The things one finds on a stroll down memory lane!

http://cardinalpole.blogspot.com/2008/11/more-on-sinister-relationship-between.html

Late last year I published a couple of posts on the relationship between the Parliamentary Group on Population and Development (P.G.P.D.) and the Australian Reproductive Health Alliance (A.R.H.A.). In that context I quoted a comment at The Australian's letters blog from an abortionite, one Iris Ashton. I mention this because after finding, in my blog's abortion tag, a reference which I needed for the post before the one which you're reading now, I thought I'd just have a bit of a browse through some of my old posts while I was there, a little stroll down memory lane, I suppose. Lo and behold, I came across a comment from the same Iris Ashton at one of my P.G.P.D./A.R.H.A. posts. Why had I not noticed this earlier? Because, oddly, the comment was submitted almost six months after I published the post! In fact, I had thought that comments were automatically disabled after less than such a considerable length of time, but there you go (and that's got me wondering how many other delayed responses are tucked away in the archives here). Here is how I respond to that comment (quotations from her comment first, in small type, then my response, in normal type):

I know Senator Moore personally and know that she is an intelligent, kind and humane Christian lady whose only thought in the matter of abortion is to save people, including the fetus, a life of pain and suffering.

A person can be saved from a life of pain either by relieving the pain, or by killing the person in pain. The latter option is not what I would call intelligent, kind, humane or Christian. The duty to minimise human suffering does not override the duty to preserve innocent human life.

I found your analysis of my comments skewed by religious dogma.

I found your advocacy for abortion skewed by nihilist dogma.

If, as you believe, we are completly dependent on God, is He not a kind and loving God who gave us free will?

Yes, God is kind and loving and gave us free will. The fact that someone freely wills this or that doesn't make it right or wrong though, so why have you mentioned this?

Nowhere in my letter did I mention the 'burden' on society of a deformed or disabled child

Nowhere in my blog post did I say that you did. Let's be clear: I observed, correctly, that an aversion to dependence was one of the themes in your original comment. Some people might, without any great leap of logic, take such an aversion even futher than you do and call into question the rights of the elderly or infirm who live in a condition of dependence, but I never said that you did--though you did speak, of course, of the burden on the family.

I also gave no opinion on the subject of euthanasia, especially as "being a way of 'freeing the infirm from being a burden on society", which I personally find to be a disgusting comment.

I never said that you gave an opinion on the subject of euthanasia, and I find such comments disgusting too. For instance, I found it digusting that euthanasia advocate Lady Warnock in the U.K. said recently that

... I feel there's a wider argument that if somebody absolutely, desperately wants to die because they're a burden to their family, or the state, then I think they too should beallowed to die.

"Actually I've just written an article called 'A Duty to Die?' for a Norwegian periodical. I wrote it really suggesting that there's nothing wrong with feeling you ought to do so for the sake of others as well as yourself."
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2983652/Baroness-Warnock-Dementia-sufferers-may-have-a-duty-to-die.html]

You see, Ms Ashton? The notion of 'freedom from burdening society' is not a straw man raised by the pro-life movement, it's a conclusion which follows without great difficultly from an aversion to dependence and a corresponding exaltation of autonomy, and is invoked by the pro-euthanasia movement. (Please do check that link, by the way, in case you fear that I might have taken Her Ladyship out of context. That ellipsis is where she talks about euthanasia being supposedly justified in cases of severe pain before she goes on to talk about the burden-to-others justification, which is what we're interested in just now so we can ignore the first part at present.)

the deformed fetus to be aborted is just that...a fetus, not a living, breathing child. If allowed to be born it then becomes a child and has my deepest sympathy on it's condition.

Why? What is the transmogrification which occurs during the child's passage from the womb to the outside world? What is the essential difference between, if you will, a t-minus-five-minutes baby and a t-plus-five-minutes baby? (I don't mind whether you or someone else from the pro-abortion movement answers me, I just hope that someone does, because I'm desperate to know.)

I found your comments to be not only offensive, but devious, inhumane and bigoted.

You believe that a baby is disposable until someone decides to 'allow' him or her the privilege of being born, but I'm the one who's offensive, devious, inhumane and bigoted?!

