Great News!

We Thank God for Justices McCombe, King, and Jackson

A British Judge Tried To Force A Disabled Woman To Abort Her Child Against Her Will

In this dystopian scenario, the state initially decided it knows better than an intellectually disabled adult woman and her caretaker.

Holly Scheer
June 24, 2019
The Federalist

On Monday, three appeal judges overturned a decision issue by Justice Lieven, which would have forced an intellectually disabled woman to abort her child, after the woman’s mother requested a review of the ruling. Lord Justice McCombe, Lady Justice King, and Lord Justice Peter Jackson reversed the decision in London’s Court of Appeals today. The reasons for this decision have not yet been released, but we do now know that this mother and her baby will be safe and she will be allowed to continue her pregnancy.

Before today, a British judge with a long personal history of supporting abortion rights had ordered a pregnant disabled woman to have an abortion against her wishes. The state decided it knew better than an adult woman and her mother who takes care of her and attempted to make this life and death decision for a child. This was a violation of the woman’s body and rights, as well as the child’s right to life, and both pro-life and pro-choice people ought to unite in denouncing this evil. The state told this woman that she had no choice in protecting her baby, and a judge tried to take away her autonomy. No case could further demonstrate the dangers that lie at the end of the eugenics behind pro-abortion policies than this devastating example.

Health Care Rationing--For the "Good Guys"

Brave New World

Medicine has become a new deity.  It no longer is focused upon returning people to health.  It is increasingly focused upon "improvement" of humanity.  It offers the prospect of an enhanced life.  The latest craze is "desirable characteristics".

Bioethicists Push Eugenic Engineering

Wesley J. Smith
National Review Online
The other day I noted that the Journal of the American Medical Association editorialized in favor of health-care rationing because medical costs are growing out of control. How could they not be? Medicine isn’t limited anymore to treating illness, palliating symptoms, or educating us to live more healthily. We increasingly expect the sector to empower us to live happier and more fulfilling lives.

Here’s another example of that cultural inflation. Two of the world’s most influential bioethicists want health insurance to pay the cost of applying expensive biotechnologies to allow people to have their progeny engineered to possess “desirable” characteristics that will flow down the generations — a new form of eugenics.

Let’s call this eugenic engineering. It isn’t science fiction but becoming a reality with the birth of two babies in China who were germline gene edited.

The end goal is the "development" of a superior human being.  This has two parts to it.

"Exterminating The Inferior Australian and Maori Races"

Eugenics: The Disturbing Skeleton in the Secular Closet

Akos Balogh 

Gospel Coalition Australia

It ain’t pretty having a skeleton in your closet. You hide it. You keep it out of sight. The last thing you want is for it to be exposed.

But skeletons are often better exposed and dealt with openly, than covered up. Exposing skeletons can teach us things we might not otherwise know.

Recently I stumbled across a disturbing skeleton in the secular closet. I’ve rarely if ever heard it talked about by secular authors. Like many a skeleton it’s a source of shame and regret.

What is this skeleton? It’s eugenics: the selective breeding of human populations (including forced sterilisations) to improve the gene-pool. This was advocated by many secular thinkers in the name of science, reason, and progress.

So lets have a close look at this skeleton, before seeing what it can teach us.

Offering Up Children to Baal

This article is from
Creation 39(3):36–38—July 2017

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©123rf.com/OlesiaBilkei

by Russell Grigg

In the 1880s, Charles Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton, gave the world a new word and a new quest, namely ‘eugenics’, meaning ‘well-born’ (from Greek εὖ eu, ‘well’ and γένος genos, ‘offspring’).1 This is the concept of improving the human race by encouraging those individuals deemed ‘fit’ to reproduce, while discouraging/preventing those deemed ‘unfit’ from doing so. Darwin heartily approved and wrote: “ … if the prudent avoid marriage, whilst the reckless marry, the inferior members will tend to supplant the better members of society”.2

The Nazis forcibly sterilized some 400,000 mentally and physically handicapped persons.

