The Demographic Bomb

We reported recently on the World Congress of Families which will take place in Madrid later this week. One of the topics to be dealt with during the Congress is the evil of population control.
This is in advance of a UN meeting the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development which will be held in Rio De Janerio next month and already UN agencies such as UNFPA are detetrmined to include population control, under various guises, in the conference as one of the ways of reducing so called global warming and its effects by decreasing human activity.
Of course when the global warming proved to be an unsustainable name it was renamed "climate change" This approach was previously put forward by the Chinese government in 2009 during a summit which took place in Copenhagen.

The coersive and draconian population control methods of the Chinese are well known and rejected by all right thinking people and yet they are now being proposed as the solution. Sadly we have heard of solutions like this before and even a so called "final solution". World governments must not go down this pathway.

The following trailer for the Demographic Bomb gives another side to the story

Controversial testing of IVF embryos proposed

RTE news on Tuesday January 17th reported that a new private fertility clinic has opened in Ireland which will provide pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD).  to identify human embryos brought into being through in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), which are deemed to be at risk of carrying inherited disorders such as cystic fibrosis. See also Irish Times article
Needles to say this type of screening prior to implantation is highly controversial and is carried out for the express purpose of selection of some embryos and the disposal of others. It can only be described as eugenic in nature and intent. 
The new Clinic built in Sandyford Co Dublin at a cost of €2.5 million.

This controversial move, which is being lauded by the media, was made despite the fact that the Irish Medicines Board (IMB) do not appear to have not granted permission for it.

According to an Irish Times report on Wednesday January 18th. 

The IMB said yesterday it has not issued any licence yet – and an authorisation would be issued only if it complied with legislation on tissues and cells.

It is understood that several IVF clinics in Ireland also hope to begin another form of genetic screening soon involving analysing the chromosomes of embryos. 

PGD is also used in other countries to identify chromosomal abnormalities such as down syndrome

I am reminded that Professor Robert Edwards who is regarded as the father of the exploitative practice of IVF,  claimed that it will soon be "a sin" for a woman to give birth to a disabled child and 'burden society'.  see my previous BLOG

However, with the exception of "No Less Human" I have not heard any disability rights groups denounce Dr Edwards' eugenicist comments, just as remarkably few journalists have the courage to investigate and challenge the public image of IVF practitioners as caring, altruistic and responsible.

Forced Sterilisations in Peru

Shades of Nazi Germany!  It has been reported that under the presidency of Alberto Fujimori in Peru, from 1990 to 2000, there was allegedly a government policy of forced sterilisations carried out on Peruvian women.   It appears that there may have been up to 300,000 victims of this horrific policy, which can only be described as a gross human rights violation.   The majority of the women subjected to it were poor, and often belonging to indigenous groups who would not have been able to speak any language other than their own particular one.  Partly because of this the women would not have understood what was being carried out on them – when they were asked, that is.   It seems that in very many cases the women were not even consulted about what was about to be imposed on them. See BBC report 

Aurelia Paccohuanca (see photograph) who had 4 children was told by nurses 

"You give birth like pigs or hamsters!"

The Attorney General of Peru has just recently re-opened an investigation into the practice of forced sterilisations, and the evidence of many women will contribute to the legal examination into the allegations – so called – that the practice was standard among public health-care providers under the term of office of Mr. Fujimori.

One woman who was sterilised without her knowledge, following the birth of her child (who died soon afterwards), took an action for damages against the doctor who performed the sterilisation on her.   She was successful in her action, and she was awarded the sum of approximately €2,400.   What an inhuman and derisory outcome.  No money could ever replace her inability to conceive and bear children in the future.

Let us hope that the sterilised women (and some men, also) of Peru may be granted some peace in their lives

Eugenics: aborting the disabled

The UK government following a lengthy legal battle has revealed the precise numbers, gestational ages, and types of disability of babies aborted between 2002 and 2010 in England and Wales. 

According to a Daily Mail report published under the  banner headline “Revealed: The thousands of pregnancies aborted for ‘abnormalities’ including cleft palates and Down’s syndrome” which was based on Department of Health figures, a total of 2,290 babies were aborted last year for so called “medical conditions.”
In 2010 alone, 482 babies with Down’s syndrome were aborted, including ten who were over 24 weeks gestation.

·         “There were also 128 terminations for the nervous disorder spina bifida, including 12 after 24 weeks.

