No woman should be forced to carry a child?

As the ASC abortion appeal starts,  Blair Mulholland argues that as human life starts at conception, abortion should be avoided, but as no woman should be forced to carry a child against their will, it should be free and legal.

So what woman is actually FORCED to carry a child?

Any woman (or man) having sex has freely chosen to run the risk of pregnancy. No contraception method is foolproof. So any woman becoming pregnant from consensual sex has freely chosen this. No-one is forcing her to carry a child, she put herself in that situation.

So we don’t need free, legal abortions to stop women being forced to carry children, abortion just allows both women and men to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions.

The ONLY time a woman is forced to carry a child is when she is raped, and conceives (which is rare from rape as it is hard to conceive in that stressful situation).

Therefore, as no woman should be forced to carry a child against her will, rape should be illegal. It already is? Oh, good.

The only time this argument can possibly be valid is when arguing for an abortion after rape, and even then the morality of abortion can be disputed. Otherwise this argument is irrelevant.

More posts on abortion.

Dodgy student alcohol and sex survey

I have just taken part in the Tertiary Student Health Project survey, an Otago University project looking into alcohol use and sexual behaviour among students. Unfortunately the questions were designed such that even myself, a happily married monogomous father with no risk of contracting STDs, would have sounded like a risk-taking no-condom-using childless student! There just weren’t options to choose to describe my actual situation, which will make the results highly questionable.

Fortunately they had a comments section at the end, this is what I wrote:

I have a number of concerns about the accuracy of the data collected in this survey.

Your questions on sexual behaviour are designed assuming all sexual behaviour is casual. Although you would never guess it reading the response to this survey, many people are still married before having sex. If you did not realise this, you may have just consulted with one sector of the student population in designing your survey, and it may be advisable to consult wider before the next one. Your survey equates “a long-term relationship” (whatever that is defined as) and engagement with marriage, when there is a world of difference between the three, especially in terms of duration and break-up rates.

You never ask in what situation the respondent had their first sexual contact, which is far more likely to have been influenced by alcohol than what they happened to be doing in the past 12 months.

You also ask whether you have ever unintentionally got someone pregnant, without asking whether you had intentionally got someone pregnant – there seems to be an assumption that pregnancy is always accidental and undesirable, which is nonsense. As a result your survey will under-record the true rate of pregnancy among students.

You ask about condom use without asking about risk factors for STDs. For example:
– You ask whether you have only had the one partner, but not whether if you have had more you have tested clear for STDs and thus have none to pass on.
– You never ask whether your partner was a virgin before you, or whether she has tested clear of STDs.
If both partners are clear of STDs, they may be unlikely to use condoms. This will bias condom use rates downwards, while having no bearing on STD risk.
– You have equated a long-term-relationship (“long-term” for one respondent may mean 10 years, for another 1 month: high break-up rate and children are usually not desired) and engagement, with marriage (lowest break-up rate as intended to be permanent, children are generally desired), so the condom use between these relationships will be markedly different but never identified in your survey.
– You never asked whether the respondent was trying for a baby.
– You never asked whether the respondent’s partner was using alternative forms of contraception. (You may have asked female respondents this, but you never asked male respondents, despite the major influence this will have on male condom use. Remember not all partners are students.)

Because of these issues your survey is likely to show a low rate of condom use and therefore imply a high risk of STD contraction, which could be used to push policies encouraging condom use on campus, when in actual fact you have no idea what the actual rate of condom use among those at risk of contracting STDs is, because you never asked the right questions.

Having been in this survey I will have to be highly skeptical of the results when they are published unfortunately, especially when making just a couple of extra answers available to pick could have made this information actually useful. However students are behaving this survey will come up with some statistics that could be used to push a particular political line (that of the Family Planning Association), rather than obtaining well-rounded factual data that can be used by people of all opinions. This is very disappointing, because alcohol and sex are highly important issues at university, and need to be understood well in order to help students.

I trust that you will publicise the actual questions asked alongside the results, to ensure people can judge the accuracy for themselves. It would be advisable to consult wider in formulating the questions for your next survey.

