February 14, 2015 by

The right to choose and the chosen people

Share

mom-20666_1280From the amount of money now spent on children it would be easy to assume that they are the most wanted and cherished children in Western history; and yet we are money-rich but time-poor, because with both parents in paid employment, much spending is for the sake of convenience and to compensate for their long absences at work; this fact has been recognised in government drives to ‘get mothers into work’ as the key to saving the economy.1 Even more is spent on compensating children for family break-up as a result of such pressures. Sadly, mental health surveys suggest that we have merely succeeded in replacing material poverty with emotional poverty.2

Paradoxically, material wealth, rather than making it easier to have children, tends to work the other way by setting the bar for the perfect childhood so high that many young couples could be forgiven for thinking that they would be better off spending their money on a luxurious house, a fast car, expensive hobbies and foreign travel; indeed, scare stories about the economic cost of children 3 could be seen as functioning as the perfect male contraceptive. There appears to be a trend towards one-child families – far from deploring the brutal Chinese one-child family policy, some have advocated that we follow it, 4 regardless of the effects on the ‘little emperors’. As in China, the small family system tends to acquire its own momentum as people receive less training in childrearing from the best teachers – children 5 – and fear that the number of problems will multiply with the number of children. From every viewpoint, having one child is better than having none, but a large family offers children opportunities for individual development that cannot be replicated by the school peer group.6

The Malthusian small-family system is not only more expensive,7 it provides less training for parents; it does, however, boost the income of childcare ‘experts’ whose main qualification appears to be boundless self-belief. The disastrous outcomes of their pet theories can be blamed on the parents, who are scared of applying discipline in case their children grow up to hate them; meanwhile children, deprived of boundaries and rendered irrational by continual reasoning, become ‘freedom’s orphans’, potentially providing more casualties of the Sexual Revolution.8

Campaigns against parental discipline are justified by child welfare concerns, suggesting that our society is ‘child-centred’, but the destruction of the traditional, secure childhood by undermining the authority of parents is favoured by left-wing progressives who, under Freudian influences, seem intent on planning their own lives backwards through the lives of future generations. The ‘negative influences’ they aim to avoid include traditional parents, responsible, apparently, for the ‘repression’ of the child simply by administering the discipline that is blamed for causing countless psychological traumas.9 Most people will continue to want children – instinct is stronger than progressives may think – but delayed childbearing produces its own evils, not least because having children prompts us to protect them from the adult-centred material and preoccupations that threaten to overwhelm them. We now see a widening gap between the very poor, who struggle to parent their children, and the highly educated, better-off woman who feels she cannot afford to have children until middle age, and who may increasingly feel resentful of the ‘welfare mother’ whom, she believes, she is subsidising out of her taxes. Society’s solution is not to restore respect to mothers, enabling them to fulfil their protective function, but to offer young women the option of freezing their eggs until they are (financially) ready to choose children.10

As for the children who are chosen to enter the club of the living, but are socially orphaned by parental work schedules, they are largely protected from negative outcomes by their ‘repressive’ middle-class parents; the outcomes are not usually fatal, although the same cannot be said of those less fortunately placed.11 And it is the less fortunate that suffer from progressive-influenced interference in their lives when progressive childrearing breaks down.12 As with most Utopias, the progressive’s benign vision tends to the Dystopian, or rather ‘I-topian’, with every tiny detail revolving around the progressive’s own preoccupations and grievances. Hostile to capitalism, it is supportive of Big State interference in some activities – eating, smoking, alcohol and motoring – but not to illegal drugs, obscenity and prostitution, taking a ‘pragmatic’ approach on the plea that ‘legalism’ does not work. Suspicious of ‘organised’ religion and antagonistic to competition, the progressive worldview all too easily melds with materialistic Marxism, atheistic humanism and eugenics population control, because abolishing self-control inevitably leads to the state imposing control.13

To post-Christian generations of ‘wanted’ children seeking a Christ-less Christianity, however, progressive ideas sound eminently attractive and reasonable, despite built-in contradictions like opposing the mild discipline of children while supporting the extreme and deadly violence of abortion. Admittedly, progressives believe that explicit, ‘comprehensive’ sex education will reduce the numbers of abortion, but when promiscuity produces an even bigger problem, advocates refuse to abandon the idea, and instead seek to eliminate attempts to promote chastity.14 In the history of positive-sounding ideas, Marie Stopes’s ‘every child a wanted child’ must reign pre-eminent. Coined to promote her negative campaign for birth control, it was rather more positive than the campaign’s original name, ‘The Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progess’, whose slogan was ‘more from the fit, fewer from the unfit’.15

The fact that Stopes had only one surviving child16 would seem to confirm her own ‘unfitness’; but in the matter of modern heroines, it is best to accentuate the positive, and Stopes has been lauded for her role in making contraception acceptable.17 But Stopes was an admirer of Hitler,18 who promoted contraception for similar reasons.19 Hitler and his henchman Josef Goebbels were also first-class propagandists, boldly spreading lies as truth while condemning their critics as liars.20 Stopes provided a virtuous-sounding, but ultimately untruthful rationale for preventing children from coming into the world, although abortion, which she privately favoured, is now considered indispensable for ‘taking care’ of birth control’s mistakes.21 Ironically, the poor looked down on the rich for being selfish and indeed ‘unfit’ for restricting their families and sending their children away to school; but thanks to Stopes, those who preferred to acquire numerous material possessions instead of children could console themselves by feeling superior to the ‘ignorant masses’ with their large broods of children, clearly ‘unwanted’ because unplanned.22

Thanks also to Stopes et al, Dickens’s Malthusian family the ‘Smallweeds’ would no longer be laughed at for its dreary utilitarianism, but would be seen as the epitome of respectability.23 And while Malthus’s gloomy philosophy influenced the desire to interfere with and control family size, it also justified lack of interference in economic matters, providing “an attractive rationalization for the imperfections of a laisser-faire economy”;24 under the Malthusian philosophy, the Irish Famine was blamed on the fact that there were too many poor people.25 Over a century later, the same ‘logic’ shaped responses to an AIDs-ravaged Africa, where too many births, rather than too many deaths, was seen to be the greatest threat;26 our foreign policy of exporting contraception and abortion to the developing world is justified by concerns for health and female equality, but the implication is the same.27 A century ago, Malthus’s simplistic remedy for poverty was explicated in Robert Tressell’s classic socialist parableThe Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: ‘“The greatest cause of poverty is hover-population,’ remarked Harlow. ‘Yes,’ said old Joe Philpot. ‘If a boss wants two men, 20 goes after the job: there’s too many people and not enough work.’ ‘Overpopulation!’ cried Owen, ‘when there’s thousands of acres of uncultivated land in England without a house or human being to be seen. … Four millions of people in Ireland have been exterminated by famine or got rid of by emigration, but they haven’t got rid of poverty’.”28

While Darwinian population controllers claimed that primitive peoples resorted to infanticide, thus demonstrating the need for contraception – the more ‘evolved’ way to control fertility29 – the more ‘compassionate’ view was that a child’s death was a blessing to overburdened parents. Birth control campaigners were fond of inventing stories about slum dwellers and unwanted ‘bybies’, propagating the lie that to them was a truism: ‘“Another byby? Well, I think I’ll clear out. There ain’t a bit of peace and quiet in this ‘ouse wot with one kid or another always yellin’. Wot we want ‘ere is more vittles an’ less kids.”’30

To the question, ‘Have you stopped beating your wife yet?’ even the innocent taking refuge in silence may be seen as guilty, but progressive slogans and catchwords – ‘family planning’, ‘every child unbeatable’, ‘humanist’ – demand assent, since it is difficult to disagree without implying that families should be unplanned and children should be beaten; that we should not prioritise human needs and that children should be unwanted. We cannot, however, plan children or prevent them from being unwanted; we can only prevent children – or, failing that, treat the ‘unwanted’ child in the womb like unwanted hair, unwanted weeds, unwanted pests – by elimination.31

The ‘wanted child’ idea sets so high a standard for childrearing that any less-than-ideal set of circumstances can justify abortion. And although many people are uncomfortable with the idea of abortion, the crux of the matter is ‘wantedness’; it makes all the difference between killing an unwanted child in the womb or striving to keep alive a prematurely born child of the same gestation, even although our abortion time limit, now set at 24 weeks, is being regularly challenged by reality.32 Disability is automatically equated with ‘unwantedness’, justifying abortion up to birth, although it is principally the State that does not want to underwrite the cost of caring for a disabled person.33 In the case of eugenics abortion the final decision is left to parents, but if ‘wantedness’ is to be our criterion, what about the elderly, the lonely, the depressed? What of tramps, gypsies, slum dwellers, street children, drug addicts, alcoholics, murderers? We are all ‘unwanted’ by someone, but this points to a failure of society as a whole; it should not be an excuse for killing, but although many more people would want to adopt an ‘unwanted’ baby than would want to adopt a tramp or an alcoholic, thanks to abortion, their chances of doing so are slim.34

Paradoxically for an age that kills its young in the cause of freedom, equality and health – even in the cause of improving children’s health35 – we are said to live in a ‘youth culture’; but it is more like a rose-tinted celebration of how we think young people ought to feel – enjoying all the freedoms that progressives have won for them; rebelling against tradition without feeling guilt or even responsibility. The ‘youth generation’ really began in Stopes’s era, with the ‘bright young things’ of the Roaring Twenties, but thanks to Margaret Sanger’s development of the Pill, it became a reality in the rebellious 1960s. When the rebels had children of their own, however, they had to deal with the fallout from freedom, therefore our ‘youth culture’ inflicts as many adult issues as possible on children, hoping that they will spring into adulthood fully equipped to deal with those issues; unsurprisingly, an increasing numbers of teenagers suffer instead from depression.36 Modern ‘comprehensive’ sex education, with its emphasis on ‘condoms and consent’, but promoting abortion just in case, has led not only to neurological malfunction in the young, as a ‘hook-up culture’ has become the new normal,37 but to cognitive dissonance as children are encouraged to see children as mistakes – annoying obstacles to a free sex life, to be tidied away with little inconvenience and no regret. Rather aptly, one ‘advisory’ agency for young people advertises the ‘morning after pill’ as being available at hosptial Accident and Emergency departments.38

In times when childhood mortality was high, with disease, hunger and war constant threats, young people longed to ‘grow up’; now, we seem intent on ensuring that they do not grow up emotionally or spiritually, but regress to toddlerhood, kicking against the realities of life, and avoiding its responsibilities. No wonder the teenage years are increasingly beset by insecurity and anxiety, the responsbilities of adulthood deferred, sometimes indefinitely; and as the young, increasingly deprived of meaning, become increasingly miserable, we increasingly seek vicarious rebellion against grown-up conformity in their imagined discontents.

