Child Abuse On A Vast Scale

Suicide Alley

Half Of All Transgender Female Teens Have Attempted Suicide

A study raises serious questions about how families, schools, doctors, government, and the media should grapple with the increasing number of children who label themselves transgender.

Kelsey Harkness
The Federalist

One in every two transgender adolescents who are female but identify as male has attempted suicide in the past year, according to a new study. The study, “Transgender Adolescent Suicide Behavior,” was published in Pediatrics, the official peer-reviewed journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The study raises serious questions about how families, schools, doctors, government, and the media should grapple with the increasing number of children and teens who label themselves transgender. In addition to the alarmingly high rate of suicide attempts among transgender girls, the study reported an attempted-suicide rate of more than 40 percent for adolescents who call themselves “gender nonconforming” (neither exclusively male nor female), and nearly 30 percent for transgender male teens.

The Mess of Pottage That is Euthanasia

To Die Or Not to Die That is the Question

New Zealand is going through yet another debate on "euthanasia".  Another bill to institutionalise "euthanasia" is before the Parliament.  The usual suspects are hard at work pushing it mightily.  Given that New Zealand is a thoroughly pagan society--one where the predominant religion is atheistic secularism--it would appear to be only a matter of time before the death cult has its way.

Euthanasia is underpinned by a philosophical principle which espouses a particular human right.  It rests upon the doctrine that human beings have a right to determine their own deaths.  If human beings have no such right, then euthanasia is a great evil.  But let us assume for the present that they do have such a right.  Let us assume that the right to choose death is one more faux human right dreamed up by pagan philosophers and professional ethicists. Let us assume further that euthanasia is not just a freedom right (people have a right to kill themselves if they chosoe) but it is also a demand right (society must facilitate, assist and enable people to kill themselves).

At present the issue before the country is whether elderly or terminally ill people have a right to take their own lives (either by their own hand, or assisted by others).  Let us repeat: these people have a right to terminate their own lives, say the protagonists--so much so that if any body or institution interfere with their taking their own life, they are breaching the human rights of that person.  In its strongest demand right sense, people have a right to have their self-death funded and facilitated by the state.

The debate is also being framed at present by an appeal to pity.

Without Excuse

Dr David Clark And Youth Suicide

We have a foolish Minister of Health who stupidly criticized his predecessor--a political opponent and former Minister of Health--for his personal failure to prevent more youth suicides.  Naturally, his opponent said he would be delighted to attribute every youth suicide from now on to the ineptitude and lassitude of the new incoming Minister.  After all, what's sauce for the goose must be sauce for the gander.

Youth suicide, we are told, is a major problem.  We have been told that the issues are complex, opaque, confused, and often contradictory.  Pity, then, the silly new Minister of Health who implied that the solution was simple and that he would take personal responsibility for putting that solution (whatever that may be) into place.

In some senses it is indeed true that the solution is simple.  If there appears to be one major cause of youth suicide it is the widespread use of smart phones amongst young people appears to rank "up there".  Now before you impute all kinds of failings to us for making such a simplistic, outrageous claim, consider the following.

In the September 2017 issue of The Atlantic an article appeared tying teenage cellphone use to rising rates of youth suicide.  Here are some salient paragraphs:

Youth Euthanasia

Sauce For Goose and Gander

New Zealand has a real problem with young people committing suicide.  Generally, no-one thinks it's a good idea.  You know, a sixteen year old hanging himself, or deliberately stepping out in front of a train--that sort of thing.

Those folk who oppose such actions--and these folk represent the vast majority, if not every adult in the country--are little more than bleeding heart fraudsters and dupes.  What on earth is wrong with a teenager taking his or her own life?  Seriously.

Long ago--well, a few decades ago--suicide used to be categorised as a sin, an ultimate act of rebellion against God.  But then God was "kicked for touch" so to speak, and the culture was suddenly awash with formal and informal fallacies, which is a polite was of saying that no-one could think straight any more.  Pretty much every social issue became filtered through emotive arguments.  In this case, when it comes to youth suicide emotion takes the form of the Appeal to Pity.  But not just the death of youth.  Assisted dying for the aged is also seen through the filter of Appeals to Pity.  This poor old person is ill, dispirited, discouraged.  If we really had pity upon him, we would help him on his way.  We would facilitate a painless, peaceful death for him.  Pity justifies such an act as morally good.