Unfortunately, I must advise you to take the results of the Tertiary Student Health Project with a pinch of salt when they are finally published. Which is a great shame, this project is no doubt expensive and could easily have been very useful.

Sex education in the UK

The problems with sex education are reaching the mainstream newspapers in the UK. It would be great to see an article like this one (from the Times) published here:

Those who can, do, according to the old saying, and those who can’t, teach. That has always seemed to me unfair. However, I have come to think that those who can’t teach, teach sex education.

Judged by its results – not a bad way of judging – sex education has been an utter failure. The increase in sex education here in recent years has coincided with an explosion of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease (STD) far worse than anywhere else in Europe. Since the government’s teenage pregnancy strategy was introduced in 1999, the number of girls having abortions has soared. You might well be tempted to argue that sex education causes sexual delinquency.

This is exactly what we have seen in New Zealand. It is great to see a frank article on the issue. Sex education isn’t working. The solution is not more of the same to younger and younger children, but actually changing tack.

Hat tip: Semper Vita

UK Police to ignore public sex

At the moment the UK is a few steps ahead of NZ in terms of the destruction of morality, here is an example of what we have to watch out for here:

Public homosexual activity in parks and public bathrooms must not be impeded by law enforcement officials except as a last resort, says a new set of draft guidelines for UK police.

Deputy Chief Constable Michael Cunningham of Lancashire Police, who drew up the 21-page report, titled “Guidance on Policing Public Sex Environments”, wrote, “In any event it is not for the police to take the role of moral arbiter.” Rather than arresting those who have sex in public, the police should instead guard the “human rights of those people who frequent open spaces” to seek anonymous copulation partners, an activity known as “cruising.”

Basically, as far as I can gather, people who don’t want to be known as gay but still want to have homosexual sex are gathering in parks to do it, in some cases so they don’t have to let their wives know (although the wording is so painfully PC you have to read it twice to figure out what they are really talking about). And the police are being told that it is a “human right” to do this and they can’t be stopped.

There is a big difference between doing something behind closed doors and doing it in public. You should be able to go for a walk in the park without seeing that sort of activity. The police should be policing what occurs in public land, not being told to ignore it. Disgusting.

Watch out NZ, Helen Clark has seized control of our police force, we need a change of government urgently.

Hat tip: Semper Vita

This election is about freedom

Garth George has written an excellent column on what this election is really about – not “trust”, not even the economy, but freedom. And he’s dead right.

This election is all about freedom – the freedom of the individual to live his or her life with as little interference as possible from the state, its politicians and minions.

It’s all about being loosed from the tyranny of dogmatic “do-it-my-way-or-else” socialism, which contends that the state knows best how to spend our money, how we use our property and how we run our families.

But isn’t Labour supposed to be all for freedom? Isn’t it full of liberals pushing for homosexuals to be free to marry, for prostitutes to be free to be prostitutes, for abortions to be readily available etc? Aren’t we supposed to be more free now than ever before? Well GJ and PhilBest were discussing this the other day on Kiwiblog:

GJ:

The only freedom this current lot gives us is SEXUAL freedom, everything else they want to control!

Think about it – all those examples I came up with before were about sex. Is there a single thing Labour/Green want to free up that isn’t to do with sex? For Green maybe drugs, that is all.

PhilBest:

Norwegian blogger “Fjordman”; in “Sweden; the Triumph of Cultural Marxism”:

The British historian Roland Huntford wrote a book in the early 1970s about Sweden called The New Totalitarians. He noted how equality between the sexes was aggressively promoted from the late 1960s and early 70s. This was closely linked to a campaign for sexual liberation:

“Indeed, the word ‘freedom’ in Swedish has come to mean almost exclusively sexual freedom, product perhaps of an unadmitted realization that it is absent, or unwanted, elsewhere. Through sex instruction at school for the young, and incessant propaganda in the mass media for the older generations, most of Sweden has been taught to believe that freedom has been achieved through sex. Because he is sexually emancipated, the Swede believes that he is a free man, and judges liberty entirely in sexual terms.…The Swedish government has taken what it is pleased to call ‘the sexual revolution’ under its wing. Children are impressed at school that sexual emancipation is their birthright, and this is done in such a way as to suggest that the State is offering them their liberty from old-fashioned restrictions.”