This ‘better babies’ concept was seen as a great idea by the politicians of the day, who passed laws for the enforced sterilization and segregation of those they deemed to be unfit. Thus, in the early 20th century, eugenics flourished in the UK, in most European countries, and also in the USA, where over 60,000 citizens were forcibly sterilized.3 That is, until after WW2, when it was established how Hitler’s master race ideology had used the idea. The Nazis forcibly sterilized some 400,000 mentally and physically handicapped persons, then progressed to the ‘mercy killing’ of almost another 300,000 citizens, and finally proceeded to the genocide of millions of Jews and other non-Aryan ‘unsuitables’.

Consequently, after WW2, the term ‘eugenics’ was avoided; however, the concept is still alive and well. In April 2016, the British weekly magazine The Spectator published an article titled: “The return of eugenics: Researchers don’t like the word—but they’re running ahead with the idea, and Britain is at the forefront.”4 In it, author Fraser Nelson points out that in Britain today, using IVF technology, “£12,000 buys you the chance to choose which embryo to implant. And £400 buys sperm-sorting, the better to conceive a boy (or a girl).” And, “Developments in IVF mean that, today, several embryos can be fertilised and screened for disease, with the winner implanted in the uterus.”

Consent to use human embryos

©123rf.com/Alexander Korzh

In January 2016, a new biomedical research centre called the Francis Crick Institute was opened in London to begin a gene-editing technique known as CRISPR-Cas9.5,6

A group there, led by Dr Kathy Niakan, “was granted consent by the United Kingdom’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to undertake gene editing using human embryos.”7The program is allowed to target specific sections of DNA, delete them, and insert new genetic sequences, in a biological cut-and-paste that rewrites the genetic code.

This is not in itself an ethical problem, as it can be used legitimately without violating biblical morality, e.g. where a mutated gene is restored to its previous healthy condition. This, like the repair of a cleft palate, is a temporary alleviation of the effects of the Curse—as occurred in Christ’s healing ministry. However, “Dr Niakan’s team are working with donated embryos left over from IVF treatment, which cannot be used after 14 days and are prohibited from ever being implanted in a woman.”7,8

Problems

Proponents glibly claim: “There are no deaths, no sterilizations, no abortions: just a scientifically guided conception.”4 Incorrect! When a male sex cell successfully unites with a female sex cell, a new single-celled living organism is generated. This immediately starts to multiply and develop until finally a baby is born. It is thus alive from conception, and there is no rational, scientific or biblical reason to conclude other than that it is always a person—a genetically unique unborn person. And therefore it is not to be washed down the drain after 14 days of life in a petri dish any more than a 14-week-old infant or a 90-year-old invalid.

In God’s eyes, the unborn are already unique individuals, as attested by David in Psalm 139, where he writes of how God formed him in the womb, and says (v. 16): “Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.”

And therefore it is not to be washed down the drain after seven days of life in a petri dish any more than a seven-week-old infant or a 70-year-old invalid.

Also, societal problems of this gene alteration include that parents may also want taller, smarter, better ‘designer’ babies. But surely if the wealthy are able to specify super-babies in this way, it will only widen the ‘opportunity gap’ between the rich and the poor.

Critics further warn that this manipulation of the genetic code could have unintended consequences that won’t be apparent until after the babies involved are born. And further into the future, the effects of such manipulation on future generations are totally unknown.

Fraser Nelson sums up the current situation well: “So some 130 years after Britain gave the world the idea of perfecting humanity, we are once again at the cutting edge of this troubled science. For good or ill, eugenics is back.”4

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Related Articles

• ‘Hooray for eugenics!’
• Darwin and eugenics
• The lies of Lynchburg
• The evolution of a monster!
• Eugenics … death of the defenceless

Further Reading

• A Civic Biology and eugenics
• Darwin’s impact—the bloodstained legacy of evolution

Something Rotten in Scandinavia

Paradise Lost

For many long years the New Zealand Labour Party has been fascinated with Scandinavia.  The previous Labour politician, Helen Clark--Prime Minister for three parliamentary terms--was besotted with an ambition to make New Zealand more like Scandinavia.  One did not need to be a genius to understand the attraction: in Scandinavia the State provided all--at least all that was needed to live a comfortable life.  Clark and others wanted New Zealand to be remoulded into being the Scandinavia of the South Pacific.

