Wheeling and Dealing
Politics is all about deals and compromises – especially if you have a minority government, like the current UK situation. In such circumstances in order for a government to get their programme through there has been a great deal of wheeling and dealing. The Democratic Unionist Party are masters at this and as a result they have got the people of Northern Ireland a good deal. Despite the faux outrage of Labour and the SNP you have to admire the DUP for doing what politicians are supposed to do – get the best for their electorate. And of course Labour and the SNP are being hypocritical as they too were previously prepared to work with the DUP as this clip so brilliantly puts it.
The Real Dirty Deal
But there was a real dirty deal done today. Labour’s Sheila Creasy took the opportunity offered by the vote on the Queens speech to put forward an amendment offering women in Northern Ireland, free abortions on the NHS in England and Wales (the Scottish government had already said they would do the same). Northern Ireland does not permit abortion except is cases of danger to the mother’s life and serious dangers to mental health. It is a devolved matter and therefore has nothing to do with the UK Parliament – which did not stop Labour promising to impose a liberal abortion law on Northern Ireland. The Supreme Court recently decided that it was not a human right to have an abortion and that it was up to the Northern Ireland Assembly to determine about abortion. The UK government were opposed to offering free abortions but because they feared that several Tory MPs would support the amendment the government, wanting to avoid defeat on this amendment, found the money to make that offer.
There are so many things that are illogical and immoral about this decision.
We are told this is an issue for justice. Where is the justice for the unborn child? Parents occasionally show me the photo/scan of their child at 12 weeks in the wo
mb. You can see the limbs, the features of a human being. But people want to say that she is an it. That he is not human but just a lump that can be removed. The fact is that it is not just the woman’s body – there is at least one other human body involved.
We are told that the NHS is desperately short of money. Why then can £1 million be found to provide for babies to be killed? People are rightly angry and asking about the justice for the 80 who died in the Grenfell tower fire. So why are we not upset that the UK government just offered to pay to kill around 1,000 Northern Irish babies in the womb in English hospitals?
We are told that the fact that the DUP are opposed to abortion is a sign that they are backward and out of step with everyone else. Are Sinn Fein for abortion – given their Catholic roots? What about all the Labour MPs who are Catholic? Are they too spineless to stand up for their faith? What is progressive and forward thinking about killing children in the womb? And why stop there? Why not have post-birth abortion if parents don’t want to keep their babies?
The BMA Betrayal
But it wasn’t only the politicians who were engaging in this culture of death – the BMA (British Medical Association) were joining in. BMA Votes to Decriminalise Abortion
In a decision that I suspect does not reflect many of the views of its members, but rather the politics of its leadership, the BMA this week voted to ask the government to decriminalize abortion. What many people do not realize is that abortion is illegal in the 
UK – except when two doctors agree that the health of the woman or the baby is in danger (the latter part always confused me – killing someone to improve their health doesn’t really work logically!). The BMA, in seeking to change that, are in effect seeking to permit abortion on demand up to birth. If you really need to know what is wrong with this, my good friend Dr Peter Saunders sets it out clearly – Why Decriminalising Abortion is Harmful
The fact is that the BMA have gone against the Hippocratic oath – – “Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion”. They have gone against every principle of medicine, justice and humanity – just to go along with the current political and culture of death zeitgeist.
The Depths of Meduza
There was one other abortion story this week – which reaches even lower depths. The feminist magazine Meduza had an article that argued that white women should have abortions in order to bring justice to non-whites! I had assumed it was a spoof but apparently not. Abort White Babies
White women: it is time to do your part! Your white children reinforce the white supremacist society that benefits you. If you claim to be progressive, and yet willingly birth white children by your own choice, you are a hypocrite. White women should be encouraged to abort their white children, and to use their freed-up time and resources to assist women of color who have no other choice but to raise their children.
Who needs a Disability Commissioner?
Finally another note on the same issue – The Times reported that Lord Shinkwin, who is Britain’s disability commissioner has been fired from his role. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) had decided that his role was no longer needed. Lord 
Shinkwin had argued passionately for equality for the disabled, including in the womb. Hence he needed to go. Because as I pointed out in this article in the Scotsman – Human rights are determined by the elites and are not subject to challenge. Some people have more rights than others. The child in the womb and the disabled do not share the same human rights as others (and I suspect that the poor, the elderly and the sick had better watch out as well).
What can we do in the midst of such rampant evil?
We must stand for the truth. We must speak up for the weak and defenceless. Something which the church at its best as always done. Traudl Junge (Hitler’s’ secretary) tells us what he thought about this Christian tendency.
