A Woman's Body Does Not Have Two Heads: Pro-Abortion Irrationality

Your body does not have 2 heads and 2 different sets of DNA.

Clever image that sums up one part of the illogicality in the feminist claim that the moral issue of abortion is largely limited to the assertion that a woman does what she likes with her body.

The other part of the irrationality in that pseudo-argument is illustrated by what I wrote in my previous post Legalizing Infanticide or Limiting Abortion:

What is absurd is for women to shut all the discussion by saying "it's my body, so I decide".

It makes as much sense as for a killer to say "I used my hand to kill, the hand is part of my body, therefore no-one can tell me what I can or cannot do with it".

The fact remains that, even if a foetus is inside a woman's body, it is still a different living, and in some stages sentient, being, so should not be treated just like an appendix of her body.

Why Paedophilia Concerns Have Come to Override Basic Rules of Law

Whether or not the BBC, as the Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson argues, should prove that the programme Newsnight was not acting with malice towards senior Tory politician Lord McAlpine wrongly accused of paedophilia by an abuse victim, one thing is clear.

The current obsession with paedophilia seems to have erased or greatly diluted the basic legal principles that a person is innocent until proven guilty and, even more importantly, that the burden of the proof is on the accuser.

Paedophilia and, to a lesser extent, rape have become such politically incorrect crimes that they are treated as if they were worse than even murder or mutilation.

Yet losing life or a limb is certainly worse than being a victim of sex crimes.

When another child abuse scandal connected to the BBC, that of Jimmy Savile, emerged, we heard a never-ending number of celebrities and commentators repeating ad nauseam that children must absolutely be believed without a doubt in the world when they make this kind of accusations, almost implying that disbelief is a crime in itself and echoing similar assertions made about rape and women who claim to have been raped.

Nobody should be believed absolutely and undoubtedly: children, adults, women and men. People who say they have been victims of a crime are witnesses; and it is a well known fact that crime witnesses are highly unreliable, as this latest case concerning Lord McAlpine confirms for the umpteenth time.

This applies to all crimes: the least unpopular as much as the most hated ones. It has nothing to do with the severity of the crime, or how much it is disliked, or how strong emotions it arises.

It is a simple rule of law. To punish an innocent is worse than to let a guilty off the hook.

In the case of paedophilia, even accusing an innocent may be worse than to let a guilty off the hook.

"To call someone a paedophile is to consign them to the lowest circle of hell – and while they are still alive" correctly writes Boris Johnson.

But why have we got to this point of insanity, where paediatricians have been lynch mobbed for having the same prefix as paedophiles (from the Greek for "child") in their name and accusations can fly around and be believed so liberally?

The reason is very simple. Starting from the 1960s "sexual revolution", strongly if not entirely consciously influenced by Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich theories that repressing sexual impulses is not good for you, sexual activity has been removed from the moral sphere.

Contemporary, influential moral philosopher Peter Singer writes in his Practical Ethics that ethics should not concern itself with sexuality, and that driving a car, due to what he believes to be its environmental impact, raises more moral issues than having sex.

This new dogma has been readily and happily accepted by a majority opinion, leading to such nice results as multiplication of marriage breakdowns, adultery, divorces, broken families, abortions, illegitimate births, multiple partners and fathers, AIDS, increase in sexually transmitted diseases, homosexualist agenda being imposed on everybody, incest and Muslim polygamy made quasi-legal or accepted.

But public opinion, seeing where all this was going, namely that sex with children woud be next on the list of morally permissible activities, strongly drew a line at that. Something similar happened with rape.

Given the very confused ideas about sexuality and morality that prevail in our societies (and I grant that the subject is complex), all the furore about paedophilia (and to a lesser degree rape) derives from and is directly proportional to the eagerness and almost desperation with which all other forms of sexuality have been embraced without a thought in the world.

It turns out that sexual activity is not beyond the realm of ethics after all.

