Two dreadful votes happened in the House of Commons in Britain last week. The Bills a majority of MPs voted in favour of must now go to the House of Lords. If that hurdle is cleared, the first Bill will mean that women in England and Wales will be able to abort their babies at any point in a pregnancy, long after viability and right up to birth in theory, without facing criminal charges.
The second Bill will pave the way for assisted suicide if a person is deemed to be within six months of death. Defenders of the Bill think it is full of safeguards. Critics say assisted suicide is wrong in itself, that the safeguards are not really that safe, and also that over time the grounds for assisted suicide will expand as has happened in other jurisdictions such as Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands.
The law in the North already allows women to abort their baby at any point up to birth without facing criminal sanctions”
Thus, in the space of a few short days, British politicians have voted to make it easier to kill the unborn, the old and the infirm. At the same time, these measures are dressed up in the clothes of ‘compassion’ and ‘choice’, as ‘advances’ and as ‘progress’.
Ireland, both North and South, has already gone quite a bit down this same path. Northern Ireland now has a liberal abortion law imposed upon it when the Conservative Party was in power in Westminster and the Northern Ireland Assembly was still suspended because of fighting when Sinn Fein and the DUP.
The law in the North already allows women to abort their baby at any point up to birth without facing criminal sanctions.
South
In the South, we have had a liberal abortion law since early 2019. The Government likes to pretend the law is not liberal because it ‘only’ allows abortion for any reason up to 12 weeks, but 90% of abortions have taken place by this point anyway. After 12 weeks, an abortion can still take place if the baby is found to have a so-called ‘fatal foetal abnormality’, or there is a deemed threat to the life or health of the mother.
Oh, and this wasn’t really noticed at the time, but the law in the South also allows a woman to abort her baby right up to birth.
Doctors and others are still penalised if they help a woman to have an abortion outside the various legal limits, but not the woman herself. Therefore, she could obtain abortions pills, take them, and abort her baby quite late into her pregnancy without facing legal consequences.
In Britain there was quite a bit of critical commentary last week after the House of Commons voted to decriminalise abortion up to birth in the case of the woman”
At a certain point, aborting a baby becomes very like infanticide. Late-term abortions are very rare, but they do happen and some of them are self-administered by the woman.
In Britain there was quite a bit of critical commentary last week after the House of Commons voted to decriminalise abortion up to birth in the case of the woman, but here there was little comment when the same things happened. I think it is because everyone was distracted by the rest of the new law going through Leinster House after the abortion referendum of 2018.
Harris
Simon Harris was, of course, the Minister directly responsible for this, because he was Health Minister at the time, and aggressively defended his Bill against all-comers. This was a man who professed to be firmly pro-life when he was first elected back in 2011.
Currently, no bill that would permit assisted suicide is before the Dail. It is unlikely that the current Government will propose such a bill, but one of the opposition parties, or an individual TD might. In the last Dail, there was a Private Member’s Bill that was working its way through its various stages but ran out of time, so it is possible another might be proposed in this Dail. The assisted suicide Bill that the House of Commons has just voted in favour of is a Private Member’s Bill.
Liberal societies are built on notion that we all have the right to pursue happiness in our own way, so long as we don’t do harm to someone else”
But why do liberal societies pass such laws in the first place? Why are liberal societies so strongly associated with laws that allow their citizens to kill unborn babies, and to do the same to the dying, and in some countries the very ill, but not dying, with the assistance of doctors, if the person in question authorises this? (Critics say very sick people can easily be put under pressure, and therefore are not really making a choice).
The reason is that we have managed to convince ourselves that such laws are needed for our happiness. Liberal societies are built on notion that we all have the right to pursue happiness in our own way, so long as we don’t do harm to someone else.
If having a baby would cause sufficient unhappiness, then we must permit abortion as the ‘solution’ to this problem. The unborn child, especially in the first weeks of pregnancy is simply not considered a ‘someone’ who is being harmed by the abortion. They have been reduced to a nothing in the eyes of law.
In the case of assisted suicide, a serious illness can obviously seriously reduce your happiness and quality of life. This is far from always the case, because people are adaptable. But liberal societies take the view that if a given person believes they are so ill (physically or mentally) that life is no longer worth living, and their condition is irreversible, then that person must be given the right to end their life with a physician’s help.
Expand
And so we see that liberal societies need to expand the right to kill and the ‘right to die’ in order to achieve their aim of giving individuals a maximum chance at happiness and maximum choice. But what a price. How extreme do your values have to become in order to justify expanding the ‘right’ to abortion constantly, and to care little about how many take place, and then to create a ‘right to die’ followed by its constant expansion as well?
A typical liberal society today see about one pregnancy in four ending in abortion, and in Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands, thousands of lives end each year through euthanasia and assisted suicide.