If I could finish with this reminder: as I point out at the right-hand side of this webpage, comments are not moderated, so if you have made a comment on an older post (by "older post" I mean roughly one which is no longer on the cardinalpole.blogspot.com main page), then please draw it to my attention.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of St. Augustine of Hippo, Bishop, Confessor, Doctor of the Church, A.D. 2009

More on the sinister relationship between abortionists and Parliament

http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/letters/index.php/theaustralian/comments/farce_with_tragic_overtones/

Two excellent letters have appeared in The Australian exposing what the Australian Reproductive Health Alliance (A.R.H.A.) really stands for. Here they are, reproduced in full:

I WAS present at the tragicomical Senate committee hearing last week into Medicare funding of late abortion, when we learned that senator Clare Moore’s submission on behalf of the Parliamentary Group on Population and Development was identical to the submission from the lobby group Australian Reproductive Health Alliance.

Angela Shanahan rightly described this duplication under two different letterheads as open to allegations of collusion (Opinion 1/11).

But it is the content that is disturbing. No fair-minded person can read the ARHA/Moore submission without understanding it as an argument for late-term abortion of handicapped babies to save society the cost of caring for them.

Exposing this collusion was great comedy, but the chilling reality is that Senator Moore’s discreetly eugenic tract was tabled, in the name of 41 MPs and senators, in the same week as a German doctor was denied Australian residency because of the costs to society of caring for his boy with Down syndrome.

For tragic historical reasons, if such a document were ever tabled in the German parliament, there would be no hint of comedy.
Dr David van Gend

Mackenzie House Medical Centre

Toowoomba, Qld

HEATHER Macdonald’s attempt (Letters, 4/11) to defend the propriety of the Australian Reproductive Health Alliance’s influence on the Parliamentary Group on Population and Development is weak in the extreme.

If, as she claims, the provision of the secretariat to this Parliamentary Group is a “professional relationship”, why doesn’t the ARHA representative leave her agendas at the door when operating as its secretary? Why have members of the group suddenly found that a submission that was supposed to represent their views is word for word the same as the submission of the ARHA?

It is also a rather lame claim to say that the ARHA doesn’t promote abortion. It has on its website as its only two current domestic issues supporting organisations and activists in the campaign to decriminalise abortion in Victoria and its involvement in the RU486 campaign. It touts as its “partners” some of the biggest abortion providers in the country.

As we are tightening up on lobbyists, the Government might do well to include training for organisations like this on what a professional relationship is, before they provide secretariats to parliamentary groups we all think are giving their own considered opinion.

Angela Shanahan is spot on—thanks for the revelation.
Dr Jane Taylor

Canberra, ACT

Furthermore, there is a comment at the on-line edition from a pro-abortion person who reveals more of the horror of the pro-abortion movement:

Iris Ashton Thu 06 Nov 08 (08:46am)

The abortion is not to save the cost of their care, but to save the anguish and heartache of the parents when after many hard years of caring for a deformed or disabled child they find they can no longer give the adult child their care and have to depend on a nursing home or the child’s siblings. It is also to save the child itself the anguish of a life of pain utterly dependent on others. Also to save the siblings of that child the efforts to help the disabled child and to save them from having to care for said child in later life.

Everyone is entitled to have a normal healthy life and if any family can be save the anguish of a life time of caring for a disabled child, who in many cases will not even know them, then that is what this law will provide.
(my emphasis)

Note the aversion to ‘dependence’, which is quite telling. We Christians know that we are completely dependent on God, Who not only created us but keeps us in existence from moment to moment. But the secularist philosophy is one of radical detachment, autonomy and independence, so naturally any reliance on others is viewed with varying degrees of horror. Hence, also, the secularist support for euthanasia as a way of ‘freeing’ the infirm from being a ‘burden on society’. But of course, as this letter also reveals, it is not primarily for the relief of the dependent party from their ‘burden’, but for the release of society from the burden—hence the commenter speaks firstly of the ‘suffering’ of the parents, with the suffering of the child an “also”, a secondary consideration. Msgr. Anthony Fisher summarised the pro-death position quite well when he said ‘it’s not about putting Granny out of her misery, but about putting Granny out of our misery’. Comments like the one from Ms Ashton are useful for reminding us of what we are up against.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
6.XI.2008 A.D.