As to the elderly, instead of the West celebrating longer life-spans, we hear warnings about the ‘ageing population’, beset by a lifeboat mentality that sees other people’s survival as jeopardising our own.39 According to this Malthusian humanist mindset, people must not be fruitful and multiply;40 the world must not be filled but emptied of other people because resources are finite. Like Malthus, who saw the poor as hangers-on at the banquet rather than producers,41 the lifeboat mentality sees the world as already overflowing; and the more hangers-on there are, the less there will be for the ‘chosen’.42

The Malthusian mindset re-emerged after the Second World War when the Labour government appointed C. P. Blacker, Eugenics Society Honorary Secretary, as the Ministry of Health’s official delegate to the 1948 Cheltenham population conference. From this gathering emerged the International Planned Parenthood Federation, founded by Blacker with Margaret Sanger;43 but dealing with ‘overpopulation’ was not the intention behind the conference, which was called in response to the most prevalent fear of the 1930s – under population.44 Crucially, in the interim, the end of Empire and the Atom bomb transformed not only foreign relations but domestic politics: the neo-Colonialism of population control would be applied not only to the newly independent African nations, but to the domestic poor once required to police the world;45 no longer would an expanding population be seen as necessary for defence purposes.46 But the younger generation, including many of the working classes, had absorbed the ‘wanted child’ orthodoxy and become ‘reprod-snobs’, associating large families with poverty and squalor;47 such attitudes, combined with the low birth rates of the 1930s, contributed to another ‘birth dip’ in the early 1950s.48

Our Malthusian world no longer puts its trust in God – no longer sees every child as a gift, but as a drain on resources, public and private – a sign not of hope but anxiety. It is assumed that any poor person who does not use contraception must produce unwanted children;49 any poor person who produces numerous children must be mentally ill, since they are going against their own self interest – in common parlance, they must be ‘crazy’.50 In Western culture children can be planned and ordered like items purchased through Amazon, and returned if imperfect or unwanted. At least, that is the idea, although for most people the reality, as with all progressive ideas, is far different.51

But it is not crazy for people – even poor people – to want children – to appreciate them for their intrinsic worth, as well as the future security they offer; rather, those who seek to fill their lives with dead material objects show irrationality, not least in believing that children can be planned. Although not everyone would articulate such views, few would dare to voice opposition to what has become received opinion; and since the vast majority of us came into being under the Stopes imperative, this is the only opinion we are likely to meet. Stopes, a “possessive and jealous mother”,52 was made to feel inferior to the family pet,53 and rather than decrying the false belief system that ranks animals above children, we have internalised it; rather than admitting the unpleasant truth that the unconditional love we advocate has been jettisoned in favour of individual choice, we make the best of a bad job, reflecting the belief that because we were ‘planned’ we were chosen.

Thus we have become the ‘chosen people’ – not chosen of God, but under our own highly irrational ‘rational’ philosophy. We are the ‘elect’, proud of being chosen in preference to other, unwanted biological specimens – not by a Darwinian Mother Nature but by parents who prioritised our welfare by restricting the number of our playmates in order to give us more material things. G. K. Chesterton noted that the English were not immune to the idea of chosenness – the Puritans had seen victory against the Spanish Armada as a sign of their “election.”54 No longer in the age of Puritanism or Victorian Imperialism, we worship no God above all things, but bow to the gods of our own appetites and preoccupations; the strongest of these, apparently, is the latest progressive god, ‘British values’. We can no longer assert our moral superiority by condemning Islamist extremists for killing the innocent, since we ourselves demand the right to do so; indeed, the right to abortion and, increasingly, euthanasia, is considered the mark of a civilised society. Instead we assert the right to sex, the corollary of the right to kill; and we must teach both in our schools via sex education, while ensuring that any who disagree will be marginalised, silenced, or exposed as intolerant – all in the name of tolerance, albeit an extremely intolerant tolerance.55 In our ‘child-centred society’, we demand the right to non-procreative sex, and our tolerance is reserved for sexual acts, not for children. And if children are put at risk as a result of unquestioning obeisance to sexual diversity – and even perversity – so be it.56

All totalitarian regimes have been ‘child-centred’, in the sense of moulding children into the kind of future citizens least troublesome to the totalitarian regime. Nazi and Communist alike had ‘values’ that they wished to transmit to the young, indoctrinating them to become the eyes and ears of the regime; turning against their parents, they terrorised them as spies and traitors, as George Orwell so memorably described in Nineteen Eighty-four.57 The student generation of the 1930s, dazzled by the Communist ideal, became mentors and gurus of the Sexual Revolution, inspiring rebellion against parental authority, creating a climate of opinion that few dared to challenge for fear of appearing out of date. Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn noted “a certain retreat by the older generation” in the West, ‘“yielding their intellectual leadership to the younger generation. It is against the natural order of things for those who are youngest, with the least experience in life, to have the greatest influence in directing the life of society. One can say…that this is what forms the spirit of the age, this current of public opinion, when people in authority, well-known professors, scientists are reluctant to enter into an argument even when they hold a different opinion. …there is a certain abdication of responsibility, which is typical here where there is complete freedom.”’(Original emphasis)58

With sexuality diverted from its reproductive course, the ‘summer of love’ turned into a winter of lust, giving birth to cruelty and death in a rage against Nature and its law of diminishing returns; the quest for endless novelty led to degradation of the gift of sexuality, underpinned by a cold-blooded ‘humanist’ utilitarianism that eventually was capable of utilising the products of conception to heat hospitals.59 Perhaps unsurprisingly in a society that treats the unwanted child as rubbish, an increasing number of aborted or newborn babies have been found discarded in the rubbish, although one made its way into the recycling process.60 In Belgium, they now utilise the organs of euthanasia victims to repair the economically viable;61 the progressive obsession with compulsory organ donation62 suggests that it would be a short step for the State to assume ownership of every citizen’s biological material, justified no doubt by applying it to a higher purpose, such as scientific research to relieve unbearable suffering; this already happens with ‘unwanted’ foetal remains, and might in future apply to the millions of ‘spare’ embryos created via reproductive technology.63

In our ‘child-centred’ culture, the commodified baby obtained through reproductive technology represents the (genetically) perfect exemplar of the wanted child, carefully constructed with the best biological material rather than generated haphazardly in a thoughtless act and allegedly unwanted. And yet, as one ‘product’ of the fertility industry maintained: “I have come to detest questions such as ‘Where are you from?’ ‘What nationality are you?’ or ‘Why are you an only child?’. … Finding out that I am the ‘wanted child’ of a sperm donor doesn’t make these questions any easier to answer, and I often find myself asking more questions after the fact. Where do I come from?”64 Another ‘wanted child’ commented: “One of the most upsetting things for me about the way I was brought into the world is the blatant double standard involved. My mother’s need to have a genetic link to her child was valued, while my need to know, love and understand the father with whom I have a genetic link was not.”65 It is now clear that the law governing the much-heralded ‘3-parent baby’ technique, to be introduced as a solution to parents at risk of begetting seriously disabled children, will dismiss the child’s ‘right to know’ his or her mitochondrial ‘donor’ – the status awarded to the anonymous mother of the newly-fertilised egg used in the process.66

Far from being a ‘youth culture’, our growing obsession with copying youthful fashions and with cosmetic surgery suggests that we fear growing old like a race of strulbrugs, the immortals in Gulliver’s Travels.67 We fear new life as a reminder that we are at risk of being chronologically supplanted, but we fear death even more; the disabled and the dying, the momento mori, must be tidied away lest they remind us of our own mortality. Paradoxically for youth-obsessed progressives, euthanasia has become another obsession, offering the prospect of controlling the dying process even though in practice it may mean handing someone else the right to kill. Heedless of such dangers, they will be ready to sacrifice the sick, elderly and disabled to the indifference or greed of their nearest and dearest; the weakest will be sacrificed to the god of the ‘good death’.68

Our reluctance to have more children as the answer to the ‘ageing population’ has meant that the planned birth has led inevitably to the planned death.69 The ‘right to choose society’ has led to the ‘chosen society’. But the child chosen like a commodity may see its parent as a product with built-in obsolescence, as one doctor predicted in 1936: “Our children, not being savages, would lead us to the Lethal Chamber – ‘This way, mother! You can’t see very well, so take my hand. I am taking you for a long walk.’ ‘Thank you, my dear. It’s a long time since you took me for a walk.”’70 Like the right to plan a child, the bogus concept of the ‘right to die’ is exposed whenever anyone chooses to live and to be cared for.71 But the fiction of ‘choice’ will be maintained by relentless propaganda until society is so used to the idea of fearing the ‘unplanned death’ that no one can remember things being any different.

However, most likely, the ‘right to die’ will not be chosen by the wealthy, who will opt to live forever, seeking ways to ‘cryopreserve’ themselves, or to transfer their brains to computers; or perhaps seek young bodies into which their ‘minds’ can be transplanted, while operating a strict programme of population control by curbing the births and promoting the deaths of the ‘unwanted’ poor – the ‘useless eaters’and the ‘unfit’.72

Believing the lie that we have the right to choose to have children has made us feel chosen; but only at the cost of suppressing the logical conclusion that we are not the products of unconditional love. And if we cannot bring ourselves to relinquish the right – really, the power – to choose, we must rationalise our choices as based on humanitarian concern for the child. Therefore we justify killing the unborn by saying that we want to spare them the suffering of being unwanted. The truth is that the unplanned pregnancy can become the wanted child, a ‘problem’ the abortion pioneers knew they had to overcome.73 Abortion supporters still oppose ‘waiting periods’ and the proper counselling of pregnant women,74 thus exploiting the ‘window of opportunity’ in early pregnancy when hormones are disrupted, emotions torn, and cold logic (often coming from those who should be supporting the mother and her child) tells her that she can choose not to be pregnant.75

To facilitate the denial of motherhood, we must deny that the unborn child is a child; but now that 4-dimensional scans have exposed the old fiction about ‘clumps of cells’ and ‘blobs of jelly’, we have legally redefined the unborn child as something with no inherent status – as an “organism”; significantly, this legal redefinition was the outcome of avoiding a compensation claim on behalf of a seven-year-old child with disabilities resulting from Foetal Alcohol Syndrome acquired as a result of her mother drinking heavily in pregnancy. The case illustrates the cold logic of ‘chosenness’, since the child’s problems could have been avoided if the mother had chosen abortion; but it would have been better for both mother and child if the mother had chosen to give up alcohol, and society had chosen to help her. In order to avoid jeopardising the ‘right to choose’, however, we are forced to assert that, legally, the unborn child does not matter.76 But in so doing we cannot avoid the conclusion that we do not matter, unless someone gives meaning to our lives by wanting us. Perhaps those prominent bioethicists who spend their time trying to find get-out clauses from the Ten Commandments77 might more profitably ponder how we have succeeded, in our quest for the wanted child, in abolishing the intrinsic meaning of all children.

In future, if the ‘right to choose’ really produces a ‘chosen people’, the choosing will be done by governing elites influenced by eugenics population control, aided by unethical capitalism; and they will be produced in anonymously generated batches, their characteristics determined by the sphere of life to which they are consigned. Can we learn again to want the child we have, rather than having the child we want? Or will we sacrifice even more categories of human beings, in addition to our unwanted children, while sacrificing ourselves to the children we do want in a vain attempt to please them, fearing that they may otherwise sacrifice us when we too become unwanted?

Religions of human sacrifice have never been noted for their egalitarian nature; it was always the poorest, weakest and most expendable that were deemed suitable offerings to placate the gods.78 Christ was born into the true Chosen People – a culture that was taught to abhor such practices; it is secular humanism that wishes to take us back to less civilised times by ‘taking us forward’ to a world of unimaginable benefits accruing from the sacrifice of the innocent, while preserving the lives of convicted murderers and terrorists. No wonder the eugenics population control movement, the cognate society of secular humanism, would have us return to pre-Christian ways. A religion that worships a baby – a baby sent as a gift, rather than designed and constructed by scientists, and chosen by consumers – might set a dangerous new trend.

