The criminal negligence of Our Lady and St Joseph

A fine example of G K Chesterton writing over 90 years ago something that could have been written today:

... Cruelty to children, one would have thought, was a thing about as unmistakable, unusual and appalling as parricide. In its application it has come to cover almost every negligence that can occur in a needy household. The only distinction is, of course, that these negligences are punished in the poor, who generally can't help them, and not in the rich, who generally can. But that is not the point I am arguing just now. The point here is that a crime we all instinctively connect with Herod on the bloody night of Innocents has come precious near being attributable to Mary and Joseph when they lost their child in the Temple. In the light of a fairly recent case (the confessedly kind mother who was lately jailed because her confessedly healthy children had no water to wash in) no one, I think, will call this an illegitimate literary exaggeration. Now this is exactly as if all the horror and heavy punishment, attached in the simplest tribes to parricide, could now be used against any son who had done any act that could colourably be supposed to have worried his father, and so affected his health. Few of us would be safe.

Eugenics and Other Evils

Unrequited love

A young woman goes to the doctor. She shows him a photograph of a young man.

"Doctor, I am so much in love with this man. I can't sleep. I can't function at all. I want him. I need him. He's not interested in me, and it hurts me so much. I am suffering. I will die if I can't have him. Is there anything you can do for me?"

The doctor thinks for a moment and then informs her, "I can find this man for you. We have therapies we can give him and drugs. Possibly mild electric shocks and hypnotism. I can make him love you."

The doctor's assistant traces the young man and he is subjected to these treatments, and falls in love with the girl whom he marries. They live happily ever after.

And, because the doctor made the lady happy, so she was no longer suffering or suicidal, what he did was right.

I mean, if there are no moral objections to providing a woman with the child she so wants but can't have, why should there be anything wrong with getting her the man she wants? She's suffering, and it would be inhumane not to.

Lenten meditations

Carmel Books blog has a list of links to Lenten meditations, from "Practical Meditations For Every Day in the Year on the Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ composed chiefly for the Use of Religious by a Father of the Society of Jesus."

Herd immunity

I've been seeing a lot of articles about vaccinations over the last week, so I've been thinking about the issue of herd immunity as an argument to have one's children vaccinated. (I'm not addressing the separate issue of unethically-derived vaccines in this post.)

With the 3-parent baby issue, topical at the moment, you get supporters of the procedure talking about how children with mitochondrial diseases suffer and die, while simultaneously dismissing the arguments of opponents as being emotive. With vaccines it's that children might get diseases, suffer, and maybe die if they're not vaccinated, but if opponents say children sometimes experience adverse reactions to the vaccines, suffer, and maybe die, they too are being emotive!

Both sides use emotive arguments. Understandably so. To vaccinate or not to vaccinate: either way there are risks.

Another motif that keeps recurring in arguments between pro-vaxxers and anti-vaxxers is the matter of herd immunity.

Someone declares that she (it is usually a she in these discussions!) has refused to have her children vaccinated, owing to concerns about possible reactions.

Then someone else argues back that she should have her children vaccinated, to contribute to herd immunity.

Now hang on a minute! What this argument is effectively saying is, you should be willing to sacrifice your child for the sake of the common good!

In my opinion, the only reason to vaccinate one's child should be to protect the child being vaccinated. If a parent decides vaccination is too risky, she (or he) is hardly going to decide to do it for the herd. Would any parent who had concerns be persuaded to vaccinate his child because the herd could use some more contributors?

It is one thing for an adult to decide to take that risk for the common good himself. That would be a selfless decision. But to decide that someone else (specifically an infant) should take that risk is another matter altogether.

Here is something that Pope Pius XII said on the subject of Medico-Moral Problems in 1952, not specifically about vaccination but I think the principle is applicable to this issue too:

"In support of their view they appeal to the fact that the individual is subordinate to the community, that the good of the individual must give way to the common good and be sacrificed for it....
... It must be pointed out that man as a person, in the final reckoning, does not exist for the benefit of society; on the contrary, the community exists for the individual man."

 Guide For Living

Mitochondria harvesting

Our MPs have voted 3-1 in favour of "three-parent babies", or "mitochondrial donation". This procedure is apparently supposed to eliminate mitochondrial disorders. So that's all right then...

This is manufacturing bespoke human beings. It is tampering with the creation of human life. So you have 3 parents, some third-siblings, maybe some two-third siblings. If you're lucky, you might have a full sibling. And you probably won't know who your third-siblings are. And the next generation will have five or six grandparents...

And it won't be long before parents will be forced to ensure their children have no genetic illnesses. And then, is it that hard to imagine that, eventually, anyone who hasn't been created by this process will have to pay more for insurance?

This is eugenics.

Oh, and the embryonic donors of the mitochondria? Seems they're destroyed once their mitochondria has been harvested.