Clearly societies going down such a destructive path need to seriously question themselves. It should be obvious that something has gone seriously wrong when the pursuit of happiness results in so much killing.
Why liberal societies need the right to kill
Two dreadful votes happened in the House of Commons in Britain last week. The Bills a majority of MPs voted in favour of must now go to the House of Lords. If that hurdle is cleared, the first Bill will mean that women in England and Wales will be able to abort their babies at any point in a pregnancy, long after viability and right up to birth in theory, without facing criminal charges.
The second Bill will pave the way for assisted suicide if a person is deemed to be within six months of death. Defenders of the Bill think it is full of safeguards. Critics say assisted suicide is wrong in itself, that the safeguards are not really that safe, and also that over time the grounds for assisted suicide will expand as has happened in other jurisdictions such as Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Thus, in the space of a few short days, British politicians have voted to make it easier to kill the unborn, the old and the infirm. At the same time, these measures are dressed up in the clothes of ‘compassion’ and ‘choice’, as ‘advances’ and as ‘progress’.
Ireland, both North and South, has already gone quite a bit down this same path. Northern Ireland now has a liberal abortion law imposed upon it when the Conservative Party was in power in Westminster and the Northern Ireland Assembly was still suspended because of fighting when Sinn Fein and the DUP.
The law in the North already allows women to abort their baby at any point up to birth without facing criminal sanctions.
South
In the South, we have had a liberal abortion law since early 2019. The Government likes to pretend the law is not liberal because it ‘only’ allows abortion for any reason up to 12 weeks, but 90% of abortions have taken place by this point anyway. After 12 weeks, an abortion can still take place if the baby is found to have a so-called ‘fatal foetal abnormality’, or there is a deemed threat to the life or health of the mother.
Oh, and this wasn’t really noticed at the time, but the law in the South also allows a woman to abort her baby right up to birth.
Doctors and others are still penalised if they help a woman to have an abortion outside the various legal limits, but not the woman herself. Therefore, she could obtain abortions pills, take them, and abort her baby quite late into her pregnancy without facing legal consequences.
At a certain point, aborting a baby becomes very like infanticide. Late-term abortions are very rare, but they do happen and some of them are self-administered by the woman.
In Britain there was quite a bit of critical commentary last week after the House of Commons voted to decriminalise abortion up to birth in the case of the woman, but here there was little comment when the same things happened. I think it is because everyone was distracted by the rest of the new law going through Leinster House after the abortion referendum of 2018.
Harris
Simon Harris was, of course, the Minister directly responsible for this, because he was Health Minister at the time, and aggressively defended his Bill against all-comers. This was a man who professed to be firmly pro-life when he was first elected back in 2011.
Currently, no bill that would permit assisted suicide is before the Dail. It is unlikely that the current Government will propose such a bill, but one of the opposition parties, or an individual TD might. In the last Dail, there was a Private Member’s Bill that was working its way through its various stages but ran out of time, so it is possible another might be proposed in this Dail. The assisted suicide Bill that the House of Commons has just voted in favour of is a Private Member’s Bill.
But why do liberal societies pass such laws in the first place? Why are liberal societies so strongly associated with laws that allow their citizens to kill unborn babies, and to do the same to the dying, and in some countries the very ill, but not dying, with the assistance of doctors, if the person in question authorises this? (Critics say very sick people can easily be put under pressure, and therefore are not really making a choice).
The reason is that we have managed to convince ourselves that such laws are needed for our happiness. Liberal societies are built on notion that we all have the right to pursue happiness in our own way, so long as we don’t do harm to someone else.
If having a baby would cause sufficient unhappiness, then we must permit abortion as the ‘solution’ to this problem. The unborn child, especially in the first weeks of pregnancy is simply not considered a ‘someone’ who is being harmed by the abortion. They have been reduced to a nothing in the eyes of law.
In the case of assisted suicide, a serious illness can obviously seriously reduce your happiness and quality of life. This is far from always the case, because people are adaptable. But liberal societies take the view that if a given person believes they are so ill (physically or mentally) that life is no longer worth living, and their condition is irreversible, then that person must be given the right to end their life with a physician’s help.
Expand
And so we see that liberal societies need to expand the right to kill and the ‘right to die’ in order to achieve their aim of giving individuals a maximum chance at happiness and maximum choice. But what a price. How extreme do your values have to become in order to justify expanding the ‘right’ to abortion constantly, and to care little about how many take place, and then to create a ‘right to die’ followed by its constant expansion as well?
A typical liberal society today see about one pregnancy in four ending in abortion, and in Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands, thousands of lives end each year through euthanasia and assisted suicide.
Clearly societies going down such a destructive path need to seriously question themselves. It should be obvious that something has gone seriously wrong when the pursuit of happiness results in so much killing.
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