Notes

  1. David Cameron’s official spokesman claimed: “Stay-at-home mothers would help to revive Britain’s economy by returning to work after having a baby”, and it was “‘good for the economy’ that the Coalition was helping parents to pay high nursery fees so that they could overcome ‘obstacles’ to work”; child care minister Liz Truss said that countries like Germany “had boosted their economies by increasing the number of women who returned to work after having children. ‘It is obviously true that having a higher maternal employment rate does help a country’s GDP”’; however, Laura Perrins of Mothers at Home Matter commented: “‘I don’t know what type of government dedicates itself to separating mums from their young children”’ (Daily Telegraph, April 25, 2013, p. 1); as benefits cuts and the “squeeze on family incomes” forced more mothers to look for paid work, 34,000 fewer women were “classed as ‘looking after a family or home’”; at just over 2 million, it was “the lowest since current records began in the early 1990s. Parenting website Netmums claimed seven in 10 working mothers would prefer to stay at home when children are young but are forced to work to ‘make ends meet’” (‘One million over-65s still going to work: Mothers “forced to work’,” Daily Telegraph, June 13, 2013). ↩
  2. Anglican priest Lynda Rose, citing Office for National Statistics figures showing that 42% of marriages were ending in divorce, that nearly half of births were occurring outside marriage, and that non-married partners were four times likelier to break up, more than half of children would “never know the reassurance of a stable home life with their birth mother and father”; with “an extended, complex, and shifting family structure”, the “majority of children” did not “have a stable home environment”, resulting in “an unprecedented rise in mental health problems”; the Department of Health stated in A Handboook on child and adolescent mental health (1995) that “severe mental illness was rare in young people”, but Lifetime Impacts: Childhood and Adolescent Mental Health, Understanding The Lifetime Impacts (Mental Health Foundation (2005)) suggested “that in any given year 20% of children under the age of 16 have a diagnosable mental health problem – mainly relating to conduct and emotional disorders” (‘The dangers posed to Family in the UK through stealth progression of the liberal sexual agenda’,Presentation at the UN, December 5, 2014, accessed at http://vfjuk.org.uk/uncategorized/the-dangers-posed-to-family-in-the-uk-through-stealth-progression-of-the-liberal-sexual-agend/ at December 20, 2014); see: L. Rose, Robert S. Harris (Eds.), Stolen Childhood: Contemporary Issues of Family Breakdown (Oxford: Voice for Justice UK, 2014). ↩
  3. See Note 5. ↩
  4. From 2004 to 2013, one-child households increased from 42% to 47%, according to the Office for National Statistics, which predicted that “half of families will soon consist of one child only” (Mary Kenny, Catholic Herald, January 9, 2015, p. 25). At a workshop that he helped organise, Stuart Basten asked whether the time had come “to challenge this assumption of a global ‘two child’ future” by following China’s one-child “ideals” (S. Basten, ‘Norms and preferences: The global development of one child norms, with a focus on China and India,’ Abstract, Contemporary childbearing and evolutionary theory, two-day workshop, St John’s College, Oxford, March 31-April 1, 2011 (The Galton Institute Newsletter, Summer 2011, p. 11). ↩
  5. Sociologist Vanessa Fong of Amherst College, Massachusetts found from a longitudinal study of Chinese ‘singletons’ beginning in 1998 that “some were happy having all of their parents’ love and felt that they wouldn’t want a sibling. Others felt that all the responsibility for looking after their parents and fulfilling their expectations had limited their lives.  They had to live close to their parents rather than travelling, and choose a well-paid respected job, rather than following what they might have otherwise been interested in.  All their parents’ money, focus and expectation was on them all of the time”; other studies from Monash University and the University of Melbourne found that Chinese only children “exhibited a wide range of social behaviors not typically found in children with siblings”; children born under the one-child policy children were generally “less trusting, less trustworthy, more risk-averse, less competitive, more pessimistic, and less conscientious individuals”; Professor Lisa Cameron stated: “‘We found that greater exposure to other children in childhood — for example, frequent interactions with cousins and/or attending childcare — was not a substitute for having siblings.”’ Those born in the 1970s and 1980s “were usually still surrounded by large extended families, while those born later and further into the policy typically have parents who were single children themselves. With fewer cousins, aunts and uncles to interact with, children were growing up in even smaller families than before”; additionally, the cost of children increased thanks to higher education fees and higher levels of spending on ‘singletons’ (Shannon Roberts, ‘The social cost of no siblings: China’s “little emperors’”, LifeSiteNews, December 4, 2013, accessed at http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/the-social-cost-of-no-siblings-chinas-little-emperors?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=42d86acb21-LifeSiteNews_com_Intl_Headlines_06_19_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0caba610ac-42d86acb21-397386287 at December 5, 2013). ↩
  6. A Ohio State University study of around 57,000 adults between 1972 and 2012 found lower divorce rates among children from large families; co-author Doug Downey told the American Sociological Association that there was a ‘“meaningful gap in the probability of divorce”’ compared with only children: “With every additional sibling, up to seven siblings, a child’s risk for being divorced as an adult is reduced by two percent.  More siblings than that didn’t provide additional protection, although they did not hurt, either”; Downey added: ‘“Growing up in a family with siblings, you develop a set of skills for negotiating both negative and positive interactions…. ‘You have to consider other people’s points of view (and) learn how to talk through problems. The more siblings you have, the more opportunities you have to practice those skills”’; however, it was possible that small families were ‘“more likely to have a single parent, or have some other issue that may hurt children in their future marriage relationship”’ (Johanna Dasteel, ‘Growing up in big families reduces divorce rate, study finds’, LifeSiteNews, August 13, 2013, accessed at https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/growing-up-in-big-families-reduces-divorce-rate-study-finds at January 16, 2015). ↩
  7. One commentator disputed claims that it cost nearly a $25,000 to raise a child to age 18, noting key overlooked factors, not least that the more children couples have, the cheaper each one is to raise; consequently, “as Americans have fewer children, of course their costs per child is increasing”; such studies also emphasized the highest spending levels rather than the average (Dustin Siggins, LifeSiteNews, August 19, 2014, accessed athttp://www.lifesitenews.com/pulse/does-it-really-take-a-almost-quarter-of-a-million-dollars-to-raise-kids-to?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=0408692f5a-LifeSiteNews_com_Intl_Headlines_06_19_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0caba610ac-0408692f5a-397386287 at August 20, 2014). ↩
  8. Per child-psychologist Arig Sigman (quoted in R. Peal, Progressively Worse: The burden of bad ideas in British schools. London: Civitas, 2014), p. 241). Childrearing advice now constitutes “a multi-billion pound industry”, but “‘supernanny’ figures with big ideas about how best to raise children” have included Sir Frederick Truby King, who advocated the (arguably man-centred) approach of making babies comply with a set routine, with scheduled feeding and strictly limited cuddling sessions; Benjamin Spock, who advocated following the maternal instinct; Penelope Leach, whose “child-centred” parenting was criticised for turning mothers into the servants of their babies; Gina Ford, whose “bestselling guide” advocated “a strict regime for both parent and child” (Alex Campbell, ‘Six childcare gurus who have changed parenting’, BBC News, May 4, 2013, accessed at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22397457 at December 29, 2014); the psychologist Dr Shefali Tsabary advocates the ‘mindful parent’ (Sarah Chalmers, ‘Don’t tell the children you’re in charge – let them raise you instead’, Daily Telegraph, January 3, 2015, p. 30). Interwar, paediatrician Luther Emmett Holt’s mechanical childrearing regime avoided ‘pandering’ to crying babies by picking them up, ignoring them in order to ‘train them out’ of the ‘bad habit’; children under 6 months were not to be played with, but kept scrupulously free of ‘dangerous’, disease-spreading dirt; he also recommended regular enemas to instil bowel habits; Holt promoted “a growing isolation of child from parent. The baby is treated as an object. This attitude is almsot a premonition of the behaviorist approach to psychology, where the animal is considered no more than a source of directionless activity until reinforcement is given or denied and its behavior shaped” (Daniel Beekman, The Mechanical Baby: A Popular History of the Theory and Practice of Child Raising (London: Dennis Dobson, 1977), pp. 116-117). All modern childcare gurus frown on corporal punishment, preferring psychology, ‘positive parenting’ and ‘child-centred learning’. ↩
  9. In the UK, where it is illegal to smack a child if it leaves a mark on the body, the Children Are Uunbeatable Alliance directs to an NSPCC webpage offering advice on “how to positively discipline your baby, toddler, school-age child or teenager” without using “harsh punishments like smacking and excessive shouting” (NSPCC, ‘Positive parenting: Better behaviour can be encouraged through positive parenting methods’, accessed at http://www.nspcc.org.uk/help-and-advice/for-parents-and-carers/parenting-advice/better-behaviour/better-behaviour_wda90753.html at June 27, 2013). Supporters of the Children Are Unbeatable Alliance include British Humanist Association President Polly Toynbee, a Guardian columnist, also well-known pacifist Gerry Adams, Northern Irish politician (http://www.childrenareunbeatable.org.uk/pages/supporters.php#aims, accessed at June 26, 2013); both support abortion: “Sinn Féin has said it would be a serious breach of party rules for any elected member to vote against the party position on the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill”; despite its title, the Bill was intended to legalize abortion (‘Gerry Adams in warning to Sinn Féin TDs over abortion law vote,’ RTE News, June 15, 2013, accessed at http://www.rte.ie/news/2013/0614/456555-abortion-legislation/ at June 26, 2013). ↩
  10. The Apple and Facebook companies now pay women to freeze their eggs for future use; see: ‘definitely. someday. Just not now. Eggsurance is the source for everything egg freezing and the community for proactive women who want to ensure they have the option of having children – just not now’, Eggsurance: Everything Egg Freezing, accessed at http://www.eggsurance.com/ at February 2, 2015. ↩
  11. Marriage, as well as social class and income, benefits children’s development, behaviour and educational attainments, according to a UK Government longitudinal study beginning in 1997 of English children aged between three and 16 (Influences on students’ development at age 16, Department of Education, September 9, 2014, accessed at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/influences-on-students-development-at-age-16 at December 28, 2014). ↩
  12. In a supreme irony, one woman deemed to be not a suitable mother because she was brought up in care, was deprived of her child who was then placed in care (Christopher Booker, Sunday Telegraph, April 8, 2012, p. 31). ↩
  13. NHS chief Simon Steven announced that GPs would be “asked to identify patients who are putting on weight under a new national programme to help fight obesity”; doctors would be “asked to identify anyone who has gained weight and is at risk of diabetes”, particularly under-40s (Telegraph, December 25, 2014, accessed at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/11295265/Doctors-told-to-report-patients-who-put-on-weight.html at December 30, 2014). The Department of Health managed to combine three progressive-friendly issues when it announced that, subject to Parliamentary approval, from October 2015 any adult in England found smoking in private vehicles containing children would face a £50 fine (Telegraph, December 17, 2014, accessed at (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/11299568/Smoking-banned-in-cars-when-children-are-present.html at December 17, 2014). For the ‘pragmatic’ approach on drugs and prostitution, see: ‘A humanist discussion of… DRUGS’, British Humanist Association, accessed at http://www.humanismforschools.org.uk/pdfs/Drugs%20%28final%29.pdf and ‘Paying the Price: Consultation on Prostitution: Response from the British Humanist Association’, accessed at http://humanism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/BHA-Response-to-consultation-on-prostitution.pdf at March 15, 2013. Regarding pornography: “Pupils should learn about pornography in sex education classes because lessons are too focused on the ‘mechanics’ of reproduction, Ofsted has said” (‘Ofsted calls for porn lessons,’ Daily Telegraph, May 2, 2013, p. 14); the National Association of Head Teachers “recommended that five-year-olds ‘be taught about the dangers of the internet’” (Daily Telegraph, May 20, 2013); Antonia Tully, of SPUC’s Safe at School campaign, noted that the “influential” Sex Education Forum had published an online magazine “showing teachers how to introduce children and teenagers to pornography”, but it was “not about teaching children and teenagers about how to avoid pornography, but normalising it”; this new campaign called for “so-called sex education ‘experts’ to teach children”, but Prime Minister David Cameron had pointed out that since “most internet access among children takes place at home”, parents were “literally best placed to protect their children from pornography”; Mr Cameron rejected the campaign’s demands for new guidelines, insisting that teachers could “talk about porn within the existing guidelines” (John Smeaton, General Secretary, SPUC, via email, September 7, 2013). ↩
