What sort of strange lottery determines that one baby is celebrated while others are aborted?
Stuff co.nz 1 November 2018
Family First Comment: A superb article from Karl du Fresne – so many great statements that it’s hard to highlight the best one!
“Alison Mau proposed during a radio debate that men be required to get permission from certifying consultants before getting prostate checks, as women seeking an abortion have to do. Journalist Alison Mau gave an early example of the fatuous arguments likely to be deployed when, in a one-sided panel discussion on Radio New Zealand, she proposed that men should be required to get permission from certifying consultants before getting prostate checks, as women seeking an abortion have to do. This reduced the whole issue to a puerile game of gender tit-for-tat. It got her a cheap laugh, but the nature and purpose of the two procedures are fundamentally different. Prostate checks are about identifying and treating a potentially fatal disease. Their purpose is to save life. But pregnancy is not a disease, a foetus is not a tumour, and the consequence of an abortion is that life is extinguished, not saved. If a high-profile journalist like Mau can’t grasp that crucial difference, we’re in bigger trouble than I thought.”
Yep.
www.ChooseLife.nz
….It can make sense only if the incipient human life is considered intrinsically valueless unless its mother happens to want it. Is that what we’ve come to? In which case, in what circumstances does a life become worth saving? A similar question arose last year amid the general rejoicing at the news that Jacinda Ardern was having a baby. Many of the people who expressed delight at the prime minister’s pregnancy and the subsequent birth of Neve Te Aroha Ardern Gayford support the right of women to have an abortion, no questions asked.
But isn’t it odd that we placed such value on Neve’s life when hardly anyone batted an eyelid at the 13,285 unborn babies who were aborted last year? What sort of strange lottery determines that one baby becomes a source of national celebration while others are sucked from the womb and consigned to a hospital incinerator? A similarly strange dichotomy occurs when skilled doctors perform miracles to save fragile newborns while elsewhere in the same hospitals, other doctors are paid by the state to kill them in the womb.
More than 40 years after abortion was made pseudo-legal, we seem to be no closer to resolving this moral conundrum. It’s an issue that now confronts us again as pressure builds for the few existing controls on abortion to be removed.
The Big Lie, which you can expect to hear repeated endlessly, is that abortion is a health issue. This is now a feminist article of faith. But no amount of repeating makes it true, because pregnancy and childbirth are not illnesses or disorders, and it’s impossible to imagine anything less healthy for the unborn child than to have its life terminated. The debate will be ugly – we know that from 1977. And the anti-abortion camp will be fighting with one hand tied behind its back, because the media are overwhelmingly pro-choice.
Alison Mau proposed during a radio debate that men be required to get permission from certifying consultants before getting prostate checks, as women seeking an abortion have to do. Journalist Alison Mau gave an early example of the fatuous arguments likely to be deployed when, in a one-sided panel discussion on Radio New Zealand, she proposed that men should be required to get permission from certifying consultants before getting prostate checks, as women seeking an abortion have to do. This reduced the whole issue to a puerile game of gender tit-for-tat. It got her a cheap laugh, but the nature and purpose of the two procedures are fundamentally different. Prostate checks are about identifying and treating a potentially fatal disease. Their purpose is to save life.
But pregnancy is not a disease, a foetus is not a tumour, and the consequence of an abortion is that life is extinguished, not saved. If a high-profile journalist like Mau can’t grasp that crucial difference, we’re in bigger trouble than I thought.
READ MORE: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/opinion/108250663/what-sort-of-strange-lottery-determines-that-one-baby-is-celebrated-while-others-are-aborted