One can understand the Left's fascination and enthusiasm for the Nordic utopia.  Tony Judt, in his magisterial Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Vintage/Random House, 2010) summarizes the attraction of Scandinavia as it was in the 1970's:

To many foreign observers and most Scandinavians the results appeared to speak for themselves. . . . Scandinavians lived longer, healthier lives than most other people in the world (something that would have amazed the isolated, impoverished Nordic peasantry of three generations before.)  The provision of educational, welfare, medical, insurance, retirement and leisure services and facilities was unequalled. . . . By the mid-1960's, Europe's "frozen north" had acquired near-mythic status: the Scandinavian Social Democratic model might not be replicated readily elsewhere, but it was universally admired and widely envied.  [Judt, p.367.]

And so it was that the Left in New Zealand turned away from a slavish adulation of communism to the kind, gentle, non-authoritarian, inclusive democratic paradise of Scandinavia.  No labour camps in sight.  Socialism with a kind, human face.  What was there not to like?

But something was not right.

Diabolism Of The UN

UN "Human Rights" In Action

Commissioner Urges Abortion for Down Syndrome Babies

Thomas Williams
Breitbart London

A member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee has defended the use of abortion to eliminate babies with Down syndrome and other disabilities as a “preventive measure” to “avoid the handicap.”

In a meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Committee this month, Mr. Yadh Ben Achour, a Tunisian lawyer and committee member, argued that one can be an advocate for handicapped people while still encouraging abortion in the case of fetuses with permanent disabilities.  Captured on videotape, the commissioner defended the inviolable right of women to an abortion, especially when her child has been diagnosed with Down syndrome or another disability.

Mr. Ben Achour said in French:

If you tell a woman, “Your child has Dow…” — what is it called? Down syndrome, Dawn syndrome — if you tell her that, or that he may have a handicap forever, for the rest of his life, you should make this woman… it should be possible for her to resort to abortion to avoid the handicap as a preventive measure:

While describing himself as “an ardent defender of the handicapped,” Ben Achour insisted that the State must do everything possible to protect the handicapped “and ensure they have a life, a possible living.”

“But that does not mean that we have to accept to let a disabled fetus live,” he said. “This is a preventive measure.”

Advocating the abortion of handicapped children “doesn’t mean that we are against the disabled or that we won’t help the disabled when born disabled,” Ben Achour said.  The commissioner went on to contend that the key difference lies in catching the disability before the child is born so that it can be aborted because afterward society is obliged to defend the child’s right to live—even if the child has a genetic anomaly.

“So this is where we will find the difference between the birth of the human being. Once he is born, it is finished; with a handicap or without a handicap, he must live and we must protect absolutely, in an absolute manner, his right to life,” he said.  “So us, we defend the right of the handicapped, but, but we can avoid the handicaps, and we must do everything we can to avoid them,” he added. “And it is not contradictory.”

In response to Mr. Ben Achour’s speech, a young woman with Down syndrome made her own YouTube video in response, suggesting that the commissioner apologize for his “horrible comments.”


“I’m a human being just like you,” said the woman, identified only as Charlotte. “Our only difference is an extra chromosome.”

“My extra chromosome makes me far more tolerant than you, sir,” she said. “If any other heritable traits, like skin color, were used to eradicate a group of people, the world would cry out. Why are you not crying out when people like me are being made extinct? What have we done to make you want us to disappear?”

“As far as I know, my community doesn’t hate, discriminate, or commit crimes,” Charlotte said. “What you are suggesting is eugenics. It’s disgusting and evil.”

“You need to apologize for your horrible comments,” the woman continued. “You should also be removed from the Human Rights Committee as an expert. You are not an expert about Down syndrome. You, sir, do not speak for my community.”

“I will fight for our right to exist for the rest of my life,” she said.