  14. Organisations supporting the Sex Education Forum’s 2001 campaign against ‘abstinence education’ for children included the Brook Advisory Centres, the Family Planning Association, the Terrence Higgins Trust, RELATE, the National Children’s Bureau, the Methodist Church, Barnardo’s, the NSPPC and the Children’s Society; the SEF has campaigned for sex education for all children, including ‘same-sex’ education (E. S. Williams, Lessons in Depravity: Sex education and the sexual revolution (London: Belmont House Publishing, 2003), p. 224). Some primary school pupils have been exposed to explicit sex education delivered via science lessons from which parents cannot withdraw them, against Department of Education advice and against scientific evidence from studies like that of M. Wiggins, C. Bonell et al, ‘Health outcomes of youth development programme in England, prospective matched comparison study’ British Medical Journal 2009; 339:b2534, a “landmark study” which “showed that delivering intensive sex education to young teenagers resulted in 3.5 times as many girls getting pregnant than in the control group” (John Smeaton, General Secretary, SPUC, June 27, 2013, via email). Governments have favoured organisations like the Brook Advisory Centres, the FPA and the Sex Education Forum above pro-family, pro-chastity, pro-life charities; see: Nick Seddon, Who Cares? How state funding and political activism change charity (London: Civitas, 2007), p. 65). ↩
  15. 1939 the National Birth Control Association became the Family Planning Association; both were housed at the Eugenics Society’s London headquarters; see: A. Farmer, Prophets & Priests: The Hidden Face of the Birth Control Movement (London: St Austin Press, 2002). ↩
  16. “Marie’s great hope for the future, for the Race, now lay with her small son, Harry… Marie disapproved of families with only one child and both she and her husband Humphrey would have liked to have more. But the injuries she had suffered after Harry’s birth, and her age, made the risk of having other children too great”; she decided to adopt a brother for her son, taking a series of small boys whom she treated badly and returned as unsuitable (June Rose, Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), pp. 191-193). ↩
  17. In October 2008 the Royal Mail featured suffragette Millicent Garrett Fawcett in a set of stamps to mark women’s achievements; Stopes was included as the founder of the first British birth control clinic, but the Malthusian League opened the first birth control clinic in Walworth, South London, in 1921; Stopes opened her first clinic in Holloway, North London eight months later. The decision sparked controversy because of her anti-Semitism and espousal of eugenics (MailOnline, September 12, 2008, accessed at
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1054749/Royal-Mail-honours-family-planning-pioneer-Marie-Stopes–sparks-outrage-eugenics-links.html at December 17, 2014). A much noticed Wellcome Institute ‘exhibition of sexology’ (Rowan Pelling, ‘Sex please. We’re British’, Daily Telegraph, November 17, 2014) avoided mentioning that Havelock Ellis, Marie Stopes, Magnus Hirschfeld and Alfred Kinsey were deeply troubled personalities who tried to normalise their own sexual habits by turning sex into a science; all developed a compensatory superiority complex that manifested itself in advocating eugenics and population control; all were concerned with preventing the primary purpose of sex – to produce children – by encouraging birth control, non-procreative sex acts, homosexuality, or paedophilia. ↩
  18. Stopes, who sent “a loving letter and book of her poems to Adolf Hitler”, was branded a ‘“Nazi sympathiser”’ by Chaplain to the Stock Exchange Peter Mullen, Rector of St Michael’s in the City of London, but the Royal Mail, defended its decision to honour her with a special stamp, saying that “a group of female academics and historians had compiled the names to be included on the stamps”. Stopes enclosed a note with Love Songs For Young Lovers: ‘“Dear Herr Hitler, Love is the greatest thing in the world: so will you accept from me these that you may allow the young people of your nation to have them?”’ Stopes attended “a Nazi congress on population science in Berlin in 1935”, and called for “compulsory sterilisation of the diseased, drunkards, or simply those of bad character”; furthermore, “even when she publicly attacked the Nazis, it was for unusual reasons. Hitler’s encouragement of a large birth rate was too indiscriminate, she felt, and she was worried war would eliminate the cream of the male population.” Stopes “left the bulk of her estate to the Eugenics Society”, but in 1999, “although she tried to stop him marrying because his bride had poor eyesight”, she was “defended by her son”, Dr Harry Stopes-Roe: “Eugenics was uncontroversial in its time, he argued, adding that his mother sent Hitler her book only because she believed she could single-handedly stop the war. ‘It is a perversion to suggest she admired him,’ said Dr Stopes-Roe. ‘She was anti-Nazi. Sending the poems was an example of her megalomania’” (MailOnline, September 12, 2008, accessed at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1054749/Royal-Mail-honours-family-planning-pioneer-Marie-Stopes–sparks-outrage-eugenics-links.html at December 17, 2014). ↩
  19. Hitler promoted contraception and abortion in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, while promoting more births among Aryan women. At the Nuremberg trials in 1948, 14 Nazis were indicted for “encouraging and compelling abortions” for women whose children were not considered “racially valuable”, a policy still supported by white supremacists. Nuremberg Associate Counsel Harold Neely said that even if all Nazi abortions were assumed to be “voluntary” they still constituted a “crime”; indeed: “The threat of forced abortion and sterilization was a fact of life for female members of disfavored groups living under Nazi occupation” (‘Forced abortion should be remembered as a Nazi crime: Holocaust panel’, LifeSiteNews, December 10, 2014, accessed at https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/forced-abortion-should-be-remembered-as-a-nazi-crime-holocaust-panel?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=cde00fe568-LifeSiteNews_com_Intl_Headlines_06_19_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0caba610ac-cde00fe568-397386287 at December 10, 2014). Under Nazi laws passed in 1933, severe penalties were imposed on abortions performed outside the law, but it was allowed for the “life or health” of the mother, and ‘eugenics’ cases were referred to the hereditary health courts created by the new sterilization law. In 1938, a Jewish woman attempting to procure an abortion was acquitted: “Since the National Socialist revolution, Paragraph 218 was really a provision for protecting the progeny of the ‘aryan’ German race, and could not therefore be applied to protect the progeny of a race which was opposed to the German people. The German people was defending itself against the Jewish race, and laws passed for the German people could not be used for the protection of Jews” (‘A case in Luneburg: Notes on effectiveness of abortion legislation in Germany and Sweden’ (Ministry of Health papers, Inter-Departmental Committee on Abortion (Birkett Enquiry), MH71-29 AC Paper 193); Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power 1933-1939 (London: Allen Lane, 2005), p. 515. ↩
  20. Hitler’s Propaganda Minister Paul Josef Goebbels (1897-1945) is credited with maintaining: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State” (Speech to Party activists, January 9, 1928); this view, attributed to Goebbels, who was noted for his violent anti-Semitism, reflected his view of the ‘British lie’: “The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous” (‘Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik’ (‘Churchill’s Lie Factory’), January 12, 1941, Die Zeit ohne Beispiel (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1941), pp. 364-369). The ‘British lie’ was, however, a reflection of the Nazi lie: William L. Shirer, an American journalist based in Nazi Germany, wrote during a visit to London: “I bought the morning Berlin newspapers. Amazing! Goebbels at his best, or worst! Hitler’s own newspaper, the Völkische Beobachter, on my lap here. Its screaming banner-line across page one: GERMAN-AUSTRIA SAVED FROM CHAOS. And an incredible story out of Goebbels’s evil but fertile brain describing violent Red disorders in the main streets of Vienna yesterday, fighting, shooting, pillaging. It is a complete lie. But how will the German people know it’s a lie? … But interesting to note Hitler’s technique. … Any lie will do” (Diary entry, March 12, 1938, W. L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941 (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1941/2002), pp. 103-104; “tonight Goebbels went on the air and blasted away at Churchill, accusing him of having sunk the Athenia. He called Churchill a liar a dozen times and kept shouting: ‘Your impudent lies, Herr Churchill! Your infernal lies!’ From Goebbels!” (Diary entry, October 22, 1939, Ibid, p. 238); “New title for Churchill in the Nazi press these days: Lügenlord – ‘lying lord’” (Diary entry, December 13, 1939, Ibid, p. 259). Hitler fulminated against the ‘Big Jewish Lie’: “The foremost connoisseurs of this truth regarding the possibilities in the use of falsehood and slander have always been the Jews; for after all, their whole existence is based on one single great lie, to wit, that they are a religious community while actually they are a race – and what a race! One of the greatest minds of humanity has nailed them forever as such in an eternally correct phrase of fundamental truth: he called them ‘the great masters of the lie’” (Mein Kampf (London: Pimlico, 1925-26/2001), p. 211); “To what an extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion” (Ibid, p. 279); “The Jew is is the great master in lying, and lies and deception are his weapons in struggle” (Ibid, p. 319). ↩
  21. In certain cases Stopes (not a medical doctor) advised “evacuation of the uterus” (L. Hall, ‘Marie Stopes and her correspondents: Personalising population decline in an era of demographic change’, in R. A. Peel (Ed.), Marie Stopes, Eugenics and the English Birth Control Movement:Proceedings of a Conference organised by the Galton Institute (London: The Galton Institute, 1997), p. 41). It has been suggested that Margaret Sanger also referred women for abortion: “Given the risks involved it is surprising that evidence of even one case was available and it suggests there may have been a system of referrals. There would, for example, be very little risk in referring regular patients who had suffered contraceptive failure” (Colin Francome,Abortion Freedom: A Worldwide Movement (London: Geo. Allen & Unwin, 1984), p. 62). ↩
  22. Left-wing demographer Enid Charles, a mother of four but not opposed to contraception per se, warned of “a significant, and from the present standpoint, highly dangerous current in the diffusion of contraceptive knowledge”: this “propaganda” had been “associated with the acceptance of a new norm for the size of the family. Among the prosperous classes the family of two is almost universally regarded as a sufficient ideal”, while the “woman with four or more children is a subject for comment, condolence, if not opprobrium”; a “growing social pressure” was being “brought to bear” on “the classes” that did not “conform to this standard”; however, if this small-family system was widely adopted, many women would have one child or no children at all; population studies shed “a formidable light” on the attitude of “many birth-control propagandists” regarding ideal family size, because ““in order to maintain an average family of more than three there must be an appreciable proportion of families of four or five children”; the “pressure of public opinion among the urban Protestant population of English-speaking countries” was “being exerted to depress fertility below the necessary level” (E. Charles, The Twilight of Parenthood: A Biological Study of the Decline of Population Growth (London: Watts and Company, 1934), pp. 195-196 (republished in 1936 as The Menace of Underpopulation: A Biological Study of the Decline of Population Growth (London: Watts and Company)). Charles posited that the professional classes’ guilt at having small families lay at the root of the ‘differential fertility’ debate. However, while right-wing eugenicists equated money with worth and interpreted wealth as evidence of genetic fitness, left-wing eugenicists also made value judgements on ‘lesser mortals’, and Charles believed that “nothing could be more desirable than the growth of a eugenic conscience”; however, she added that such “fears” were “more often a rationalization which reinforces a disinclination to reproduce than a socially adequate reason for refraining from doing so” (Ibid, p. 198); she also noted that although the poor and non-white had high birth rates they also high death rates, while the eugenics population controller worried only that deaths did not outstrip births (Ibid, p. 92; p. 109). ↩