·         “Musculoskeletal problems such as club foot were the reason for 181 abortions, including eight over 24 weeks.

Anthony Ozimic, communications manager for the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) commented as follows

“Between 2001 and 2010, the number of abortions on the grounds of disability rose by one-third, 10 times that of abortions generally. It is clear that legal abortion is a system which discriminates, fatally, against the disabled.”

The full response from the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children  SPUC can be found here SPUC report  and the response of the SPUC affiliate No Less Human can be found here No Less Human

Survival of the fittest

Will you take me as I am?

Now that you have seen the scan.

You fear I could be born deficient

Is my presence not sufficient?

Will you love me and accept me

Or will you callously reject me

Focus not on my defect,

Please accept and don’t reject.

What about the blind and lame

Surely they deserve a name

If only the perfect may be born

What you practice is profane 

Patrick Buckley        

The brave new world of word play and ideological power struggle

Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, permanent representative of the Holy See to the U.N. offices in Geneva addressed a conference organised by the Communion and Liberation movement at their headquarters in Rome Thursday February 17^th according to a Zenit.org report,

Archbishop Tomasi's address was titled "The Force of the Word. Truth and Ideology in International Organizations." 

Marta Carabia, professor of constitutional law at the University of Milano-Bicocca, also spoke and the event was moderated by the director of the International Center, Roberto Forlan.

Archbishop Tomasi told the meeting; 

"Husband" and "wife" is out, and "partner" is in. Also out: "man" and "woman." "Gender" is the word of choice today. Want to say "Contraception?" Try "reproductive health."

With these and similar word games combined with an extreme interpretation of "anti-discrimination," international institutions are imposing ideologies across the globe -- policies that oppose Catholic thought and influence daily life. And in general, people realize there's been a change too late.

"Geneva is a place where culture is generated daily," said Archbishop Tomasi, recalling that 30,000 employees of international entities reside there, holding more than 9,000 conferences every year.

To clarify the problem, the prelate recalled Benedict XVI's thought on the dictatorship of relativism: "A good part of contemporary philosophy states that man is incapable of knowing the truth. And, as a consequence, the man who is incapable of [truth] does not have ethical values."

Thus, the archbishop continued, "he ends up by accepting majority opinion as the sole reference point -- although history demonstrates how destructive majorities can be," as in the case "of the dictatorships imposed by Nazism and Marxism."



Moving over

According to Archbishop Tomasi, words from Judeo-Christian tradition are disappearing: words such as truth, morality, conscience, reason, father, mother, child, commandment, sin, hierarchy, nature, marriage, etc..

A new vocabulary that "represents an individualist ideology taken to the extreme and which inspires the guidelines of the employees of world governance" is coming to the fore, he said.

"The United Nations aspires to create a new international order and to do so it creates a new anthropology," as when it speaks of gender -- "not the one given by nature but the one chosen by the individual," Archbishop Tomasi explained. This undermines the very structure of society in what pertains to the family, he added.

A Thomist vision that exacts "conformity of the intellect with reality" is replaced "by a concept of reality as subjective and as a social construction in which truth and reality do not have a stable content," the prelate cautioned.

This "alliance between ideology and pragmatism" challenges Christian wisdom, he affirmed, even if in the long run "they will not be able to underestimate or simply ignore the anthropological realism of the Christian tradition."



Apples and pears 



Asked how these strategies come about, Archbishop Tomasi said it is a complex process, beyond the proponents themselves. He traced it to the dictatorship of relativism.

"To say that a pear is not an apple is not discrimination," the archbishop reminded. "And these soft laws are transformed into juridical norms. Then there is a new convention and it becomes law and it is applied even in a small village."

Pope Benedict XVI warns of the Dangers of Eugenics

Pope Benedict XVI in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Life on Saturday 21st February welcomed progress in the area of genetics which he said has “truly taken giant steps in understanding the basic language of biological information, which determines the development of a living being.” This knowledge according to the Holy Father makes it possible to more easily arrive at earlier and more effective diagnosis of genetic maladies, but also to create therapies to alleviate illnesses and, in some cases, to restore, the hope of regaining health.

Pope Benedict said that in addition to the challenges of genetics there is a danger of the re-emergence of eugenics which, in the past humiliated man and provoked immense suffering. The Pope acknowledged that while the terrible practices of former regimes were not being proposed he told his audience, that a new mentality is creeping in that tends to justify a different consideration of life and personal dignity based on individual desire and individual rights.

