work, and what the correct answers are to age-old philosophical controversies. The dazzling real achievements of brain research are routinely pressed into service for questions they were never designed to answer.”

Seeing is believing and, so, when presented with the evidence of a brain scan showing different parts of our grey matter firing up in the course of different aspects of the human experience, we’re prone to accept claims that our choices, emotions and beliefs have been ‘explained’ or, rather, explained away as mere patterns of neural activity.

• “In general, the ‘neural’ explanation has become a gold standard of non-fiction exegesis, adding its own brand of computer-assisted lab-coat bling to a whole new industry of intellectual quackery that affects to elucidate even complex sociocultural phenomena.”

Poole exposes the various tricks pulled by the salespersons of popular neuroscience – the anecdotalism, the “premature extrapolation” and the cherry-picking from often conflicting evidence. But the point he really brings home is just how little the real scientists admit to understanding:

• “The human brain, it is said, is the most complex object in the known universe. That a part of it “lights up” on an fMRI scan does not mean the rest is inactive; nor is it obvious what any such lighting-up indicates; nor is it straightforward to infer general lessons about life from experiments conducted under highly artificial conditions. Nor do we have the faintest clue about the biggest mystery of all – how does a lump of wet grey matter produce the conscious experience you are having right now, reading this paragraph? How come the brain gives rise to the mind? No one knows.”

What is lacking in popular neuroscience is a sense of perspective. Whatever little scraps of correlation that might be gleaned from our measurements are floating on an immense ocean of deepest mystery. And, yet, this is the basis on which serious commentators and politicians – including some conservatives who really ought to know better – are beginning to make their arguments.

At the heart of all of this, of course, are the intellectual forces of materialism. Having killed- off God (at least, to their own satisfaction), the abolition of the human soul is the next thing on their to-do list.

The DIY guide to eugenics

Back in February, Jonathan Freedland wrote a brilliantly honest article entitled Eugenics: The skeleton that rattles loudest in the left’s closet. It spells out the truth that in pre-war Britain, many of the most prominent eugenicists were – and still are – heroes of the liberal left: men and women like George Bernard Shaw, Marie Stopes, Harold Laski, JBS Haldane and William Beveridge.

Writing in the New York Times, Ross Douthat reminds us that much the same applied on the other side of the Atlantic: 

• "The American elite’s pre-World War II commitment to breeding out the "unfit" — defined variously as racial minorities, low-I.Q. whites, the mentally and physically handicapped, and the criminally inclined — is a story that defies easy stereotypes about progress and enlightenment… eugenicists were often political and social liberals — advocates of social reform, partisans of science, critics of stasis and reaction… From Teddy Roosevelt to the Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, fears about ‘race suicide’ and ‘human weeds’ were common among self-conscious progressives, who saw the quest for a better gene pool as of a piece with their broader dream of human advancement."  

What would these ‘progressives’ have made of our 21^st century advances in pre-natal genetic screening? Douthat has no doubt: 

• "…they would have empowered the state (and the medical establishment) to determine which fetal lives should be carried to term, and which should be culled for the good of the population as a whole."  

Governments wouldn’t do such a thing in "today’s political climate", but what about the rest of us? 

• "…given our society’s track record with prenatal testing for Down syndrome, we also have a pretty good idea of what individuals and couples will do with comprehensive information about their unborn child’s potential prospects. In 90 percent of cases, a positive test for Down syndrome leads to an abortion. It is hard to imagine that more expansive knowledge won’t lead to similar forms of prenatal selection on an ever-more-significant scale."  

As pre-natal screening for an ever wider range of genetic traits becomes increasingly accessible, Douthat foresees a future of DIY eugenics in which "the agents of reproductive selection are parents rather than the state."

Of course, we’re not talking about forced sterilisation here, but rather the widely accepted practice of abortion: 

• "From a rigorously pro-choice perspective, the in utero phase is a space in human development where disease and disability can be eradicated, and our impulse toward perfection given ever-freer rein, without necessarily doing any violence to human dignity and human rights."  

Yes, it’s much easier to pull up ‘human weeds’ – to use Margaret Sanger’s vile phrase – when you don’t even consider them to be human.

The scandal of population control

Uzbekistan is a dangerous country in which to uncover evidence of government wrongdoing; but reporting for the BBC World Service, Natalia Antelava has exposed a state campaign of forced sterilisation.

The Karimov regime is a notoriously unpleasant one, but what the BBC coverage doesn’t mention is that there is nothing exceptional about the abuse of human rights as part of a population control campaign.

Writing for the New Atlantis, Robert Zubrin blames an “ideology of antihumanism” for what he calls a “population control holocaust”. He seeks to justify these strongest of words by documenting the methods regularly used to reduce birth rates in developing nations around the world. The charge sheet includes forced abortion and sterilisation; the medically negligent use of untrained staff and unsterilised equipment; and the selective use of population measures as a tool of oppression and even genocide:

• “In Peru, the Spanish-speaking descendants of the conquistadors have directed the country’s population control program toward the goal of stemming the reproduction of the darker non-Hispanic natives. In Kosovo, the Serbs used population control against the Albanians, while in Vietnam the Communist government has targeted the population control effort against the Hmong ethnic minority, America’s former wartime allies. In China, the Tibetan and Uyghur minorities have become special targets of the government’s population control effort, with multitudes of the latter rounded up for forced abortions and sterilizations. In South Africa under apartheid, the purpose of the government-run population control program went without saying… There should be nothing surprising in any of this. Malthusianism has always been closely linked to racism, because the desire for population control has as its foundation the hatred of others.”

Zubrin alleges that many of the human rights violations have taken place within programmes funded by western governments, international bodies and family planning NGOs. If just part of what he says is true then what has taken place is a global scandal of monumental proportions.

Clearly, both Zubrin and the New Atlantis have their own ideological axes to grind, but that is all the more reason for other journalists to investigate. When it came to the scandal of clergy abuse in the Catholic Church, the mainstream media were relentless in their pursuit of the story. One wonders whether we can expect similar dedication when it comes to the quintessentially ‘progressive’ cause of population control.

The North Korean gulag

What is your first memory? For Shin In Geun it was an execution. That's because he was born in a North Korean labour camp, the son of political prisoners.

At the age of 23, he escaped, which is why his story can be told in Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harnden. The Guardian carries an edited extract, but be warned: it is difficult to get through – such are the brutalities described.

Even the bare statistics are horrifying, speaking, as they do, of the sheer scale of the North Korean gulag:

• "The South Korean government estimates there are about 154,000 prisoners in North Korea's labour camps, while the US state department puts the number as high as 200,000. The biggest is 31 miles long and 25 miles wide, an area larger than the city of Los Angeles. Numbers 15 and 18 have re-education zones where detainees receive remedial instruction in the teachings of Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung, and are sometimes released. The remaining camps are "complete control districts" where "irredeemables" are worked to death."

What can be done? North Korea's Communist regime clearly doesn't care about western opinion. However, the Chinese government does. People should therefore know that China's official policy is to forcibly return North Korean refugees to their tormentors. Tell someone.