  23. See: Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Ware, Herts.: Wordworth Editions, 1852-53/1993). ↩
  24. E. Charles, The Twilight of Parenthood: A Biological Study of the Decline of Population Growth (London: Watts and Company, 1934), p. 1. ↩
  25. Dr Halliday Sutherland saidthat when Malthusians cited the Irish famines “as proof of over-population”, it revealed “the falsity of their argument”; in 1727 the population was about two millions, and the birth rate “about 50 per thousand”; the people were “in abject misery”, and Jonathan Swift, “master of satire, proposed, as a remedy for the over-population of Ireland, that the English people should cultivate a taste for roasted Irish babies, and thus bring delicacies to England and prosperity to Ireland”; in 1838 Ireland’s population “was about eight millions”, which economist John Ramsay McCulloch claimed was “more than double” what the country “‘with its existing means of production’ could support in comfort. A blacker economic lie was never told. It was neither the imprudence nor the high birth-rate of the Irish people that made them choose the potato as their staple food, but the certain knowledge that if they produced anything else, it would be taken from them to pay the rack-rents of absentee landlords”; in fact Ireland was exporting foodstuffs even during the famine (Quoted by Henry George, Progress and Poverty, An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy (1879), p. 95, H. Sutherland, Laws of Life (London: Sheed & Ward, 1936), pp. 181-182). ↩
  26. See: S. W. Mosher, Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits (New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction Publishers, 2009). ↩
  27. International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell acknowledged that “of course, the fastest way to alleviate poverty is to get people jobs” (A. Mitchell, ‘Foreign aid is an investment in our future,’ Daily Telegraph, June 24, 2013, p. 18), but has made population control central to Britain’s overseas aid budget: “Britain’s international development policies are not about soft-hearted altruism. They are a clear and hard-headed approach to our own security and prosperity. But they are also morally right”; consequently, as well as pursuing a worldwide vaccination programme, in 2012 the government directed “a similar effort…towards achieving the same impact with family planning”; this British-led “effort…targeting family planning…should mean that over the next eight years we reduce, by half, the number of poor women in the world today who want access to family planning but cannot get it. It is hard to think of a result that will have a greater effect on the position of women around the world” (A. Mitchell, ‘A Safer and more Prosperous World: Why Aid Really Matters in an Age of Austerity’ (London: Legatum Institute, 2013, accessed at http://www.li.com/docs/default-source/publications/2013-publications-the-future-of-international-development-and-the-uks-aid-programme-andrew-mitchell-li.pdf at July 27, 2013); earlier, it was announced: “The UK supports the Programme of Action from the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) which agreed that population and development are inextricably linked, and that empowering women, advancing gender equality, eliminating violence against women and ensuring women’s ability to control their own fertility were essential elements of development policies. We continue to seek appropriate opportunities to advance the ICPD agenda” (Hansard, June 16, 2011, Col. 954, accessed at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm110616/text/110616w0003.htm#11061650000005 at July 27, 2013). ↩
  28. R. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanphropists (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1914/1955), pp.24-25. ↩
  29. Population control advocate Norman Himes stated: “There can be no doubt but that infanticide has contributed to group survival in a certain state of cultural evolution. This is not to say that we need it now. We do not, for we have a reliable substitute” (N. Himes, Medical History of Contraception (New York: Gamut Press Inc., 1936/1963), pp. 51-52). ↩
  30. Bessie Drysdale believed in compulsory birth control for the poor, while writing heart-wrenching stories about poor unwanted ‘bybies’ in their Neo-Malthusian magazine (Bessie I. Drysdale, ‘He, She and It’, New Generation, January 1922); married to C. V. Drysdale, she “shared his abiding hatred of collectivism and socialism” (R. Soloway, Birth Control and the Population Question in England 1877-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), p. 192). ↩
  31. Population activist Paul Ehrlich claimed that as with rats, human aggression was the result of overcrowding (P. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Buccaneer Books, 1971), p. 153), noting that in 1968 the US Government’s family planning budget was the same as for rat control (Ibid, p. 85). ↩
  32. The mother of baby Bella Davison, born at 23 weeks weighing 1lb, called for the abortion limit of 24 weeks to be “‘significantly lowered”’; doctors “are advised not to resuscitate babies born before this time” (MailOnLine, January 8, 2015, accessed at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2901720/Baby-born-just-ONE-week-legal-abortion-limit-weighing-just-1lb-finally-goes-home-six-months-hospital.html?utm_source=Christian+Concern+List&utm_campaign=c781bc5524-WN-2015-01-10&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9e164371ca-c781bc5524-127155297 at January 10, 2015). ↩
  33. With successive administrations investing heavily in a search-and-destroy approach to disabled foetuses, the “government’s view of a society where disabled people can realise their aspirations and fulfil their potential” (‘Fulfilling Potential: improving the lives of disabled people’, Office for Disability Issues and Department for Work and Pensions, December 1, 2011, update September 4, 2014, accessed at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/fulfilling-potential-working-together-to-improve-the-lives-of-disabled-people at January 17, 2015) did not include protecting their right to life. ↩
  34. After abortion was legalized, adoption was increasingly depicted as “anti-child, anti-woman, and anti-black, redistributing children from the poor to the middle class” (P. Morgan, Adoption and the Care of children: the British and American Experience (London: IEA Health & Welfare Unit, 1998), pp. 7-8). Statistics for England and Wales for 2011, which did not include adoptions by same-sex couples and single persons, showed that out of a total of 4,734, only 77 babies were adopted, compared to 5,172 in 1974 when records began; while numbers of adoptions continue to rise, Office for National Statistics figures show that increasingly adoption involves step-children adopted within new relationships rather than childless married couples adopting newborn babies; illegitimacy was once a major source of adopted children, a problem that campaigners claimed would be addressed by legalising abortion, but in 1976 “around 50% of babies adopted were born outside marriage – now the figure is 82%”, mainly because in 2011 47% of all babies born in England and Wales were to unmarried parents; consequently “there are fewer babies born to married parents; and they are less likely to be put up for adoption” (Simon Rogers, The Guardian, August 7, 2012, accessed at http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/aug/07/child-adoption-england-wales at January 1, 2015). ↩
  35. Dr Peter Saunders of Care Not Killing, commenting on a Guardian article on mortality statistics for England and Wales (accessed at http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/oct/28/mortality-statistics-causes-death-england-wales-2010), noted that the total of 224 babies described as dying before, during or after birth from all causes did “not include 189,574 human deaths in 2010 from abortion”; he pointed out: “Abortion has for some years now been the leading cause of human death in Britain”; including the number of abortions in 2010 brought the total to 682,816, because “189,574 out of 682,816 deaths, or 27.76% were due to abortion”; the fact that such deaths were excluded from official statistics showed “how far we have fallen since abortion was effectively legalised in Britain 45 years ago this week on 27 October 1967” (‘27% of all human deaths in England and Wales are due to abortion’, Peter Saunders, blog, October 22, 2012, accessed at http://pjsaunders.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/27-of-all-human-deaths-in-england-and.html at October 17, 2014). ↩
  36. The 2001 Census found 40% of 15-year-olds were not living with both parents, but 97% of couples living with their 15-year-olds were married (Harry Benson, The Myth of long-term stable relationships outside marriage, p. 2, 2013, The Marriage Foundation, Cambridge, accessed at http://www.marriagefoundation.org.uk/Shared/Uploads/Products/92318_May%202013%20-%20Myth%20of%20long%20term%20stable%20relationships%20outside%20marriage.pdf at July 4, 2013). According to a Mental Health Foundation report (‘The Lonely Society’, Mental Health Foundation, http://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/content/assets/PDF/publications/the_lonely_society_report.pdf), although “generally associated with older people”, loneliness “affects young people more than any other age group”, specifically 18-24 year olds (Radhika Sanghani, ‘Generation Lonely: Britain’s young people have never been less connected’, Telegraph, December 28, 2014, accessed at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11312075/Generation-Lonely-Britains-young-people-have-never-been-less-connected.html at December 28, 2014). However, rather than address the problem of family break-up, the focus has been on dealing with the negative outcomes among young people, defined as mental health issues: at “a time when emotional and behaviour problems among younger children are increasing because of higher divorce rates, financial pressures at home and the growing influence of social media”, a CentreForum Mental Health Commission survey of English head teachers found 54% “complained that local mental health services were ineffective in supporting the needs of pupils” (Sunday Express, December 28, 2014, accessed at http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/549008/Schools-are-let-down-over-children-s-mental-health-survey-shows at December 28, 2014). ↩
  37. J. S. McIlhaney, F. McKissic Bush, Hooked: New science on how casual sex is affecting our children (Chicago: Northfield Publishing, 2008), p. 88. ↩
  38. See: ‘Ask Brook’, available at https://www.brook.org.uk/our-services/category/ask-brook at December 20, 2014. Far from campaigning against the ‘sexualisation’ of young people, the Brook Centres take the opposite approach: “Why is sex taboo? Why do we allow young people to be stereotyped as promiscuous and irresponsible yet at the same time deprive them of the vital information they need to make safe and healthy choices? If you’d prefer to live in a world which is more open and honest about sex and relationships, celebrates sexuality and embraces individuality then join the Sex: Positive campaign. Brook’s young volunteers have created Sex: Positive to take a stand and challenge society’s negative attitudes about sex” (‘Sex: positive. Challenging society’s negative attitudes about sex’, accessed at http://www.brook.org.uk/our-work/sexpositive-challenging-societys-negative-attitudes-about-sex at December 20 2014). For the physical and psychological consequences of premature sexual activity in young people, revealed by neurological science, see: J. S. McIlhaney, F. McKissic Bush, Hooked: New science on how casual sex is affecting our children (Chicago: Northfield Publishing, 2008). ↩
  39. Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968) portrayed the Earth as a sinking ship whose passengers refuse to take action (‘How to Save the Ship,’ in G. Hardin (Ed.), Population, Evolution and Birth Control: A Collage of Controversial Ideas (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Co., 1969), p. 366). ↩
  40. Genesis 1: 27-28. ↩