There is thus he said "a tendency to privilege the capacities for work, efficiency, perfection and physical beauty to the detriment of other dimensions of existence that are not held to be valuable". In this way, “ the respect that is due to every human being -- even in the presence of a defect in his development or a genetic illness that could manifest itself in the course of his life -- is weakened, and those children whose life is judged unworthy of being lived are punished from the moment of conception”.

Pope Benedict also told his audience that, “it is necessary to re-emphasize that every discrimination exercised by any power in regard to persons, peoples or ethnic groups on the basis of differences that stem from real or presumed genetic factors is an act of violence against all of humanity". What must be forcefully re-emphasized he said, "is the equal dignity of every human being according to the fact itself of having life.”

The Holy Father during the course of his address also said that “if man is reduced to an object of experimental manipulation from the first stage of development, that would mean that biotechnologies would surrender to the will of the stronger”. Confidence in science he told his audience “cannot forget the primacy of ethics when human life is at stake”.

The 'wicked' doctors who refuse to kill

Dame Mary Warnock, one of the most prominent advocates for the culture of death in Britain, has called doctors who would refuse to help a terminally ill patient commit suicide "genuinely wicked."

This is a woman who came to Ireland last year to tell us of our "moral obligation" to allow embryo research and who has spoken in the past of frail, elderly people having a "duty to die." Journalist Melanie Phillips has described Warnock as a 'monster' and in many ways she symbolises the warped, twisted ideology Britain has embraced over the past forty years. She is very little different from the fashionable eugenicists of the twenties and thirties, figures such as Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger who were Nazi sympathisers and yet are lauded as altruistic souls who just wanted to help everyone. As John Smeaton puts it: "Reasonable-minded citizens should be genuinely frightened of Mary Warnock."

You forgot to mention Love

This feature by a journalist who has a disabled son, came hot on the heels of an article which argued that women pretty much have a social duty to abort if they discover that their baby may have a disability. She describes this attitude as "the purest form of eugenics: it is Nazi doctrine", a point of which we in the pro-life movement have always been aware. The passage that really struck me was her point about love:

Still, let’s be generous: it is expensive and it is hard and your world-view shifts and sometimes you cry. What Marrin seems unable to grasp is that these things – time, stress, expense, anxiety, tears – are sacrifices that parents are happy to make because they love their children. There is no mention of love in the 1,050 words of her column, nor of hope or faith or compassion or even kindness.

It is a pity that India Knight undermines her otherwise powerful article by describing abortion - including eugenic abortion - as a 'powerful, subjective choice' all women should have. What happened to love, India?

More on Children as Commodities

A couple of days ago, I mentioned the disturbing phenomenon of people who think they can buy anything, including IVF babies of their preferred sex.

Just to confirm my worst suspicions about the Brave New World society we live in, in which children are valued only as far as they satisfy the needs of adults, LifeSite reports a couple facing jail for selling their baby on Ebay. The couple from Belgium, sold the baby for an undisclosed sum to a Dutch couple to whom they handed the baby in a hospital car park.

According to the report, this is not the first incident involving the online sale of a baby, with another case in America earlier in the year involving a newborn baby being advertised for $10,000.

The Catholic Church warned in Donum Vitae that this sort of behaviour would be the inevitable consequence of the "dynamic of violence and domination" so characteristic of abortion and IVF. The document states:

“The abortion-mentality which has made this procedure possible...leads, whether one wants it or not, to man's domination over the life and death of his fellow human beings and can lead to a system of radical eugenics.”

“The child is not an object to which one has a right, nor can he be considered as an object of ownership: rather, a child is a gift, ‘the supreme gift.’”

Eugenics and other Evils

A draft law is being considered in The Netherlands that would punish 'unfit' parents by forcing women to use contraception for a number of years and taking the baby away as soon as it was born if the woman refused the order to take contraception and became pregnant.

Khaled Diab in The Guardian, voices disquiet at the proposed law, warning:

This government may have all the best intentions, but what's to guarantee that a future government doesn't use the law, or an amendment of it, to target "undesirable" groups, such as Roma, gays, religious minorities and immigrants?

More immediately, there's the question of how we would define the "unfit parents" who should be deprived from the right to bear children. Should the law apply only to parents who pose a clear and present danger to potential offspring or could it be more loosely interpreted to apply to those of whose parenting style the state disapproves?

