Stuart's Note

Of the rights of unborn children, the right education of children and sundry other matters
by Stuart Abram on Monday, 11 October 2010 at 22:21

The following was to-day (11/x/10) posted in response to my facebook post requesting my friends to peruse and sign up to the Youth Declaration to the UN. This can be found at http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.c-fam.org%2Fyouth%2Flid.2%2Fdefault.asp&h=6abba . In response to this, an acquaintance of mine posted two comments, the more substantial of which I reproduce below in its entirety:



Unwanted children become problems in society, giving parents the choice to abort a fetus before it is a sentient being reduces the problems in society.To over stress the role of the family marginalises those who do not have family, for what...ever reason. Marginalising people causes problems in later life.Gender, as in one's self identity of gender, is not an objective thing and to try and force people into one gender or another if they are not subjectively of those genders is psychologically harmful, because gender roles are not black and white, but shades of grey.


I agree that unborn children, once they are children, have rights that must be protected but those rights are not the same as those of a child.I agree that the right to life is an important measure but this statement denies the right to death that we must consider moving forward as we continue to increase our ability to stay alive until decrepitation.I agree that sexual education needs to instill a sense of responsibility, self respect and understanding of the full effects of sexual acts, but this bill denies that sex outside marriage can ever be a good thing. Couples who do not see if they are sexually compatible before they wed are demonstrably less happy and psychologically stable than those who do sleep with each other while courting.I agree that exploitation is a very bad thing that we all need to be protected from but this statement denies that any work in the sex trade is not exploitative. However in a well regulated sex trade it can be a fulfilling job that gives rise to wealth. In societies where it is treated as wholly wrong far more exploitation occurs because the demand still exists.


As for point 2, a parent has a DUTY not a RIGHT to educate their child with the truth. Religious education, in the common form of gentle indoctrination is extremely harmful to children, and those raised in highly religious homes are intellectually inferior for the rest of their lives.


Other than points 3 & 5 I cannot agree with any of the points in this statement wholly, or with the subtext, because the world would be worse off if any of the rest of them were fulfilled.



Let us deal with the points in turn. I apologise to the reader if this is somewhat dull, but it suits the purposes of our sport. My interlocutor disputes that unborn children do not possess rights as they are not 'sentient' and/or it is convenient to give parents the 'right' to dispose of them before they become an inconvenience. The first response to this is that logically, parents should therefore have the right to kill newborn children until about the age of two, when they might first be categorised as 'sentient'. Birth, by this standard, is a mere stage in the progress to the magical moment whereupon one becomes 'sentient'. Logically this argument also leads to a 'right' or even perhaps a 'duty' to dispatch those whose understanding is impaired to such an extent that they are not 'sentient'; so all you depressives, mental defectives, sexual deviants (i.e. those married and with children, without the desire to have the right to kill them) and those with learning difficulties should step forward (if you are capable of this) and prepare for extermination.



One wonders what 'problems' are solved by the extirpation of the unborn. Financial and emotional difficulties have always been problems for any society yet in a country with a generous and comprehensive Welfare State and a National Health Service of which we may be rightly proud (and which is free at the point of delivery), one wonders at what point necessity requires or permits the killing of innocent life. Forgive my impatience with this, but it was an eminent member, respectable without question, of ancient Jewish society that remarked that it would be better for one man to die for the country than for the nation to perish. Although one can understand the mathematics and the temptation of it, to kill a being fully capable of human life for advantages that in almost all cases could be given by a proper and generous use of public services seems cowardly and murderous in the extreme.



This first paragraph is trapped in what appears to be a web of emotivism and illogicality. The force of the first line is that children themselves cause these problems, as if they had called themselves into the world to wreak unconscionable havoc ('Unwanted children become problems in society'), ignoring the responsibility of human beings in the first instance to conduct themselves in such a way as the dignity of sexual congress requires. A short attack then ensues on the position of the family; those who find themselves not belonging to one should not be harmed, it is argued, lest one feel 'marginalised' (although in that case there is nothing to be marginalised from, if there is no family). This ignores the vast amount of scientific research that shows that stable, married family life is the best context for the raising of children and the sexual maturity of both parties. To marginalise the family risks marginalising a great deal of people who will not haave the structures of friends, school, university or profession to cling onto. For many people still, the family, even in its degraded state, is their only hope and their only refuge. The most deprived themselves have most to lose from the fall of the traditional family and of sexual morality; the effects on the middle and upper classes may be mitigated by wealth and advantage but for these people, it hits hardest, eating away at their very selves. The poor, of all people, have most need of strong families. One last point is that marginalising people causes problems later on. I agree. That is why I am in favour of the only structure where one is really welcome, come what may, the family.