  41. Malthus believed that if “society” did not “want his labour”, the poor man had “no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is” (T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798); An Essay on the Principle of Population; or, a View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness; with an enquiry into our Prospects respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils which it occasions (1803)). ↩
  42. Population control advocates warned: “1975 will be a crucial year in the world, crucial because the world food shortage will then dominate the headlines and the results will be in full view”; they recommended a “triage” approach, with Haiti, Egypt and India designated as “Can’t be saved”, the Gambia and Libya as “Walking Wounded”, while Tunisia and Pakistan “Should Receive Food” (W. Paddock, P. Paddock, Famine – 1975! (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1967, in G. Hardin (Ed.), Population, Evolution and Birth Control: A Collage of Controversial Ideas (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Co., 1969), pp. 123-126). ↩
  43. B. Suitters, Be Brave and Angry: Chronicles of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (London: IPPF, 1973), p. 32. ↩
  44. The Royal Commission of inquiry into population, announced in 1943, offered an excellent opportunity for eugenicists to influence public policy on population issues; it began work in 1944 with six members of a Eugenics Society offshoot, the Population Investigation Committee, including C. P. Blacker, Alexander Carr-Saunders, David Glass, H. D. Henderson and E. Holland, and eugenics sympathiser R. R. Kuczyinski; Lord Simon sat on the Committee. Evidence was taken from the Abortion Law Reform Association, and like the Birkett inquiry into illegal abortion in 1937 it was heavily influenced by eugenics assumptions, eugenics sources and eugenicists. Glass, who also gave evidence to the Birkett inquiry, during the War worked for the Rockefeller Foundation, a generous funder of population control (C. Langford, ‘The Eugenics Society and the Development of Demography in Britain: The International Population Union, the British Population Society and the Population Investigation Committee’, in R. Peel (Ed.), Essays in the History of Eugenics: Proceedings of a Conference organised by the Galton Institute, London 1997 (London: Galton Institute, 1998), p. 103). ↩
  45. In the wake of post-War African independence, Elspeth Huxley remarked: “Populations are increasing at a rate which cannot but terrify; their poverty is great and growing, means of employment lacking, they are bottled up inside their countries and yet are told they have inherited the earth. The situation is revolutionary” (‘Disengagement in Africa,’ F. S. Meyer (Ed.), The African Nettle: Dilemmas of an Emerging Continent (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1965/1970), p. 101); wife of Gervas Huxley, grandson of ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ T. H. Huxley, Elspeth supported the euthanasia campaign (B. Schreiber, tr. H. R. Martindale, The Men Behind Hitler: A German warning to the world (Stuttgart, 1972), pp. 134-135); her obituary in the Independent failed to note the irony of her being appointed a CBE “for her services to Africa and her highly regarded career as an author”, and the link between her preoccupations: “She espoused eclectic causes such as opposition to the erosion of the countryside and support for euthanasia” (January 13, 1997). ↩
  46. Post-War, Bishop E. W. Barnes advocated ‘voluntary’ euthanasia, compulsory sterilisation, infanticide of the child “horribly defective or deformed” and “painless extinction” for murderers because war could no longer be relied upon to ‘deal’ with overpopulation; atomic weapons might “empty an overcrowded world” but would bring “grave suffering” (‘Science, Religion and Moral Judgements’, Nature, September 16, 1950). ↩
  47. Eugenicist researchers Eliot Slater and Moya Woodside found that family limitation was no longer seen as selfish but sensible, a resistance the authors saw as a positive development (E. Slater, M. Woodside, Patterns of Marriage: A Study of Marriage Relationships in the Urban Working Classes (London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1951), pp. 188-190); however, contraception was seen as a “two-edged sword” that made life more complicated, since childbearing became a conscious decision; large families were commonly associated with poverty and drudgery, and even among those with a sentimental attachment to the idea, none planned a large family; some looked down on the older generation for their perceived laxity and irresponsibility, but there was a marked difference between the sexes, with women more open to the idea of children while men showed more concern for finances (Ibid, pp. 180-183). ↩
  48. Influenced by Commonwealth immigration, UK births rose in the late 1950s, then slumped again; in 1951, crude live birth rates for women aged 15-44 were 73.0 per 1,000; for 1961, 90.1; for 1966, 91.1; for 1968, 88.4; for 1969, 85.9; for 1970, 84.4 (‘Population’, Social Trends, CSO, 1971). ↩
  49. The concept of “unmet need” for contraception has been rejected by experts, including Harvard economist Lant Pritchett, World Bank economist Berk Ozler, University of California San Francisco epidemiologist Dominic Montagu, and Georgetown University international economic development professor Shareen Joshi; however, UN researchers came up with “a creative solution to the problem of squaring ‘unmet need’ with ‘demand’ – redefining demand”; thus estimations of ‘unmet need’ have included women with religious or other objections to contraception (Rebecca Oas, C-Fam, March 14, 2013, accessed at http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/un-statistics-create-a-vast-unmet-need-for-contraception?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=42fe36df8a-LifeSiteNews_com_Intl_Headlines_03_07_2013&utm_medium=email at March 14, 2013). This reinforces the belief that women need contraception even if they do not want it; according to Uju, African-born and trained founder of Culture of Life Africa, Melinda Gates and other advocates gave “the impression that contraceptive drugs and devices” were “the most needed and most scarce products in Africa”, even coining the expression ‘unmet need’; in reality, there was “a constant flow of contraceptives in Africa”, indeed, “the cheapest products” in African pharmacies were “contraceptive drugs and devices” – it was “even cheaper for a woman to get contraceptives for herself than for her to buy life-saving antibiotics for her child” because contraceptives were “heavily subsidised by the big international aid organisations and pharmaceutical companies”; having worked in a major hospital in her country Uju had seen “first-hand” the negative effects of “wide-scale government or donor-sponsored contraception programs in Africa”, and saw “something wicked in dumping Group-1 carcinogens in a part of the world where cancer is still a death-sentence”; there was “something inconsiderate and even imperialistic in forcing the western worldview on Africans”. IPPF’s website admitted providing “15.9 million contraceptive services in subsaharan Africa in 2011”, and “40.9 million condoms”; USAID’s budget for “Family Planning & Reproductive Services” in 2012 totalled $524 million – “more than their budgets for tuberculosis, public health threats, pandemic influenza, vulnerable children, and nutrition combined”; billions of dollars were “still being raised and channelled to provide more implants, injectables, pills and patches” while classrooms were “crumbling and our children are malnourished” (Uju, Founder & President, Culture of Life Africa, ‘Contraceptives in Africa,’ August 6, 2013, accessed at http://www.cultureoflifeafrica.com/2013/08/colafrica-response-to-hate-mail.html?m=0 at August 22, 2013). ↩
  50. Eugenicist population controllers regarded as mentally unfit those poor women who persisted in having babies against their economic interests; conversely, those who sought abortions were seen as demonstrating rationality; see: A. Farmer, By Their Fruits: Eugenics, Population Control, and the Abortion Campaign (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008). Dorothy Thurtle, abortion campaigner and Eugenics Society member, and also a member of the Birkett Enquiry into illegal abortion, dismissed proposals for six-room houses in every area as a deterrent to abortion, claiming that her own local authority was “one of the most overcrowded…in London” but found it impossible to let three-bedroom flats despite long waiting lists and “very low rents”, since large families “seemed to prefer to remain in an overcrowded state” (Institute of Midwives, evidence to Birkett Enquiry, May 4, 1938, Ministry of Health papers, Inter-Departmental Committee on Abortion (MH71-26 AC Paper 134)); slightly higher rents would have meant less money to spend on food. ↩
  51. National President of Women Exploited by Abortion Lori Nerad recalled: a“Two weeks after the abortion, I went into labor. I staggered into the bathroom. And there, with my husband beside me, I delivered a part of my baby the doctor had missed. It was the head of my baby… I’ll wake up in the middle of the night, thinking I hear a baby crying. And I still have nightmares in which I am forced to watch my baby being ripped apart in front of me. I simply miss my baby. I constantly wake up wanting to nurse my child, wanting to hold my child. And that’s something the doctor never told me I would experience” (Nancy Flanders, ‘8 unbelievably heart-rending quotes from women who aborted their babies’, LifeSiteNews, December 2, 2014, accessed at https://www.lifesitenews.com/pulse/8-brutal-heart-rending-quotes-from-women-who-aborted-their-babies?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=6fda0b57fa-LifeSiteNews_com_Intl_Headlines_06_19_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0caba610ac-6fda0b57fa-397386287
    at December 4, 2014). ↩
  52. June Rose, Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), p. 199. ↩
  53. Although she had one younger sister, “Marie was a solitary child and found the atmosphere of the home with its clutter of books, boxes of stone and heavy Victorian furniture somewhat oppressive”; with a “dour” mother brought up in the Free Church of Scotland, an “extreme Protestant sect”, Marie’s father “brought a much needed playfulness into the home with his passion for animals”, training Fluff, “the family cat and the girls’ ‘brother’ to sit in his own high chair and eat from his own dinner plate at mealtimes… Years later Marie remembered bitterly that one Sunday when the joint of beef was carved, her mother said: ‘That’s too rare for Fluff, give it to Marie!”’ (Dr Harry Stopes-Roe, interview with author, March 1990, June Rose, Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), pp. 6-7). Marie refused to attend her son’s wedding because his bride, Mary Wallis, daughter of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the ‘bouncing bomb’, because she was short-sighted, which Marie regarded as a sign of physical unfitness (Ibid, pp. 233-236). ↩
  54. G. K. Chesterton, A Short History of England (1917), G. K. Chesterton Collected Works Vol. XX (San Francisco, Ca.: Ignatius Press, 2001), p. 536. ↩
  55. The ‘British values’ programme was initiated to combat Islamist indoctrination in schools, but a Jewish newspaper reported “growing concerns about a possible backlash against faith schools”, because since July, “three of the country’s 12 state-aided Jewish schools and academies” had received “no-notice visits” from school inspectors, resulting in the “downgrading of one of them…from an outstanding school to one that ‘requires improvement’”; subsequently, Education Secretary Nicky Morgan “proposed forcing schools to teach more than one faith for GCSE religious studies”, and the National Association of Orthodox Jewish Schools “accused the inspection service of bullying pupils with insensitive and anti-religious questions”; according to NAJOS: “Girls in a strictly Orthodox secondary school were asked by inspectors if they knew about gay marriages, had boyfriends or used social media… Even nine-year olds in a primary school were reportedly asked if they knew any gay people and how babies were made” (Simon Rocker, ‘Faith schools’ battle over British values’, Jewish Chronicle, October 23, 2014, accessed at http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/analysis/124579/faith-schools-battle-over-british-values at December 10, 2014). Christian schools were also targeted: ‘Ofsted marked Catholic school “unfairly” over British values’ (Daily Telegraph, December 15, 2014, p. 6). A “successful Christian school” was “warned” it would be “downgraded by inspectors and could even face closure after failing to invite a leader from another religion, such as an imam, to lead assemblies”; the “small independent school in the Home Counties” was told it was “in breach of new rules intended to promote ‘British values’ such as individual liberty and tolerance in the wake of the Trojan Horse scandal” (Telegraph, October 19, 2014, accessed at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/11173102/Christian-school-downgraded-for-failing-to-invite-an-imam-to-lead-assembly.html at December 1, 2014). The British Government has consulted ‘diversity’ campaigners on their demands, and Stonewall outlined its own programme of teaching ‘diversity’ to children: “Under-fives should have materials in their preschools ‘celebrating’ homosexuality and teaching them about ‘gay marriage,’ the new head of Britain’s powerful homosexualist lobby has said. ‘I think the next step is about going into preschools. I know from all my godchildren that the quality of children’s books depicting difference is dire. We need to encourage under-fives to think about different families. Loads of kids these days have two mums or two dads – or at least gay uncles and aunts’”; in an interview in the Independent, Ruth Hunt said Stonewall was “ready to commission ‘a suite of books that celebrates difference in all its forms”’ (‘UK activist: “under-fives” should be taught to “celebrate” homosexuality’, LifeSiteNews, August 4, 2014, accessed at http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/uk-activist-under-fives?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=5da14fdee8-LifeSiteNews_com_Intl_Headlines_06_19_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0caba610ac-5da14fdee8-397386287 at August 5, 2014). ↩