As numerous commentators at the end of the article point out, this is essentially just another piece of legislation stemming from the eugenicist ideology so popular during the Interwar period, which was of course promoted by the likes of Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger. Others quote the number of European countries and US states that had eugenicist laws in place until the early 70s, which involved the compulsory sterilisation of those regarded as mentally and physically unfit, along with some racial minorities.

An article in Second Spring analyses the work of G.K. Chesterton in campaigning against and defeating the Mental Deficiency Bill in 1912. Chesterton was one of the only vocal and influential opponents of eugenics at a time when eugenics was being publicly embraced and promoted by England's liberal intelligentsia.

As the horrors of past eugenics programmes fade in memory and this evil ideology once again takes hold of society, we need another G.K. Chesterton to sound the alarm.

The Curse of Marie Stopes

The Daily Mail has published an article on the Marie Stopes stamp controversy. It makes for interesting reading but what gripped my attention more were some of the reader comments left in the combox. As a pro-life campaigner, I am all too aware of the eugenic mentality behind the abortion and contraception industries but they are usually quite careful to keep quiet about it and do everything possible to deny any association with eugenics. However, voxpop is less guarded and the comments were spine chilling. Here are some examples

"Why is it acceptable to selectively breed better animals but where humans are concerned, we bend over backwards to help the most lazy and unhealthy specimens to have families?"

"Just imagine what a stable, well-ordered society we'd have if compulsory sterilisation had been adopted years ago for the socially undesirable. The prisons would be almost empty, and the law-abiding majority could walk any streets without fear."

"The opposite of Eugenics is dysgenics. This aims to multiply the number of cripples, incompetents, idiots, criminals, murderers, whores, thieves, delinquents, drug users, stupid brutes and drunks in society. The social engineers have been successfully making our society in this mould for the last sixty years. No wonder decent people want to emigrate. This society has no hope."

A young British pro-life campaigner once told me that she sometimes wondered what would happen if the millions of men who died fighting the Nazis were to come back from the dead and see what the world looked like now? In her words, 'would they think the Nazis had won?'

I am not sure I would take things that far, but I think it is true to say that society has never learnt the terrible lessons of Nazi Germany when it comes to respect for basic human freedoms. Judging by the response to the Daily Mail article the eugenic philosophy is clearly still alive and well. Ironically, eugenics is founded on junk science, the entirely misplaced assumption that every facet of a person's physical, mental and moral development is based on their background. But more to the point, I would like to ask people who casually assert their support for eugenics, precisely whom they feel should decide which members of society has the right to have children? What criteria should they use in making such a decision? Would they accept that decision if an appointed judge were to decide that they were either too bigoted, or too heartless or perhaps even too ill-informed to be allowed a child? And ultimately, would anyone wish to live in a country where the state held such absolute power over the most intimate area of a citizen's life?

I think it was Mahatma Gandhi who said: "The best test of a civilised society is the way in which it treats its weakest members." We have failed that test.

By Their Fruits

On the subject of eugenics, Ann Farmer has published a new book entitled By Their Fruits: Eugenics, Population Control and the Abortion Movement, examining the history of the abortion movement and the link between population control and eugenics.

This book is a timely work of revisionism which challenges the received wisdom that the population control and abortion movements have ever been altruistic or pro-woman in their ethos.

More on Marie Stopes

The news that Marie Stopes is to appear on a Royal Mail stamp has caused outrage among Catholic bloggers. Catholic Perspective,The Hermeneutic of Continuity and Saint Mary Magdalen to name just three have all carried the story of Marie Stopes and her racist, eugenicist ideology.

Just out of interest, I looked up the Marie Stopes International website to see what they have to say about their founder. The timeline of her life has a large gap in it between 1930 and 1958 when she died, which is a pity as they could have informed people about such significant events as Dr Stopes' appearance at the International Congress for Population Science in Berlin, held under the auspices of the Third Reich [1935].

The Marie Stopes website describes Stopes and her fellows as having "played a major role in breaking down taboos about sex and increasing knowledge, pleasure and improved sexual and reproductive health." Of her anti-Catholic, anti-semitic views and her promotion of eugenics, they have not a word to say. Oddly enough, I could not find any links to her publications either. This is surely an unfortunate oversight on the part of the MSI directors - why else would they deprive the public of the opportunity to appreciate Dr Stopes' love poems dedicated to Adolph Hitler?