“Sometimes we also had interesting discussions about the church and the development of the human race. Perhaps it’s going too far to call them discussions, because he would begin explaining his ideas when some question or remark from one of us had set them off, and we just listened. He was not a member of any church, and thought the Christian religions were out-dated, hypocritical institutions that lured people into them. The laws of nature were his religion. He could reconcile his dogma of violence better with nature than with the Christian doctrine of loving your neighbour and your enemy. ‘Science isn’t yet clear about the origins of humanity,’ he once said. ‘We are probably the highest stage of development of some mammal which developed from reptiles and moved on to human beings, perhaps by way of the apes. We are a part of creation and children of nature, and the same laws apply to us as to all living creatures. And in nature the law of the struggle for survival has reigned from the first.
Everything incapable of life, everything weak is eliminated. Only mankind and above all the church have made it their aim to keep alive the weak, those unfit to live, and people of an inferior kind.” (Until the Final Hour –p108)
Indeed. That is our aim. To keep alive the week, those others consider ‘unfit to live’ and ‘people of an inferior kind’. We are Christians. We recognise that all human beings are made in the image of God. All life is precious to us. On that we will not compromise or do deals. In the words of a far greater German than Hitler – “here we stand, we can do no other”!
I wrote to my local paper on the matter of abortion during the election campaign. Unsurprisingly it wasn’t printed. I also submitted a question on abortion to a hustings which wasn’t asked, but then it was the ‘Churches together in Teddington ‘ hustings (a body which my congregation is proud NOT to belong to). It seems impossible to even raise the massacre of the unborn any more. No-one will let us be heard.
We have got SPUC Evangelicals coming to our Harvest in September, maybe that’ll get some reaction. It just makes me feel like crying, it really honestly does.
“It is a devolved matter and therefore has nothing to do with the UK Parliament ..”
So are women in N Ireland different to other parts of the UK? Are their pregnancies different? No they are not, and nor are their rights different to choose what to do with their own bodies. It’s not your choice, it’s theirs.
I think you are missing the point of devolution. It means that national parliaments get to decide on these issues. And your last point is completely destroyed when you realise that a) there is more than one body invovled and b) none of us get to do whatever we want with our own bodies.
The women of Northern ireland and their pregnancies are the same as anywhere else. The values of the people in NI and GB are different though.
You consider pregnant mothers to have a right to choose what to do with their own bodies. Why? Because you place a higher value on them, than upon the sons and daughters of theirs who would perish if they chose to have abortions. That is an elitist value judgment, exalting one group over another, the mothers over their foetuses.
The consensus in NI, a few dissenting, is that a pregnant women DOESN’T have the right to chose to have her child aborted. That is because of an egalitarian value judgment, that considers all humans to be of equal worth, foetus and mother alike, along with everybody else.
In the law of GB, abortion can become the mother’s choice, if certain conditions are met. In the law of NI, abortion is usually nobody’s choice. Abortion isn’t one of the options that anybody can choose, except in very limited circumstances that only apply in less than 2% of the abortions in England and Wales. 98% of English and Welsh abortions, would be illegal in NI, because the law s different there.
In the UK of GB & NI, many people think the law should be changed in GB, to make it like the law in NI. Many others think the law should change in NI, to make it like the law in GB. If there is an absolute standard of right and wrong, that makes the egalitarian value judgment correct, then GB should change. If there is an absolute standard that makes the elitist value judgment correct, then NI should change.
I appeal to the Equality Principle, in support of my value judgment that the child’s life is more important than the mother’s wishes.
Why don’t you argue for the elitist, contrary value judgment you make, that the mother’s wishes are more important than the child’s life? I mean argue, not just assert. You think the mother has the right to choose abortion, because the foetus is growing inside her own body, which she “owns”. But you haven’t tried to explain why the fact that the foetus is inside the mother, demands a departure form the Equality Principle that supports the position that the government of NI takes.
Reblogged this on Talmidimblogging.
Dan 12:10, a verse which is translated many different ways in different English bibles, predicts a time of polarisation, such as that in which we live, I say, as even people less eccentric than I have started to notice.
Just like other genocides, you first declare the intended victims sub-human to justify your actions. The end point of humanism is unfettered eugenics, no doubt in my mind.
Humanism is self-improvement so I think you are right on that. Man is his own Saviour. In which case what better means of saving the human race is there than eugenics?
If man is his own saviour, and his own god, then what is “improvement”? And from what can a man be “saved”, unto what?
I wrote a piece on eugenics myself once, albeit (as you’d expect), somewhat tongue-in-cheek. (I do this occasionally.) Please enjoy.
Giving evolution a helping hand
https://johnallmanuk.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/eugenics/
Salvation from his own metaphysical limitations, with development generally predicated on the ability of man to educate himself into improvement, that process being regarded as both inevitable and inexorable. A kind of sanctification. Man moves inexorably forward, one generation delivering itself from the failings of its predecessors.
“Salvation from his own metaphysical limitations, with development generally predicated on the ability of man to educate himself into improvement, that process being regarded as both inevitable and inexorable.”
The better to understand your doctrine, might you please be willing to provide me with an example of a “metaphysical limitation”? One in any field, and regardless of whether it was accompanied by development at all, let alone development that was predicated on anything specific, and regardless of how it was “regarded”?