How Close Abortion and Infanticide Can Be

The video above shows a CNN report on Obama's opposition, in 2001 when he was an Illinois state Senator, to the Illinois state's Born Alive Infants Protection Act, a bill to give legal protection to live babies surviving abortions, so that they would not be thrown away and left to die.

Obama voted against Born Alive and was the only senator to speak against it on the senate floor for 2 consecutive years.

The federal version of Born Alive was approved unanimously 98-0 by the US Senate. It passed overwhelmingly, approved from left to right, in the US House of Representatives. President Bush signed it into law on August 5, 2002.

As chairman of the Illionois Senate Health & Human Services Committee, Obama stopped a bill with identical wording of the federal law from being introduced in Illinois in 2003.

The reason Obama had given for voting against the Illinois state's Born Alive Infant Protection Act was that this bill was different from the similar federal law that was passed, in that it was open to being interpreted as making all abortions illegal and did not protect Roe v. Wade.

The video report shows a debate on the issue between Democrat James Carville and conservative Bill Bennett.

As you can easily see in the video, only Bennett has a valid argument: the federal law and the Illinois bill are identical, so this is not about Roe v. Wade, this is not about abortion. It looks like one of Obama's many falsities.

Carville has no arguments at all, valid or not. All he does is using ad hominem attacks against Santorum, thinking that his socialist peers will find him funny, and against the nurse who supported the bill.

Imagine for a moment if this happened in a court of law: Bennett's statement would have been accepted, Carville's would have been rejected as argumentative.

It's easy to see why the best brains belong to the right end of the political spectrum. Since socialism of various shapes and forms is the current dominant ideological orthodoxy of the West, it takes more intellect - as well as guts - to challenge it than to go along with it.

Legalizing Infanticide or Limiting Abortion

UK Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said that the legal time limit on abortion should be halved from 24 weeks as it is now in the UK to 12 weeks, although Home Secretary Theresa May, interviewed yesterday about the extradition to the USA of Abu Hamza and other four suspect terrorists, has made it clear that the government does not intend to follow that recommendation.

On the question of abortion, I think that the debate has been too fixated on some "demarcation points", magic moments where the moral status of the organism would suddenly change.

Typically these are two: the moment of conception and that of birth. No doubt these are crucial biologically, but biology should not necessarily dictate ethics.

The moral philosopher Peter Singer was right when he wrote some considerations to the effect that there is nothing about birth that can alter the morally relevant characteristics of a being.

A foetus one day before birth is very much like a baby after birth. This argument has been used by Peter Singer, and now by others following his argument, to justify infanticide. The BMJ's Journal of Medical Ethics published in February 2012 an article entitled "After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?", which repeats what Singer says. This could be the slippery slope that the pro-life campaigners have warned about.

Obama has been accused of legalizing infanticide for voting three times in the Illinois Senate against the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act, which was designed to ensure that, if a live baby fully emerged before an abortion was successfully completed, the baby would be saved.

Singer's argument is logic, indeed is what I always thought even before reading his books. But it coud be used in the opposite direction, to cast ethical doubts on the acceptability of abortions in advanced stages of pregnancy. There are foetuses perfectly viable at 6 months, the time when abortions are still allowed by the UK law. Premature babies can survive, sometimes in incubators.

I suggest that maybe we should think in terms of degrees of increasing moral worth, rather than a clearcut demarcation line - be it conception or birth, neither of which per se, and especially birth, is conducive to difference in morally relevant characteristics of the being in question.

The moral and legal answer to the question of allowing abortion should not, perhaps, be a black-or-white yes or no, but depending on many curcumstances, and very prominet among those should be the age of the embryo or foetus.

What is absurd is for women to shut all the discussion by saying "it's my body, so I decide".

It makes as much sense as for a killer to say "I used my hand to kill, the hand is part of my body, therefore no-one can tell me what I can or cannot do with it".

 The fact remains that, even if a foetus is inside a woman's body, it is still a different living, and in some stages sentient being, so should not be treated just like an appendix of her body.