  56. A mother revealed how her 13 year old son was sexually abused by four men he ‘met’ online: ‘“We became aware that there was a problem with our son…he was very unhappy towards the end of 2010… He’d come out as being gay on Facebook in the summer of 2010 and the months following that he was very very unhappy, very unsettled. We put it down to the fact that he was struggling with his sexuality. We knew that something had changed dramatically in our son and the school wasn’t picking up on it” (‘Mother tells how her 13-year-old son was groomed online and sexually abused without her ever suspecting anything was wrong’, MailOnline, November 30, 2014, accessed at
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2854911/Mother-tells-13-year-old-son-groomed-online-sexually-abused-without-suspecting-wrong.html
    at November 30, 2014). ↩
  57. G. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin, 1984). ↩
  58. A. Solzhenitsyn, interview, Panorama, BBC1 TV, March 1, 1976, quoted in M. Whitehouse, Whatever Happened to Sex? (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978), p. 227. ↩
  59. Professor Mike Richards, chief inspector of hospitals, was said to be ‘“disappointed”’ by the revelation in Channel 4’s Dispatches that the remains of aborted and miscarried foetuses had been used to heat some hospitals (Daily Telegraph, March 24, 2014). ↩
  60. The increasing prevalence of chemical abortion has meant that more women are delivering dead babies ‘at home’, but in Roseville, Michigan, the body of a newborn baby boy “estimated to be one to three days old” was found by workers at a recycling plant; they were “sorting different forms of recyclable materials when at about 11 p.m. a bundle came down the sorting line. When workers opened the bundle, they found the body of the newborn child” (Steven Ertelt, ‘Mother Arrested After Workers at Recycling Plant Find Body of Dead Newborn Baby’, LifeSiteNews, January 27, 2015, accessed at http://www.lifenews.com/2015/01/27/mother-arrested-after-workers-at-recycling-plant-find-body-of-dead-newborn-baby/ at January 28, 2015). ↩
  61. The danger of the ‘right to die’ becoming the duty to die was illustrated by a 61-year-old Dutch woman Dicky Ringeling, a MS sufferer who was euthanised, whose “decision to donate her organs” received “media attention and praise”; one Dutch newspaper ran the headline: ‘“Woman dies while saving five lives.”’ Ms. Ringeling “did not want to ‘suffer unbearably’ and soon started to discuss euthanasia with her husband and two daughters”; although she had signed an organ donor card, “most euthanasias in the Netherlands take place at the patient’s home”, with two doctors “to record the death, examine the corpse and verify that the procedure was carried out in accordance with the law”; however, her “daughters helped her to overcome all these administrative and medical difficulties” and she was “euthanized in a hospital setting”, enabling her body to be “released to the operating team in less than five minutes after death”; she “spent three weeks in the hospice, saying ‘goodbye’ to her family and friends, even joking with the medical staff. “Let’s keep it joyful… At least my death will be useful” (LifeSiteNews, October 21, 2014, accessed at https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/media-praise-woman-for-asking-doctors-to-kill-her-donating-organs?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=3f0707d3e0-LifeSiteNews_com_Intl_Headlines_06_19_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0caba610ac-3f0707d3e0-397386287 at October 22, 2014). ↩
  62. Wales has introduced a compulsory ‘donation’ scheme, but practical problems remain: “Two fathers died after they were given an alcoholic rough sleeper’s kidneys – which had been rejected as ‘unfit’ by six other hospitals”; they were later found to be ‘“riddled with deadly parasitic worms’” (Metro, November 18, 2014, accessed at http://metro.co.uk/2014/11/18/transplant-dads-die-after-getting-alcoholic-donors-kidneys-4953757/ at November 25, 2014). Communist China has long embraced compulsory organ removal, a practice highlighted by pledging, not for the first time, to desist (‘China to stop harvesting executed prisoners’ organs’, BBC News, December 4, 2014, accessed at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-30324440 at January 7, 2015). ↩
  63. “Conservative estimates suggest there are 100,000 to 200,000 frozen embryos in Britain”, most intended for future IVF cycles; however: “Researchers believe tens of thousands may be languishing on ice simply because parents don’t know what to do with them”; following a change in the law, parents are allowed a longer storage period, but there are “three options when it comes to leftover embryos: donate them to research; donate to an infertile couple; or allow them to perish” (Anna Saunders, ‘IVF: the hidden story of Britain’s ‘snowbabies’, Telegraph, August 23, 2010, accessed at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/7948027/IVF-the-hidden-story-of-Britains-snowbabies.html
    at January 7, 2015). ↩
  64. Alana Newman, child of an anonymous sperm donor, created the Anonymous Us Project “as a ‘safety zone for real and honest insights regarding third-party reproduction (sperm and egg donation and surrogacy)’”, a “repository of stories from parents, donors, surrogates and children” conceived through Artificial Reproductive Technology: “The pain and sadness felt by the children of anonymous donors is palpable. Here is a small sampling: ‘Thank you so much for giving me this life, anonymous father. … And the system that allows this to happen anonymously, thank you so much! I have never felt more screwed over and depleted of my rights”’ (Rebecca Taylor, “‘Shut Up, and Be Grateful for Your Life”:We Need to Listen to Children Conceived Through Third-Party Reproduction’, National Catholic Register, December 20, 2014, accessed at http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/shut-up-and-be-grateful-for-your-life/ at December 21, 2014). ↩
  65. As a child, Jo Rose, 36, discovered her father was a sperm donor; she had not found him, and was battling to “have her rights recognised, and find her identity” (‘“I could have 300 siblings”’, The Guardian, November 14, 2008, accessed at http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/nov/14/family-genetics at December 21 2014. ↩
  66. Under the proposed law, Britain would be the first country in the world to allow the creation of babies with two mothers and a father, but the Government said that the identity of the second mother would remain secret, since her genetic contribution would be tiny; in contrast, laws governing children born from donated eggs and sperm can discover the donor’s identity at age 18. While advocates claim the law will help women at risk of passing on mitochondrial disease, critics argue that the process constitutes genetic engineering; Philippa Taylor of Christian Medical Fellowship commented: ‘“A child must have the right to identify and know who his or her three genetic parents are, if they choose. This is already granted to children who are adopted because we understand how important it is for children to know about their genetic heritage for their sense of identity and self-understanding. It should not be denied to these children’” (MailOnLine, December 17, 2014, accessed at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2877667/UK-proposes-rules-embryos-3-people.html at December 17, 2014). ↩
  67. The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons said there had been a 17% in cosmetic procedures since 2012, the vast majority carried out on women (Glenda Cooper, ‘We ought to be grown up about ageing’, Sunday Telegraph, January 11, 2015, p. 27). ↩
  68. During the House of Lords debate on Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill, Baroness Warnock, a trenchant supporter of abortion for disability, asked: ‘“My Lords, why is it thought wrong for someone to ask to die out of a sense of duty or a wish not to continue in a condition that is intolerable – the condition of being disruptive, indeed often destructive, to the well-being of their own family?”’ (Hansard, Col. 1908, November 7, 2014); Lord Carlile of Berriew responded: ‘“People with much less strength of character than the noble Baroness, who is known for her views and her enormous strength of character, are at risk of those feelings being adopted, condoned and co-opted by their family. Those of us who have practised law for many years have come across such cases. Indeed, there will be people who have observed it in the lives of friends and family. It is our view that a sense of obligation – ‘It would be better for my children if I were carried away’ – is not a sufficient basis for allowing an individual to do what is anticipated by the Bill, which is deliberately to end the life of another person” (Ibid). See note 54 above regarding the Belgian woman with MS who chose to be euthanised, using the opportunity to donate her organs. Pregnant women have been influenced in the decision to have an abortion by the suggestion of donating the foetus for scientific research described as having the potential to save lives: see: A. Farmer, ‘Abortion: Woman’s Right or Body Parts Industry?’ (Catholic Medical Quarterly Volume 64(1) February 2014, accessed at http://www.cmq.org.uk/CMQ/2014/Feb/abortion_body_parts.html). ↩
  69. In the 1960s it was posited that as with the planned birth, “humane and advanced societies are ripe for a similar and in many ways equivalent swing-away from the ideal of longevity to the concept of a planned death” (M. R. Barrington, ‘Apologia for Suicide’, in A. B. Downing (Ed.), Euthanasia and the Right to Death (London: Peter Owen, 1969/1977), p. 156). ↩
  70. H. Sutherland, Laws of Life (London: Sheed & Ward, 1936), pp. 269-270. ↩
  71. In 2004 Leslie Burke, suffering from terminal brain disease, won the right to be fed and hydrated by tube at such time as he became unable to communicate; the judgment was overturned on appeal by the General Medical Council and Government papers leaked to the press indicated that cost was a significant factor in the appeal (Daily Mail, July 28, 2005). Burke’s case was rejected by the European Court (Catholic Herald, August 18, 2006). In response to concerns that the Mental Capacity bill only allowed people to choose not to be treated, the Government failed to address such issues, stating that it had appealed the Burke judgment because it could be interpreted “as giving patients the right to demand any life prolonging treatment they wish, no matter how untested, inappropriate or expensive, and regardless of their doctors’ views as to whether it might benefit them or not. There is even a possible risk that the judgment could allow requests for life-ending treatment” (Letter, DCA Mental Capacity Legislation Division to author, March 21, 2005). In fact Burke brought his case as a result of ‘Bland’; the DCA claimed that “people should be able to request artificial nutrition and hydration”, but failed to explain how a patient with mental incapacity would make such a request (Ibid); Tony Bland made no ‘living will’, but had he formally requested treatment in the event of incapacity his request would have had no legal force. ↩
  72. Zoltan Istvan, founder of the Transhumanist Party, wrote The Transhumanist Wager (2013), a science fiction novel “about Christian terrorists who are killing non-religious transhumanists”, and told the Huffington Post that if elected US President, he would “call for ‘regulations that restrict religious indoctrination of children until they reach, let’s say, 16 years of age’”. Lecturer in Christian ethics Agneta Sutton commented that transhumanists had “high hopes” but also “great fears of dying and of being replaced by others”; they were “very much centred on themselves, on their own legevity, youth and health. Theirs is a quest for more and more in this world. Lacking in belief in a Heavenly Father, while hoping either to preserve or to transcend their earthly bodies, they cannot fathom a world transcending this physical one” (Agneta Sutton, ‘The man whose dream is to live for 10,000 years’, Catholic Times, January 9, 2015, p. 14). ↩