Francis Schaeffer, writing at the end of the 1970s, said this, “What was unthinkable in the 60s is unthinkable no longer.The thinkables of the coming 80s and 90s will certainly include things which most people today find unthinkable and immoral, even unimaginable and too extreme to suggest. Yet – since they do not have some overriding principle that takes them beyond relativistic thinking – when these become thinkable and acceptable in the 80s and 90s, most people will not even remember that they were unthinkable in the 70s. THEY WILL SLIDE INTO EACH NEW THINKABLE WITHOUT A JOLT.” (Extract from “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?)
Thanks for that. A practical question for the moral relativist: if the majority of a society at some point in the future can hold a present moral axiom to be immoral and overthrow that position how can today’s norm be in any way morally binding and normative? The question is valid for all moral axioms arising out in of a purely humanistic base. One generation cannot morally bind subsequent generations. If so, can one generation even morally bind itself?
Let alone those of us who are time travellers, tourists visiting the present from the past, or the future.
Next practical question, please. Or a philosophical one if you prefer.
This is from Albert Mohler on the Gospel Coalition site:
“Great moral debates ride on arguments, but they’re decided on emotion and moral intuition. That doesn’t mean arguments don’t matter—they assuredly do. What it does mean is the winning side in a great moral crisis will never win on argument alone. Moral sentiment is more basic than moral argument.”
Selfish emotion rules, but that’s not new, going back to the Garden.
The ethic of “common good” is being expunged and selective killing is promoted. Yet there is no rage against the killing, unlike the Grenfell Tower deaths. Do embryonic humans deserve being killed? I’d suggest, less so than anyone who has died in any recent UK mass deaths, no matter how “good ” they were.
The embryo cannot be publicly hugged by Jeremy Corbyn.
Sinn Fein – what Catholic roots? It is one of great tragedies of Northern Ireland that it seems that the majority of Catholics give their support to that party. I’m pretty sure it is pro-abortion. It certainly supports the definition of marriage. As for Catholic MPs there are several who are very active in the pro-life cause but I’m sorry to say that there are some who vote for abortion.
I accepted the £billion bung to NI at the behest of the DUP with equanimity. It was the sting in the tail that horrified me May’s bung to her own back-benchers, of the thousand British-Irish babies, sacrificed to May’s own sense of self-importance.
I’d rather she’d let the children live, and handed over to almost any other MP, than to watch her buying more time in office, with the blood of innocents.
What a kick in the teeth for the DUP. They are pro-foetus.
“Despite the faux outrage of Labour and the SNP you have to admire the DUP for doing what politicians are supposed to do – get the best for their electorate. And of course Labour and the SNP are being hypocritical as they too were previously prepared to work with the DUP as this clip so brilliantly puts it.”
There must be a temptation for bloggers and journalists of a particular genre to lift the easiest and most superficial soundbite from one side without considering the right to reply for the other side. This is particularly unlikely to draw a response when it is not the main point of the argument. The objection to the deal surely is not that there is a deal per se. The government or the opposition for that matter can make a deal with any other willing party. There are at least three objections to the current agreement between the Conservatives and the DUP.
(a)The first problem is that in terms of the Good Friday agreement, if direct rule from Westminster is triggered while Stormont is suspended, and if the government is depending on the DUP to get votes through Westminster, then there is a conflict of interest as the Government is supposed to be the neutral broker of direct rule. It cannot be neutral if the Conservatives depend on the DUP which is one party of Stormont. How will the Government respond to the Irish Language Bill for example?
(b)The second problem is that if ‘cash for questions’ is a scandal as it was some years ago, if ‘cash for ash’ was enough to bring down the last Irish administration, does ‘notes for votes’ not also have the taint of bribery?
(c) The third objection is that money given to Northern Ireland by Westminster should be matched under Barnett formula consequentials for Scotland and Wales. If not, why not?
I do not think it is hypocritical or faux of the SNP to object to the deal on any of these grounds.
I appreciate that the main thrust of your objection to the Queen’s speech is the facilitation of abortion in mainland England & Wales for prospective mothers from Northern Ireland thus effectively sidelining the domestic law of the province. I thought that the DUP would not have supported such a move but it did not go to a vote so they were spared the dilemma. And the Government were spared the risk of losing their first vote.The Irish question of financing mothers from Northern Ireland to abort their babies in mainland UK does not appear to be connected to the DUP deal. Did the Conservatives change their previous stance, thus avoiding a vote, for the sake of political expediency? If I am mis-informed and if there is a connection to the DUP deal then that is a fourth objection.
I agree the DUP probably have more finely honed negotiating skills that anyone in Cabinet and might be a helpful addition to the Brexit negotiating team. As for that matter do SInn Fein.
I agree with John Allman’s comment on abortion-there are two lives to be considered.
PS I found this which sounds plausible as an explanation of a ‘work around’
https://theferret.scot/scotland-3bn-conservative-dup-deal-barnett/