The Horror of Aborting Babies Because of Disabilities

Pope Francis Condemns ‘Eugenic’ Mindset 

Thomas D. Williams
BreitbartNews

Pope Francis has denounced what he called the “eugenic tendency” behind eliminating unborn babies with handicaps, which reveals a “narcissistic and utilitarian vision.”

This egotistic viewpoint leads many to consider people with disabilities as marginal, without perceiving their human and spiritual wealth, the Pope said Saturday, as he addressed participants in a conference titled “Catechesis and Persons with Disabilities: A Necessary Engagement in the Daily Pastoral Life of the Church.”

Too many people still reject this condition, Francis said, “as if it prevented them from being happy and fulfilled.  Proof of it is the eugenic tendency to suppress the unborn who have some form of imperfection,” he said.

Pope Francis has repeatedly spoken out against the “scourge of abortion,” comparing it to the brutal tactics of the Mafia.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Making John Knox’s Bones Twitch

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

March 12, 2015

Rachel Marie Stone wrote an article for Christianity Today urging us to “reconsider” Margaret Sanger. The point was that while Sanger was emphatic about the personal and social good that comes from freely available contraception — contraception that was under the control of women — she was also opposed to abortion.

I learned about this article through a lot of good Christians what-the-helling on Twitter and so on, and so I thought I should go take a look. Having done so, let me acknowledge an important point made by a number of respondents thus far. Sanger was a white supremacist, and she was promoting her methods as a way of keeping the human weeds under control. Her outlook was perfectly appalling, and this illustrates yet again that we shouldn’t really care how good Mussolini was with train schedules, or how disciplined and coordinated the North Korean flag-waving drill team is.

The prefix eu in eugenics was a thin code for those white folks who have now dropped the word eugenics like a hot rock, but who still continue to disproportionately target black boys and girls — with the connivance of black quislings — and it should be pointed out by somebody that they have a kill rate much higher than that of the Ferguson Police Department.

Letter From the UK (About A US Supreme Court Justice)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, population control and the things we don't admit about abortion 

Tim Stanley
The Telegraph
September 28, 2014

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Photo: AP).

The cat exits the bag – or, at least, pokes its head out for some air.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Supreme Court Justice, has given an interview that anti-abortion activists claim expresses eugenicist views. Asked about the impact of abortion restrictions upon poor women, Ginsburg delivered this super-creepy-sounding line:

It makes no sense as a national policy to promote birth only among poor people.

Conservatives infer that she would prefer a policy that discourages pregnancy among the less well-off – a view consistent with a much older "progressive" line on abortion rights. Margaret Sanger, the perversely popular historical midwife of the pro-choice movement, wanted the government to promote contraception as a way of reducing the population density of the poor and the sick – while increasing the power of so-called “thoroughbreds”. If a voluntary approach didn’t work, she was happy to achieve her goals through “a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation”. You might dismiss Sanger’s views as a “product of their time” (just like Nazism) but they’ve not entirely lost their currency. There is a small strain of thinking within US liberalism that obsesses about population control. Jonah Goldberg notes that in 1992, a lawyer wrote to Bill Clinton urging him to rush a new abortion pill onto the market as quickly as possible. He said:

Moral Bankruptcy of Utilitarian Calculus

Thank you, Professor Dawkins!

Christian Medical Fellowship
August 26, 2014  
Written by Rick Thomas

Who said nothing ever happens in August! Just as we were looking forward to a quiet bank holiday weekend, up pops Prof Dawkins with a disturbing tweet. Responding to another Twitter posting by a woman admitting she would face a ‘“real ethical dilemma”’ if she became pregnant and found she was carrying a baby with Down’s syndrome, he suggested she should simply abort and try again, and that it would be ‘“immoral”’ to bring into the world a child with Down’s syndrome if you had the choice. He attempted to justify himself further here.

So, there we have it. Knowingly giving life to a child with Down’s syndrome is immoral, terminating its life is commendable. On what grounds would an intelligent person say such a thing, you might ask?
To prevent the child’s suffering – the compassion argument?

Truth is, people with Down’s syndrome don’t ‘suffer’ from their condition, they live with it. And in general the lives they live are more joyous than most.