By old-fashioned restrictions, read Christian morality. Huntford noted that this came together with efforts to downplay or attack Western culture prior to the French Revolution. As Mr. Olof Palme, who was Swedish Socialist Prime Minister from the late 1960s until 1986, said: “The Renaissance So-called? Western culture? What does it mean to us?”

“As political and economic freedom diminishes” said Aldous Huxley’s in Brave New World, “sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase.” This fits perfectly with Huntford’s description. The state strips away your personal, economic and political freedom, yet grants you sexual freedom in return, boldly hailing itself as your liberator. Sweden in 2008 is a society with no real freedom of speech if you deviate from the ruling ideology. The more crushing ideological censorship and political repression become, the more frantic the displays of “sexual freedom” get. Sex is freedom; freedom means sex, and only sex.

State authorities present this as liberation of women and sexual liberation, but it is actually about breaking down rival sources of power: The traditional Christian culture and the nuclear family. This leaves the state more powerful since it can regulate all aspects of life and, most importantly, can indoctrinate the nation’s children as it sees fit, without undue parental interference. The state replaces your family, raises your children and cares for your elderly…..”

We oppose immorality because it is immoral, and as Christians or conservative-thinking non-Christians we know morality is important for a host of reasons. But there is more to it that this. Sexual freedom can be used to hide a socialist agenda. We need to be very wary of it

When we stand up for morality we must also remember that we are blowing away the smokescreen of socialism.

Care workers told to help clients masturbate

Ok, now this is just disgusting if the allegations are true. Basically care workers allege that they were instructed to help mentally disabled clients masturbate if that was what they wanted, which they rightly refused to do, and they claim this is asking them to be prostitutes. I fully agree. But we can expect further cases like this in a country where prostitution is legal.

In addition to the entire case being ridiculous and disgusting:

None of the six women had masturbated any clients, including the one remaining employee, who is Maori and said she had been told she was exempt on cultural grounds.

So it is ok to expect white women to act as prostitutes, but not brown women?

The woman who allegedly told the workers they were to assist their clients to masturbate is Claire Ryan, whom I assume is the “Relationships and Sexuality Advisor” by the same name at IHC. If you are interested in the sort of stuff that IHC teaches about sexuality, download their September 05 Networker newsletter. This newsletter discusses disabled children growing up and becoming sexual. Not once does it mention whether it is appropriate for teenagers to become sexually active – it just assumes that they will and parents just have to let them do it.

Very worrying stuff, but not surprising at all – this is the exact same rubbish that Family Planning spouts to teenagers at school. In the few encounters I have had with Family Planning, I have found:

• A school educator boasting to a 6th-form class about how she had managed to convince 12-year-old boys that if they didn’t masturbate their balls would explode, and thinking this was hillarious.
• The same woman maintaining in front of the class that you could not catch HPV (virus that causes genital warts and cervical cancer) while using a condom, even when challenged, but then admitting privately after the class that she knew full well this was incorrect.
• A Family Planning nurse claiming that the morning after pill worked by stopping sperm working and preventing conception, not by allowing conception but preventing implantation (the truth, which I regard as an early abortion).
• A GP who recommends all his patients to ignore everything Family Planning says because he is sick of fixing up all the messes their terrible advice has made for so many of his patients.

This is the state of sex education in NZ. You can walk into Family Planning and get a case of 144 taxpayer-funded condoms for a $3 prescription fee, while Pharmac struggles to fund medication that could potentially save lives. And no-one will even ask you whether you really think you should be having sex at 13 even though it is illegal.

This is why we need the Family Party to push abstinence first as the best option.

Sexually active teen girls depressed

A study has found sexually active teenage girls are more likely to be depressed than chaste girls.

