Abortion, Amnesty International and a confession

The other links in this post are optional, but not this one. [I've mislaid my source, but I'm fairly sure it was Laban Tall]. A sample of the things that become possible once we grow out of the primitive delusion that there is a God and men and women are created in his image: eugenics, once the province of scary men in jackboots, is now available on the NHS.

Amnesty International think there's a universal human right at stake here. Hint: not the unborn child's. As Shuggy says:-

'The only conclusion one can draw is that Amnesty International's official position now is that the unborn child is not human.'

Shuggy's so right about Amnesty, and it's a real shame. The beauty of the organization used to be that it did exactly what it said on the tin. If you got locked up, or worse, for saying the wrong thing about your government, Amnesty would speak up for you, whether you were a communist in Pinochet's Chile or a born-again Christian in the Gulag. But somewhere along the way mission creep set in - doubtless partly through straightforward corporate megalomania, but mainly, I think, because they got hijacked by the people who think there's no such thing as politically impartial and that anything they consider desirable must be a basic human right.

They're the same crowd who run the aid charities. There's no point in giving to Oxfam, Christian Aid or Cafod these days if you just want to help poor people. You need to believe they are in possession of the magic formula that will Make Poverty History, and not be worried that the formula begins by systematically ignoring the countries which are actually succeeding in making poverty history.

Frau Grumpy (patronizing sexist reference just in case Catherine Bennett happens to read this) agrees with me about Amnesty, so there'll be no Amnesty Christmas cards from the Grumpy household this year, I'm afraid.

As for abortion: it begins to look my Rubicon crossing. This is where it all gets deadly serious. I'm shocked that abortion is being used to weed out club feet and cleft palates (jaw defects may not yet have been taken as grounds for a termination, but we must assume that there is nothing in principle to prevent that from happening: the thought fills me with particular horror since Frau Grumpy, like Joanna Jepson, has one). But there's something else: I'm shocked that it has taken a chance click on a link from a blog to tell me that this is going on. Of course I could blame the media I relied on before I started blogging, which have no interest in enlightening me. If I'm honest with myself, though, I could have taken steps to inform myself, and I didn't.

I was always uncomfortable with the way the 'woman's right to choose' slogan is chanted at full volume to drown out discussion of the ethical assumptions it rests on. But I've been all too ready to suppress my doubts and go along with the left/liberal herd, accepting that if women are granted the power of life and death over their babies of course they will all exercise it responsibly - and even if they don't it's no business of mine.

And yet human lives are being discarded - lives which, for many a bien-pensant liberal, are apparently of less account than a hunted fox or a laboratory rat. I am quite certain there are people who know me who, if they read this post, would take it as conclusive proof that I have become a reactionary, misogynistic turncoat. But there's a bit too much at stake to be influenced by the fear of losing friends.