So might it be the struggles faced by the parents that the professor has in mind?

Depravity Without Bounds

Planned Parenthood: Kill Amendments to Ban Sex-Selection Abortions

by Dr. Susan Berry  

17 Jun 2014

Breitbart News

Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California have issued a floor alert to members of the California legislature urging lawmakers to defeat all pro-life amendments to budget bills, including any that ban sex-selection abortions or require parental consent for minors to obtain an abortion.

The memo to California lawmakers, dated June 12, speaks on behalf of more than 110 Planned Parenthood facilities in the state and declares California to be a “pro-choice state,” based on a Field Poll from four years ago which they claim found 71 percent of Californians opposed to any further restrictions on abortion.

In addition, the Planned Parenthood affiliates' memo states that any amendments that could restrict abortion are “hostile” to “choice,” and it threatens that lawmakers who vote “on any budget amendments to restrict abortion access may be included on the PPAC Legislative Scorecard.”

To justify their demands upon lawmakers, the Planned Parenthood affiliates cite:

Voices in the Wilderness

Why Does the World Still Ignore 2.6M Stillborn Children Every Year?

Posted on | May 20, 2014 

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.

Turtle Bay and Beyond

Why are the nearly three million children who die on their birth day every year still ignored? This is the question posed by a report released today in the Lancet. And it’s the question that should be on the table at the World Health Assembly  this week in Geneva. The high number of deaths hasn’t changed over the years, and neither it seems have the reasons for the utter failure of the world’s maternal health policy elite–see my blog of three years ago.

Delegates interested in making a real difference through the nascent Sustainable Development Goals now under negotiation will be keen on the report’s findings that what could save millions of maternal and newborn lives in the coming years is straightforward: more skilled birth attendants and better health facilities.

To put the matter baldly, we suggest the reason why these children continue to die is because the United Nations and its agencies want them to.  The Malthusians, the population controllers, the eugenicists, and the Greenists all advocate a smaller population for the world as a solution to its problems. 

Belgium's Heart of Darkness

Belgium’s Terrible Decline

After euthanasia-on-demand for children, the next step is euthanasia without-demand

Posted on  March 24, 2014 

By J.C. von Krempach, J.D.

Turtle Bay and Beyond

 

Joseph Conrad once coined the term “heart of darkness” to describe the atrocities of the Belgian colonial rule in what today is the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nowadays, however, the heart of darkness seems to be closer to home: in Belgium itself. By adopting a law that makes euthanasia available for minors, Belgium has surpassed its neighbours Netherlands and Luxembourg as the most euthanasia-friendly jurisdiction in the world, and must now be regarded as a world-wide champion of the Culture of Death.

The new law allows euthanasia for minors without any lower age limit, albeit with parental consent.

It is certainly strange that a legal system, in which children are below 14 are generally considered unable to form any legally relevant decision should nevertheless attach relevance to a declaration by which a child gives up its right to live.

The Kool Aid Tastes Bitter

Thankful for Spineless Hypocrites

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935) is one of the most celebrated jurists ever to sit on the benches of the United States Supreme Court.  He was an atheist.  He had little respect for human life in an abstract sense.  Accordingly, he could write as follows to a correspondent:

I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand.  [Holmes to Frederick Pollock, August 30, 1929, in Richard A. Posner, ed., The Essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 108.]

Consistent with this particular religious commitment, Holmes advocated forced sterilisation and eugenics.  the following citation is taken from Conservapedia: 

Progressives and the Ideology of Eugenics

Dirty Secrets

Eugenics was and remains a proud glory of the Progressive ideology.  It was somewhat unfortunate that Hitler and the Nazis took eugenics seriously, so seriously that it became a movement for mass extermination of those deemed unfit.  This served to take the gloss off  what many in the Progressive movement deeply believed.  So public support for eugenics faded.  But the reality and the dystopian nightmare continued.
 
Abortion is a form of soft-eugenics.  A baby that is unwanted by its mother and father is likely to experience a terrible life.  Cold pity argues for the termination of the child's life, rather than let the child experience deprivation, rejection, and hardship.  It's a mercy to kill, don't you know.

