http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=585
May 19, 2008
The slippery slope to dehumanisation
Daily Mail, 19 May 2008
When abortion was first legalised in 1967, that pioneering law was presented as a humane measure designed to end the hazards of backstreet abortion.
Few could then have foretold that, four decades later, the abortion rate would be running at 200,000 per year and that thousands of women would have had at least four abortions.
Even fewer could have foreseen that, as a result of the profound change in attitude brought about by the Abortion Act, the beginning of life would have been arbitrarily redefined from the moment of conception to 14 days’ gestation for the sole purpose of allowing scientific experimentation upon early embryos — including the creation of animal/human hybrids.
Today, MPs vote on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill in a changed climate. Many people have come to believe that all this has simply gone far too far. An initially civilised gesture has given rise to a steady process of brutalisation in which we are fast unravelling the very idea of what it is to be a human being.
So it is deeply depressing to see the way in which such concerns are being treated at the very top of government.
The public health minister, Dawn Primarolo, has delivered a crude put-down to some of these qualms. Because the Government said the Bill could be used to amend the Abortion Act, amendments have been tabled calling for a reduction in the upper time limit for abortion from 24 weeks to 20 weeks or earlier.
Ms Primarolo claims that the real purpose behind these amendments is to erode the whole abortion law. She says that the principle must be upheld of ‘a woman’s right to choose’ — even though this was never the founding principle of the Abortion Act.
Although it may be difficult now to recall, the Act actually enshrined in law the belief that abortion was the lesser of two evils and could take place only under certain defined conditions where the likely harm to the mother if a baby was born outweighed the harm of destroying it.
One of those conditions was that the baby was too immature to survive outside the mother’s body. But today, babies can survive at as young as 21 weeks’ gestation.
Yes, those cases are exceedingly rare. But the fact that some babies younger than the upper time limit have managed to live changes the whole picture, and it is disingenuous of Ms Primarolo to try to deny it.
There is now a widespread reaction against late abortion because we know that by this stage, unborn babies feel pain. Moreover, since it involves the dismemberment of recognisable human beings, it causes such revulsion among hospital staff that increasingly only the private sector will perform it.
In this light, Ms Primarolo’s vacuous and sinister ‘right to choose’ slogan is stomach-turning. Yes, some campaigners would indeed like to make all abortions illegal once again. But many more are simply reasserting the elementary sympathy for all human life which divides civilised society from barbarism...
The abortion row, however, should not distract attention from other measures in this Bill which are even worse because they would take us yet further down this slippery slope to a more brutalised society.
Yesterday, Gordon Brown wrote an impassioned defence of the Bill’s provision to allow the creation of animal/human hybrid embryos for research purposes. This, he said, was ‘an inherently moral endeavour, that can save and improve the lives of thousands and over time, millions’.
But do we really want to be the world leaders in abortion, mass fatherlessness and hypocrisy, shedding crocodile tears over human suffering while creating a bleakly degraded and brutalised society?
It is said that scientific progress can no more be halted than Canute could have held back the waves. But one of the essential aspects of being human is that we have free will and can make choices about how we live.
The idea that people were the helpless pawns of their genes led to eugenics and the horrors of Nazism. The belief that people were the helpless pawns of economic forces led to Stalinism and the gulags of the Soviet Union.
Now we are being told that we are helpless before the relentless forward march of science. If we are not careful, this latest form of determinism will destroy the very concept of our common humanity, and with it our capacity to love and to care.
http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=585
Couldn't we be free of trouble? Couldn't we live out quiet lives in remote villages? But that was not what was happening; and strangely he could hear Julia's voice comforting him, guiding him. He didn't know if this was a suicide mission; probably not, he felt so calm. Everything felt right. Right time, right place, an unfamiliar sensation. The tides in the ethereal grey were drifting him towards the interior walls. He could see, if he looked closely, thousands of specks coming and going; and the closer he looked the more detail the walls showed. It was a a very long way from the burning building he had gone to inspect one day as a general news reporter.
Here there was no smoke, no air, bathed in an interior, artificial light. He had still not been detected; which he considered bizarre. But the moment the thought came there was a warning: for God's sake don't think, don't think, not now. Please not now. He was latching, he could feel it, on to the interior surface; and the process, beyond his control and beyond his understanding, had begun. They were aware of him now; alright. The whole thing gave a dark flash and suddenly he was awake, ejected from the core. He was still sitting at his computer terminal. The same tedious story he had been working on, about the improving health of the general population, was up on the screen, a story he didn't believe for a moment. Not if you factored in free will as part of an individuals health.
Startled, fully awake, his fingers scrabbled across the keyboards as he tried to pretend everything was normal. He looked around the giant news room, the fluorescent lights, the tedious, defeated faces of the slaves he worked with, the tight, fear-invoking faces of the bosses, the complex hierarchy of the office. Several of the faces of those in power were turned towards him; a startled look on their faces. They were moving towards him. And then suddenly they just stopped. His own implant gave a burst of static; and then just stopped functioning. Wiped ten times and here he was. Could it possibly have been a success?
There was the strange sight of the people he was meant to be afraid of; all looking in his direction; or even having begun moving in his direction. And then just stopped. Entirely stopped. He could hear someone shouting in the distance; on the other side of the office. And then cheering. Someone was standing beside him; a woman who had looked at him so sadly, so long ago. Julia. Others. They were crowding around him; "it worked, it worked", Julia was saying.