But some have sought to go beyond emotive arguments to justify helping the aged end their lives.

Reaping the Whirlwind

No Slippery-Slope Here

When the centre is lost, nothing holds.  When a culture turns away from the Lord and Giver of life, death becomes the answer.

Twenty-Year Old Euthanised

Sex abuse victim in her 20s allowed by doctors to choose euthanasia due to ‘incurable’ PTSD

News.com

WHEN we think about euthanasia, many of us picture an elderly person.  They’ve had many good years, but an illness has ruined their quality of life. They’re in pain, and they want to end things on their own terms. For many people, this is an easy concept to accept.

But a recent case in the Netherlands is getting a lot of media attention, and it’s troubling ethicists.  A sexual abuse victim in her 20s was allowed to go ahead with assisted suicide as she was suffering from “incurable” post-traumatic-stress disorder (PTSD), according to the Dutch Euthanasia Commission.

Autonomous Rights Over One's Body

Slimy Lusts

The following article has appeared in the NZ media:

Young pregnant teens don't have the mental maturity to understand the implications of an abortion, new research suggests.  Parents should be involved in the abortion decision, rather than giving all girls, no matter what their age, the right to consent, Otago University masters law student Michael Morrison said.  The current "clumsy" legislation that allows teens to chose to have an abortion without their parent's permission is outdated and should be repealed, he said.   "We're relying on an ancient piece of legislation."

The Execration of All Things

A Meditation Upon Suicide

The chattering classes have been animated in recent days over a young female cancer sufferer who has made plans to kill herself.  She has been, and continues to be a "Right to Death" advocate.  The media have lionised her, lauded her, and praised her to the skies as a great example for us all.  What courage!  What dedication!

G.K. Chesterton wrote the following in his essay, "The Flag of the World". It will help us reflect more closely upon such things:

. . . an argument arose whether it was not a very nice thing to murder one's self.  Grave moderns told us that we must not even say "poor fellow," of a man who has blown his brains out, since he was an enviable person, and had only blown them out because of their exceptional excellence.  Mr William Archer even suggested that in the golden age there would be penny-in-the-slot machines, by which a man could kill himself for a penny.  In all this I found myself utterly hostile to man who called themselves liberal and humane.

Branding Matters

Getting Our "Positioning" Right

New Zealand has a problem with youth suicides.  There are too many of them.  Way too many.  We posted recently that a national newspaper had this to say:

The deaths from the Taupo Bay area in the Far North follow the Herald on Sunday's reports on a similar cluster [of youth suicides) in Kawerau two years ago. These, and the country's relentlessly high suicide rate, are now prompting calls for a nationwide suicide prevention publicity programme similar to that used to combat depression - and for government funding to be more effectively targeted.

The secular world is finds itself in serious in conflict over young people taking their own lives.  On the one hand there is this brute reality that every fibre of our being screams out that it is wrong. But, on the other hand, secular amorality also insists that there can be nothing immoral or unethical about the act itself.  So we are filled with pity and guilt without any ethical warrant.  We are all dressed up with nowhere to go.  We know we are sad, but unsure whether we ought to be.

Teenage Suicides

The Crown of Secular Amorality

New Zealand has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the developed world. Often-times these appear as "outbreaks"--a cluster of suicides occurring in small communities.  The working assumption is that the news spreads amongst the small community by word of mouth, Chinese whispers, social media, and conversations around the dinner table.  Everyone knows, but no-one talks about it.

The latest spate of youth suicides (five so far, one as young as ten years old) have occurred in Taupo Bay  in the far north.  They follow a similar outbreak in Kawerau two years ago.  The tragedy is palpable.  The stupidity and senselessness of the suicides overwhelming.  The cold, hard reality is that there was nothing in these young lives so discouraging or so bad to justify such gross actions.  That they thought there was indicates that these kids had departed from the realms of reality and truth and had entered a destructive fantasy realm.  The realm in which so many of their parents live and in which our society glories.