The Overreach of Stupid Science, Part V

The Eclipse of Ethics

[Part V of  The Folly of Scientism by  Austin L. Hughes

Originally published in The New Atlantis ]

Perhaps no area of philosophy has seen a greater effort at appropriation by advocates of scientism than ethics. Many of them tend toward a position of moral relativism. According to this position, science deals with the objective and the factual, whereas statements of ethics merely represent people’s subjective feelings; there can be no universal right or wrong. Not surprisingly, there are philosophers who have codified this opinion. The positivist tradition made much of a “fact-value distinction,” in which science was said to deal with facts, leaving fields like ethics (and aesthetics) to deal with the more nebulous and utterly disparate world of values. In his influential book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), the philosopher J. L. Mackie went even further, arguing that ethics is fundamentally based on a false theory about reality.

Evolutionary biology has often been seen as highly relevant to ethics, beginning in the nineteenth century. Social Darwinism — at least as it came to be explained and understood by later generations — was an ideology that justified laissez-faire capitalism with reference to the natural “struggle for existence.” In the writings of authors such as Herbert Spencer, the accumulation of wealth with little regard for those less fortunate was justified as “nature’s way.” Of course, the “struggle” involved in natural selection is not a struggle to accumulate a stock portfolio but a struggle to reproduce — and ironically, Social Darwinism arose at the very time that the affluent classes of Western nations were beginning to limit their reproduction (the so-called “demographic transition”) with the result that the economic struggle and the Darwinian struggle were at cross-purposes.

Partly in response to this contradiction, the eugenics movement arose, with its battle cry, “The unfit are reproducing like rabbits; we must do something to stop them!”

How Nonsense Became Received Wisdom

 The Flat Earth Society Has Nothing on This

When the previous century began, optimism was in the air.  Mankind could finally control its own destiny.  Man could be progressively perfected and Paradise would break forth.  All of his problems could be solved by correcting external influences.  Evil and sin would be progressively removed by enlightened policies of social and human re-tooling. 

The first change agent off the rank was Socialism.  If wealth were redistributed and the poor were given other people's money virtually every social problem would disappear immediately.  The second cab was science.  The more technological advances made, the more disease would be conquered; the more Nature exploited, the more  resources to distribute. 

These hopes proceeded on the belief that the Christian doctrines of Original Sin and human depravity were ignorant superstitions of a dark past.

Scientific Breeding

Taking Control of Evolution

"Eugenics" is currently a dirty word, a blasphemy.  However, we have conveniently overlooked that a mere seventy years ago it was perfectly respectable in both Britain and the United States.  The intellectual elite generally believed selective breeding was a key to overcome the dark past of the human race and facilitate a new dawn of civilisation. 

Then along came Adolf and the Nazis who not only took the idea seriously, but actively institutionalised it, making it official policy within the Reich.  For this scientific advance, the Nazis were accorded a good deal of respect before the war amongst the intelligentsia, on both sides of the Atlantic.  With the demise of Nazi Germany, however, and the horror of the "Ultimate Solution" exposed, the attraction of eugenics in the West suffered collateral damage. It was no longer fashionable in the salons.

Nevertheless, eugenics are still being promoted within academia in the West--tellingly without scandal or notoriety.

Lest We Forget

A Seething Mass of Maggots

Michelle Malkin provides some historical background to the political storm over Christians and churches and Christian institutions being forced to provide contraception and abortifacients.  Beneath it lurks the liberal fascination with eugenics.

Letter From America

Social Darwinism at Work

It is only a few short years ago that eugenics was practised in the United States.  It was a direct result of Social Darwinism--of elites trying to "help along" the Darwinist idea of the emergence of an uber-race.  This article, reprinted in the Sydney Morning Herald underscores how eugenics is part of our recent history.   It wasn't just the Nazis. 

The killer quotation (literally):  "The board's goal was to purify the state's population by weeding out the mentally ill, diseased, feebleminded and others deemed undesirable."