  73. A member of the Eugenics Society and Vice-President of the Abortion Law Reform Association in 1969-70, psychiatrist Eliot Slater favoured preventing the births of the ‘unfit’, and explored the role of heredity in mental health: Patterns of Marriage was co-authored with Moya Woodside, Eugenics Society and ALRA member, who helped re-shape the view of backstreet abortionists as kindly and selfless (M. Woodside, ‘Attitudes of Women Abortionists’, 11th Howard Journal 93, 1963, pp. 93-112). Their marriage study found that pregnancy was more acceptable if the couple was planning to marry, and that children were accepted as part of marriage (E. Slater, M. Woodside, Patterns of Marriage: A Study of Marriage Relationships in the Urban Working Classes (London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1951), pp. 271-274); they believed that parenthood should be “a conscious choice” (Ibid, p. 177), but although many children were unplanned – defined by the authors as unwanted at birth – they “nearly always came in the end to be gladly accepted” (Ibid, p. 275); the vast majority having “their full share of affection” and not regretted (Ibid, pp. 180-183). ↩
  74. Labour MP Diane Abbott commented: “I urge Minister of Health Jeremy Hunt to drop the government’s anti-choice abortion counselling plans, whilst there’s still time. He must listen to the public” (accessed at https://twitter.com/HackneyAbbott/status/242952554277924864 at December 22, 2014). ↩
  75. “If you think you may be pregnant, it is important to find out as soon as possible”; “It is important, once you are confident of your decision to get an abortion, to act quickly. … A high proportion of all pregnancies are unplanned. It is common to feel stunned, scared, embarrassed or isolated when facing an unplanned pregnancy. Deciding whether or not to continue with the pregnancy can be very straightforward and obvious for many women; others can find it a difficult and complicated decision. If you are struggling with the decision, confidential help, counselling and information about your options is available from health professionals including your GP, family planning clinics or Brook Centres for under 25 year olds. Only you can make the decision as to whether or not to continue with the pregnancy”; “…Abortion Rights is campaigning to improve the quality of care for women facing an unplanned pregnancy. If you have faced unfair barriers to services or have been given biased and directive information we would like to hear from you, anonymously if you prefer.” Despite Abortion Rights’ own emphasis on obtaining abortion rather than keeping the baby, the website stated: “Please note, ‘LIFE’ and ‘Crisis’ centres are opposed to abortion, and so the information they offer may not be unbiased” (‘Pregnant and considering abortion?’ Abortion Rights, accessed at http://www.abortionrights.org.uk/index.php/pregnant at December 22, 2014). The UK’s biggest abortion provider, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, also warned that pregnancy counselling centres were not neutral, made false claims about the effects of abortion, discussed the status of the foetus, and offered help rather than abortion (Daily Telegraph, February, 11, 2014). However, such counselling centres do not charge, do not profit out of abortion, and women can change their minds. In the context of health provision targets, Conservative MP Fiona Bruce asked what steps were being taken to ensure that women seeking abortion counselling were “not subject to pressure to agree to the procedure” as a result of the Department of Health’s requirement that abortions be performed within ten days of the first appointment; the DoH responded that Required Standard Operating Procedures “clearly set out that women can choose to delay appointments or booked procedures and this should always override issues of timeliness” (Hansard, June 13, 2014). Responding to BPAS’s warning about increased “protests” outside abortion clinics, and that “protesters sometimes try and carry out ‘counselling’ on people attending clinics”, Labour’s Yvette Cooper “urged the Government to consult with health providers and the police on ‘buffer zones’ or ‘bubble zones’, which bar demonstrators from getting within a certain distance or barracking women” (Telegraph, December 8, 2014, accessed at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11280830/Abortion-clinics-should-get-buffer-zones-says-Yvette-Cooper.html at December 8, 2014). But one anti-abortion commentator noted: “Abortion provision is a highly profitable industry that relies heavily on taxpayer money and wants to grow its business. Even their pre-abortion ‘counselling’ sessions of just 30 minutes cost between £65-£80. It is surely clear who has the most to gain from women choosing to have abortions, who has the vested financial interest, whose existence depends on demand, and who wants to actually increase the total number of women having abortions. BPAS and MSI are going to carry on doing abortions on behalf of the NHS. But they need to stick to just that and not…provision of counselling and advice for women prior to decision-making. And they ought to be more open about their conflict of interests (Original emphasis) (Philippa Taylor, ‘Abortion is big business. Six-figure salaries abound and nearly 200,000 terminations a year are not enough’, Conservative Woman, November 4, 2014, accessed athttp://conservativewoman.co.uk/philippa-taylor-abortion-big-business/ at November 7, 2014). One post-abortive woman recalled: “Prior to an abortion, you are given a scan to assess how advanced the pregnancy is. I asked the sonographer if I could look at my baby on the screen, but she told me that as I was planning to abort, it was best not to. If I had looked, I feel certain I would have ended up keeping my baby. I already loved this child; I’m sure that being a mum and knowing how all-consuming a mother’s love is intensified those feelings. I was referred for pre-abortion counselling at a local clinic near my home in Eastbourne, where I explained my ambivalent relationship with the baby’s father; even though we had split up, I’d told him about the pregnancy. One minute he thought I should have a termination, the next he said he’d be happy to have the baby every weekend. I just couldn’t countenance bringing a baby into the world knowing he or she would be shifted from pillar to post throughout their childhood, and with parents who could not get on. So I allowed the clinic to make me an appointment, turned up at the allotted time and, under a general anaesthetic, ended the life growing inside me. Before I left the clinic hours later, I had to sign my medical notes. Attached to them, face down, was a picture taken during that eight-week scan. Seeing my baby for the first time, it finally became real to me that a life had been brutally stopped. As a mother, I had committed the most unimaginable betrayal. I hated myself so much at that moment, I could barely breathe” (MailOnLine, September 17, 2014, accessed at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2759970/Last-week-BEL-MOONEY-wrote-abortion-no-big-deal-The-response-overwhelming-Abortion-moving-conflicting-stories.html at September 18, 2014). Abortion clinics claim to offer ‘abortion care and advice’, but a Telegraph investigation revealed that some were rubber-stamping abortion requests with pre-signed consent forms, for women who had not seen a doctor; a poll showed that even more females than males disapproved of women obtaining an abortion in such circumstances, despite abortion providers’ claims that tightening up procedures will harm women (‘Women oppose abortion changes,’ Daily Telegraph, March 8, 2014). ↩
  76. The Court of Appeal ruled against legal compensation for a girl born disabled because of her mother’s “grossly excessive” drinking, because she was an “organism” in the womb. In the case of “CP” v Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority, Lord Justices Dyson and Treacey and Lady Justice King at the Royal Courts of Justice ruled that “CP”, who was “very small for her age” and suffered “numerous medical complications”, was “not a legal person in the womb. Pro-life MP Fiona Bruce commented: ‘The pro-abortion movement did their best to prejudice this judgment. Their false spin labelled this case as being about criminalising drinking during pregnancy”’, when it was ‘“a civil case about whether a child should be offered compensation after excessive drinking during pregnancy rendered her disabled for life”’; the law was ‘“hopelessly unclear on the status of the unborn child, and this judgment makes it even more incoherent. The only loser in this case is the child who has been denied compensation to help with her care costs”’ (Catholic Herald, accessed at http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2014/12/04/appeal-court-rules-that-an-unborn-child-is-not-a-person/ at December 22, 2014). ↩
  77. “Thousands of medical ethicists and bioethicists…professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on its way to becoming the justifiable until it is finally established as the unexceptionable” (Richard J. Neuhaus, ‘The Return of Eugenics’, Commentary Magazine, April 1, 1988, accessed at
    http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-return-of-eugenics/ at December 17, 2014). In 1961, Sir Julian Huxley, scientist and eugenicist, edited The Humanist Frame (London: Geo. Allen & Unwin Ltd), arguing for a new religion of directed evolution, with scientists as the new philosopher kings, providing the authority needed to usher in their programme of new eugenics; they would be supported by a new school of bioethics, shaped by prominent figures including John Harris, Mary Warnock, Peter Singer, Helga Kuhse and Clifford Grobstein, whose ‘pragmatic’ approach to reproductive technology, abortion, infanticide and euthanasia shows a consistently negative view of disability as something to be prevented or eradicated; as Patricia Spallone notes, contributors to The Humanist Frame included “élite scientists”, among whom Huxley, C. H. Waddington and Hermann Muller were the most influential; Huxley proposed “‘evolutionary humanism’” to replace orthodox religion; Waddington believed that man’s “ethical duty was no longer just to control his store of genes, but to invent the type of evolution” he wanted; scientists had “the knowledge to help in the formulation of a ‘supra-ethics’”, with a new caste of authority figures – scientists – “or else nobody would believe what they were told.” Muller discussed “remoulding organisms in the name of ‘progress”’, and both he and Waddington “placed their authoritative stamps of approval on reproductive engineering”, which they “called…a moral imperative, a scientific humanism.” In short: “The modern Humanist ethic, whose agenda was set by renowned scientists, created a philosophy which demands the special status of the scientist as ethicist and as engineer of women’s reproduction for the sake of human evolution” (P. Spallone, Beyond Conception: The New Politics of Reproduction (Granby, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc., 1989), pp. 141-142). Gregory Stock, who organised a biotechnology symposium in 1998, ‘Engineering the Human Germline’ announced: ‘“Life is entering a new phase in its history. We are seizing control of our own evolution”’; director of the UCLA Program on Science, Technology, and Society, Stock was in a “loose alliance” of “designer-baby promoters”, including scientists and “a small but increasingly assertive bunch of biotech entrepeneurs, bioethicists, social theorists and journalists” promoting reproductive technologies as “both inevitable and a boon to humanity” (Marcy Darnovsky, ‘The Case against Designer Babies: The Politics of Genetic Enhancement’, in B. Tokar (Ed.), Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press/London: Zed Books, 2001), p. 133).The academic bioethicist, avoiding the political and social implications of designer babies, focussed instead on managing the inevitable, in the process becoming “‘a translator, sometimes an apologist, sometimes an enabler, of scientific ‘progress’” (Barbara Katz Rothman, Genetic Maps and Human Imaginations: the Limits of Science in Understanding Who We Are (New York, 1998), pp. 35-39, in Ibid, pp. 140-141). Some reproductive technology advocates frankly admitted that their goal was genetic enhancement; one critic commented: ‘“The old eugenics was steeped in political ideology and motivated by fear and hate. The new eugenics is being spurred by market forces and consumer desire”’ (Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World (New York, 1999), p. 128, in Ibid, pp. 135-136). The Galton Institute’s David Galton agreed (D. Galton, In Our Own Image: Eugenics and the Genetic Modification of People (London: Little, Brown & Company, 2001), p. 96). ↩
  78. Goddess worship was associated with fertility, in the sense of enabling men to ‘sacrifice’ their reproductive potential in exchange for good fortune and sexual favours. But the temples also functioned as ‘birth control clinics’ where unwanted offspring could be murdered or exposed to the elements, thus ensuring that the ‘goddesses’ were not hampered by children; similarly, Victorian prostitutes paid ‘baby farmers’ a lump sum to take their babies, where often they died with “hideous promptness” (E. Pankhurst, My own story (London: Virago Ltd., 1914/1979), pp. 27-28). The bones of 97 newborn babies discovered at a Roman villa were found to be the remains of the children of prostitutes working at a brothel, discovered in 1912 but locked away in a museum “without their significance being realised” (Daily Telegraph, August 31, 2011, p. 13). ↩
Tags: , ,

More in Culture & Society

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.