The argument on 'gender roles' is curious. On face value it would appear to be right. We assume 'roles' when we act in a play, for instance. But biological gender places upon us roles and obligations that go beyond any notion of playacting. The respective and equal (albeit different) dignities of fatherhood and motherhood, whether exercised conventionally or 'spiritually' in some other role such as being an aunt or uncle or nun or priest, stem from a biological and ontological difference that is universally accepted in the light of reason. Only when we do construct 'gender roles', assuming that a certain pattern of individual outward behaviour and sexual conduct (as opposed to a full-understanding of the procreative role) constitute a certain 'gender' does the argument begin to become tenable. Yet this divorces humanity from reality in an extreme idolatry of the will. According to this we are whatever we say, and perhaps feel. In that case, I am a Persian elephant called Friedrich III. According to this argument, no one could disabuse me of this notion no matter how unpersian, unelephant-like and unFriedrich-like I may be. That I am free to ignore my humanity or the biological facts of my existence does not mean they are not there.



There follows a litany of non-sequiturs. My opponent concedes that 'unborn children, once children, have rights that must be protected', yet 'those rights are not the same as those of a child'. One wonders whether, given the fact that babies and the unborn are not sufficiently 'sentient', this is perhaps a less unlovely method of extermination than forcing a miscarriage, cutting a child up (potentially while still alive) in the womb or sucking its brains out. Burning alive perhaps. This no doubt is part of the apparent 'right to death' that he is now convinced exists, in the Name of Progress no doubt, despite its absence from the ECHR and the entire corpus of English Law. Until the 1960s, English Law forbade (attempted) suicide and to this day forbids assisting or abetting it (cf. Suicide Act 1961). The 'right to death', which historically seems to quickly morph into the 'right to kill' frankly does not exist. As apparent proof of this, the concomitant duty of the right to kill becomes the duty to die, we are to 'moving forward as we continue to increase our ability to stay alive until decrepitation [sic]'. One wonders when the National Institute for Geriatric Advancement will come into being to 'move forward' those felt to have had a good innings.



My opponent, perhaps surprisingly, is agreed that 'sexual education needs to instill a sense of responsibility, self respect and understanding of the full effects of sexual acts', yet he advocates, on utilitarian grounds, that sexual relations outside of marriage may be beneficial, helping couples to discern whether they are 'sexually compatible', on psychological grounds. The immediate impression this gives is of treating sexual congress as a game. It is eminently reasonable that those who treat it as a game will prefer the company of those who do likewise. They may indeed derive greater pleasure and satisfaction from their 'love-making', but in doing so they will probably have missed the point entirely, taking the pursuit of pleasure very seriously. The inseparable union of two beings, in my interlocutor's eyes, is no such thing. It is temporary and really quite tawdry, little deserving of respect or awe, save insomuch as we derive self-satisfaction from it. Gone is the notion of inviolable gift to the other, of self-sacrifice and surrender, which are rightly quite difficult and demanding. Gone is the adventure of love. Newly arrived is the boredom of self-seeking.



The final eye-rolling episode in this litany of unreality is that on exploitation; all exploitation is bad it seems, but perhaps not all the time. One would love to know how he derives the conclusion that prostitution 'in a well regulated sex trade it can be a fulfilling job that gives rise to wealth'. Having worked with the down and outs of Paris, had friends who worked in the porn trade or even sold themselves, I can assure him and you, dear reader, that I have never met a 'happy whore'. Addiction cannot be thought of in the same light as professional commitment, nor whatever residual pleasure may remain in the sexual act as 'fulfilment'. Only a rather warped humanity could be fufilled thus. The sordid sum that indicates, in rather specious language, that it 'gives rise to wealth' underlines this with an unlikely and unintended eloquence.



In this unhappy and irrational world of sexual experimentation, gender-by-preference and careerist whoring, religious parents seem to have a 'duty' to educate their children in its truth. We are self-rightelously informed that, 'Religious education, in the common form of gentle indoctrination is extremely harmful to children' but, presumably, killing them in the womb or afterwards (see my argument above), downplaying any notion of family beyond the convenient or politically acceptable, abandoning them to the worst of their desires, discouraging them (implicitly) from having any sort of objective, gender-based identity, teaching them that picking a sexual partner or spouse is rather like picking flavours of ice-cream at Sainsbury's and that prostitution can be a fulfilling, profitable activity is not. We people of faith destine such benighted children, apparent, to be 'intellectually inferior', perhaps because they will not give way to the unreason, unreality and intellectual blindness of my dear accuser. Would they perhaps not be classed as 'sentient'? Would they be encouraged (or forced) to 'move forward' for the common good?



Give me the 'obscurantism' of Catholic Christianity with its love and protection of human life and right from conception until natural death, the dignity of the marital act, objective gender and the condemnation of sexual exploitation any day over the pompous, blind, hypocritical, dangerous, illogical, irrational and uncaring approach, suggested by what warped 'reason' I know not, suggested above by my foe. May the Lord englighten his mind and soul and bring us together in the last day as friends in joy.