"How is that possible?" he asked. And it was as if he could hear a cheering spreading across the city. He hadn't been the only one after all, not by a long shot. Everything was on the turn, everything was changing. The cheering was spreading even further.
"How?" he asked.
"As you thought," Julia said. "We redesigned you as a virus. No one had ever been wiped that many times before; and they didn't regard you as any sort of threat. The only thing they were worried about was that they had turned you into an idiot."
He grimaced.
She gripped him on the shoulder.
"Don't worry," she said. "You'll be fine. You'll come back, completely, I'm sure. We'll all come back. It's a great thing you did."
"I didn't do anything."
"Oh yes you did. Just by staying sane; just by resisting the urge to give up; that took a lot of courage, considering the pressure you were under. Staying sane under the circumstances they dished up can be like climbing Mount Everest, very difficult."
He could feel the celebrations spreading across the city. He could see the frozen, quizzical looks of the bosses. He could see the desperate, futile efforts of the organism trying to repair itself.
"That must have been quite a virus," he said.
"It was," Julia smiled. "Believe me it was. It took the underground years to develop. There really was a village, a remote place, off the grid; and they sent some of the world's brightest people there, because they wouldn't surrender to the controls. And if you put a whole lot of brilliant people together; sometimes brilliant things happen."
He couldn't believe that in the end it could have been so fast, or so simple.
"Won't they repair, retaliate?"
"They can't. They're gone. The fabric's gone. The connections that made them what they were; the giant collusion; it's all collapsed in a blink. You can't come back from that. There isn't an injured version skulking somewhere; waiting to be repaired."
One of the bosses he particularly despised; who operated by fear and threats; came up to the desk where he was now surrounded by half a dozen people, mostly women.
"Into my office," he said sternly.
He looked up; free at last.
"No," he said.
And everyone around him laughed and cheered.
"No," he repeated, just for the pleasure of it. "No. Never again."
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/libs-left-reeling-by-labor-surge/2008/05/19/1211182704262.html
KEVIN Rudd has opened a massive 53-point gap over Brendan Nelson as preferred prime minister in today's Age/Nielsen poll, as the Liberals plunge into bitter fighting over a damaging leak that has undermined the Opposition Leader's budget reply.
Mr Rudd's 70%-17% lead is the biggest since the poll started in 1972. It will further fuel tensions that blew up yesterday, with the Nelson and Turnbull camps accusing each other of revealing that Malcolm Turnbull had disagreed in writing with Dr Nelson's proposal to cut petrol excise by five cents.
The poll of 1400, taken from Thursday to Saturday, found the budget had gone down well, with two-thirds "satisfied" and 57% thinking it "fair". This is despite just 31% believing it will make them better off — about the same proportion (30%) who think it will leave them worse off.
The Government seems to have chosen an acceptable cut-in point for new welfare means tests, with a majority agreeing those on the $150,000 household income were "wealthy".
http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN1954399620080519
MAYSVILLE, Ky., May 19 (Reuters) - Hillary Clinton had a warning on Monday for rival Barack Obama, who is on the verge of claiming the U.S. Democratic presidential nomination: Not so fast.
"This is nowhere near over," Clinton said at a rally in Maysville, Kentucky, pressing ahead with her long shot bid for the White House even as Obama focuses on November's general election match-up with Republican John McCain.
Despite Obama's almost unassailable lead in delegates who will select the nominee at the August Democratic convention, Clinton repeatedly has shrugged off calls to quit the race before the last of the voting concludes on June 3.
She warned the Illinois senator against premature victory celebrations one day before Kentucky and Oregon cast ballots in the lengthy Democratic White House fight.
"None of us is going to have the number of delegates we're going to need to get to the nomination, although I understand my opponent and his supporters are going to claim that," Clinton, a New York senator, said in Maysville.
Obama expects to claim a majority of pledged delegates won in the state-by-state races after Tuesday's returns, but he will still be about 75 short of the 2,026 needed to clinch the nomination without further help from superdelegates -- party officials who are free to back any candidate.
Obama contends the remaining undecided superdelegates, who have been trending his way heavily in recent weeks, should back the candidate who won the most delegates in state voting.
But Clinton says superdelegates should consider her argument that she will make a stronger general election foe for McCain, and her victories in big states like Pennsylvania and Ohio give her a better base than Obama has managed.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/animal-welfare-groups-outraged-as-kangaroo-cull-starts/2008/05/19/1211182703329.html
THE Defence Department has started culling more than 400 kangaroos on department land in Canberra, angering the RSPCA, which says the cull was preventable, and animal rights activists who wanted the animals moved to NSW.
The department would not say yesterday whether the cull at the former naval site in Belconnen had started, but the RSPCA, which was monitoring the cull, confirmed it had begun.
"It's a disgusting, sickening outcome," said Michael Linke, the ACT chief executive of the group.
Inspection reports to the group from the cull found no "welfare issues" over the treatment of the eastern greys. They were shot with tranquilliser guns then killed by lethal injection. Mr Linke said the cull, which had been ordered to stop kangaroos destroying endangered grasslands, could have been avoided.
Views of Sydney Harbour from the Water Police Headquarters at Balmain.
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