The Reticulator

Remember when pro-abortion people used to say that reproductive choice should be a matter between a woman and her physician? What they didn’t tell us was that a woman is now to be denied the choice of making this decision with physicians who are personally opposed to performing abortions themselves. (WSJ Health Blog: Obama will move to rescind ‘conscience’ rule on abortion, birth control)

Remember the bumper stickers that said, “If you don’t like abortions–DON’T HAVE ONE”? I used to think it was a valid point, if not a deciding one. But now we’re told that if don’t like abortions, we have to participate in having one, anyway. We’re throwing out the uneasy compromise by which people are allowed to exercise their own abortion-choice while others are allowed not to take part, and are replacing it with an anti-choice system in which we all will be required to take part in abortion whether or not we find it to be right.

Remember those people who say we need to ban smoking in all restaurants in order to protect the workers? Sure, people should be allowed to choose whether or not to patronize an establishment that allowed smoking, but what about the workers? We can’t tell them that if they don’t like it they should find a different employer (they would tell us). But now it turns that we can very well tell doctors and nurses that if they don’t like participating in certain activities detrimental to the health of a fetus, that they should find, not just a different employer, but an entirely different line of work.

A “walking supply” was what you might use to escape a Siberian Gulag, according to Anne Applebaum’s book. Escapes were difficult because the camps were a long way from anywhere. So you and your buddy might talk a third person into doing an escape with you. You’d want to pick someone who was well fed, like the camp cook. He would be the “meat”. If you ran out of food, you’d kill him and eat him. The nice thing about it was that you didn’t even have to carry him until the food was needed.

Not everyone could pull this off, though. It would help if you were already a hardened criminal.

That was in the Soviet Union. Here in the west, you don’t need to embark on a life of crime to make yourself into the kind of person who could do that. It may be only step 2 in a five-step program, but in the U.K., the prime minister is pushing for legislation that would allow the creation of “savior siblings,” according to the Daily Mail. If your kid has a rare disease, you could generate others who could be tissue or organ donors, and use genetic screening to abort any who wouldn’t fit the need. The idea is catching on in the U.S., too, according to this Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article.

It’s not quite the same as a walking supply, but it’s a step closer than we were before.

And a lot of the rationalizations could come in handy when get to Step 5. Look at some of the comments at the end of that Daily Mail article:

… should church leaders in the House of Lords, who have not been elected, be allowed to influence the laws of the people?

Many such arguments have merit on both sides and tipping the scales towards the greater good is all that conscience demands.

Morality aside, there’s an interesting twist to one of the “walking supply” stories in Applebaum’s book.

The two men did as planned–they killed and ate the cook–but they had not bargained on the length of the journey. They began to get hungry again:

Both knew in their hearts that the first to fall asleep would be killed by the other. So both pretended they weren’t tired and spent the night telling stories, each watching the other closely. Their old friendship made it impossible for either to make an open attack on the other, or to confess their mutual suspicions.

Finally, one fell asleep. The other slit his throat. He was caught, Buca claims, two days later, with pieces of raw flesh still in his sack.

What exactly was the point of going to all the trouble of winning World War II if Britain was just going to adopt the moral values of Nazi Germany, anyway? (And what’s the purpose of having a debate if it’s a foregone conclusion that it will become law?)

News item:

PARENTS of sick children in Britain will be allowed to use IVF to create “spare-part babies” under controversial laws published yesterday.

The legislation will dramatically relax rules on IVF clinics creating “saviour siblings” who can help cure their older brothers and sisters of medical conditions such as leukemia.

Experts said that one day they could create a “designer baby” with kidneys perfectly compatible with a sibling suffering renal failure.

More immediately, saviour siblings could give umbilical cord blood or bone marrow to family members in the hope of treating conditions such as sickle cell anaemia.

The Government’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill will be debated in British Parliament and is expected to become law in 2009.

What lessons are children going to learn from this? How about these:

• Saving our own skins is worth more than anything in the world.
• No sacrifice is too great for someone else to make for my sake.
• My parents value me for my health more than for anything that might give meaning to my life.