Research which appeared recently in the Journal of Health Economics has found that young girls who are sexually active often experience feelings of guilt, low self-esteem, regret and shame, and are far more likely to suffer from depression than those who remain chaste.
…
The study found that sexually active teen girls have more than double the rate of depression of those who are not sexually active – 19 percent compared to 9.2 percent.
…
Dr. Trevor Stammers, a lecturer on sexual ethics and chairman of the Christian Medical Fellowship in the UK, said the new study confirmed that most girls “retrospectively showed regret about early intercourse.”

This may be partly because early sexual activity causes depression, but in my opinion is mainly the other way around – depressed teenage girls with a low self-esteem are more likely to seek to be valued in a sexual relationship than girls who are comfortable with themselves.

This is where fathers are important. A girl will want to be valued by men, either consciously or subconsciously. Without a father to value her (or with an abusive father) a girl is more likely to have low self-esteem and seek male affection and value in a sexual relationship. If we ever want to reduce our rates of teen pregnancy, depression, STDs, and single parenthood we must support and encourage fathers. You won’t stop these things with reactionary band-aids like condoms and antidepressants, you need to address the root causes – which come back to the family.

Hat tip: Family First

EDIT: If you have found this post while searching for support as you or someone you know is pregnant or has just had an abortion, Bethlehem House (Family Life International) offers free crisis pregnancy and post-abortion counseling in New Zealand. Check out www.pregnantandworried.org.nz or call 0800 3675433.

If you are not in New Zealand do some internet searching and you may find a similar local service.

Marriage better than cohabitation

The Telegraph has a great article on why marriage is far better than cohabitation for children:

An in-depth study claims almost half of babies are now born outside marriage in Britain.

It goes on to warn that live-in relationships tend to be much shorter than marriages, and therefore many of these babies will end up being raised by just one parent.

The report, based on an analysis of 10,000 households over 18 years, says there are “long-term negative consequences” for those who grow up with either just a mother or a father.

Children in one-parent families do worse at school, are less likely to get good jobs and suffer more health problems, it claims.

…

“The time couples spend living together in cohabiting unions before either marrying each other or separating is usually very short, the median duration being about two years.

“The unions that produce children are much less likely to be converted into marriage and more likely to break up than childless ones.”

He said only 35 per cent of cohabiting couples stay together until their children turn 16, compared with 70 per cent of married couples.

So not only is it bad for children to be born outside of wedlock, as they are more likely to be raised by only one parent, but if a couple has children while living together they are less likely to actually get married. This is worrying, considering the number of couples who live together these days and then may consider getting married once having children.

But none of this is new. We have always known marriage was best. Even some strong liberals recognise this. Why is this not accepted by parliament? Why does it take a Christian party to stand up and say we need to promote marriage? It is obviously far better than cohabitation and so should be promoted by all politicians.

The policies of parliament over the past few years, such as civil unions, and giving cohabiting couples essentially the same rights and responsibilities as married couples (such as 50/50 division of assets), have not been based on what is best for children. Rather they are based on ideology.

Marriage is a contract between two people to stick together for life. It exists to provide a secure home to raise children in. It is basically a contract that the two now wish to be considered as one – ie all assets are owned collectively (to be split 50/50 in the event of divorce, or all inherited by the other in the event of death), each has the responsibilities of the next of kin, one for tax purposes (income splitting) etc. To force the conditions of this contract on people who have not signed it (cohabiting couples) is not only immoral, but a breach of basic contract law.

It is akin to forced marriages, which most of us find unacceptable, but is in fact worse than this. If parents arrange a marriage of their child against the child’s will, at least the parents will generally have given some thought to who they are marrying the child to. But if the government passes a law effectively forcing people into a marriage situation, this applies whoever they happen to be living with – and in some cases this might be someone undesirable whom no parent would ever force their child into a marriage with. Somehow we find it abhorrent when parents force a child into marriage, but perfectly ok when the government effectively does this indiscriminately to thousands of couples at the stroke of a pen.

We must rebuild a marriage culture, and encourage and strengthen marriage, rather than undermining it.

Hat tip: Family First