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5,300 UK teens who aborted a baby in 2010 had at least one prior abortion

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Dina sent me this disturbing article from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Pro-life campaigners said young women were being ”let down in an appalling way” after it emerged three of the 38,269 teenagers who had a termination in 2010 had undergone the procedure at least seven times.

NHS figures released to the Press Association under the Freedom of Information Act show another two teenage girls had their seventh abortion in 2010, the most recent year for which data is available, while four more teenagers had a termination for the sixth time.

Fourteen teenage girls had their fifth abortion in 2010, 57 teens had a termination for the fourth time and 485 women aged 19 or under went through the procedure for a third time.

Rebecca Mallinson, of the Pro Life Alliance, said: ”There is something seriously wrong with a country where teenagers are having even one abortion, let alone repeat abortions to this extent.

“We are failing these young people in an appalling way, and storing up serious sexual health problems for the future, whether the direct issue of sexually transmitted diseases, but also the effects that multiple abortions can have on future fertility.

[…]Of the abortions carried out on teenage girls in 2010, more than 5,300 were on teenagers who had already had at least one termination.

In the UK, taxpayers are forced to provide free abortions as part of their government-run socialist health care system. Many Christian voters are OK with subsidizing abortions because they think that wealth redistribution is a good idea. They think that people should be able to live any way they want, disregarding morality, and then have someone else violate their conscience in order to pay for the messes that result. It’s just wrong, but many Christians who care more about feelings than economics support it. They think that paying for someone else’s murders is “fairness”.

Christians should support individual charity, and the best way to support that is to let people keep more of their own money and give them tax deductions for charitable contributions. Whenever you get a secular government involved in helping others, it quite often just makes it easier for them to sin and to do harm. Thoughtful Christians should not support that. When you make sin “free” for someone by paying the costs, they will sin even more. We should never make it easier for people to sin. The first rule of sound economics – which Christians should know – is that when you subsidize a behavior, you get more of that behavior.

If you want to help someone in trouble, then use your own money – don’t take someone else’s money through taxes. People who make mistakes learn not to make them when they are accountable to the person who bails them out of it. There has to be oversight over how charity is being done at the individual level – not everyone deserves charity just because they are in a jam. Only if they have learned their lesson should they get it – go and sin no more, as Jesus says. That’s why individual charity is morally superior to government-run social programs. In a very real sense, Christians who claim to be pro-life can actually be pro-abortion in practice when they make it easier for women to have abortions.

In a previous post, I also wrote about how Christians should not tell women that premarital sex is a valid pathway to marriage – that men can be shamed and coerced into marriage after recreational sex with slogans like “man up”. That’s another mistake that many pastors make that increases the number of abortions. We have to start thinking things through if we are going to stop abortion.

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UK doctors who refuse to perform sex changes can be banned from practicing

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Dina sent me this alarming article from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

The General Medical Council has issued guidance warning that it would be “discriminatory” for doctors not to prescribe either the pill or morning-after pill because they disagree with people having sex before marriage.

[…]The draft GMC guidelines, entitled Personal Beliefs and Medical Practice, stipulate that doctors “cannot be willing to provide married women with contraception but unwilling to prescribe it for unmarried women”.

“This would be a breach of our guidance as you would be refusing to treat a particular group of patients,” the document adds.

It also warns it would be illegal for doctors to refuse to carry out “gender reassignment”, because it would also amount to discrimination.

“Serious or persistent failure to follow this guidance will put your registration at risk,” the guidelines warn.

[…]Bishop Tom Williams of the Archdiocese of Liverpool claimed the advice discriminated against “certain groups of doctors” and risked creating an “atmosphere of fear” in which doctors would be “prohibited from ever expressing their own religion”.

Dr Peter Saunders, chief executive of the Christian Medical Fellowship and a former surgeon, said the rules would “marginalise Christian health professionals in Britain”.

He told the Daily Mail: “The problem is that 21st century British medicine now involves practices which many doctors regard as unethical.”

In other secular left regimes like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, conscience rights for medical professionals were similarly frowned upon. For a socialist, whatever the state wants is right, and who cares about the individual’s freedom?

Many Christians today in the United States, and especially in socialist countries, think that it is a good idea for the government to provide medical care to everyone, regardless of their lifestyle choices. It doesn’t matter if some people are freely choosing lifestyles that expose them to higher medical costs, like promiscuity or homosexuality. These socialist Christians think that individuals and their employers should be taxed in order to pay for abortions, sex changes, HIV treatments, and so on. The secular left things that birth control pills, which can cause abortions, are “health care”, and socialist Christians agree with them.

A dollar can only be spent one way. It can be spent on an apologetics book, or it can be spent on a sex change. It can be spent on private Christian school tuition or it can be spent on a partial birth abortion. What would God prefer? Would he rather that people who are sinning face higher costs for their sins, so that they think twice about committing them? Or would he rather that people who are sinning have the costs paid by someone else who isn’t, so that the sin becomes cheaper? Well, when I talk to socialist Christians, especially in Canada, they think that God is happier with a bigger secular government, so that sinful people have lower costs and government approval. That doesn’t make sense to me, though.

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Arthur Brooks: true fairness means rewarding merit, not spreading the wealth

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Arthur Brooks is an economist, a Christian and the President of my third favorite think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. He has been making a push lately to convince conservatives to become more articulate when making the case for the free enterprise system. One of his major ideas is that happiness is not related to the amount of money you have, but it’s related to how well you can achieve your own prosperity and independence by your own labor. His research shows that people are happiest when they feel in control of their own prosperity, even if they have less wealthy than people who depend on the government to take money away from others so they don’t have to work.

Here’s an article he posted on AEI entitled “True fairness means rewarding merit, not spreading the wealth”.

Excerpt:

There are two main ways to define fairness: fairness in terms of opportunity, and fairness in terms of outcomes. The first means leveling the playing field, and the second means spreading the wealth around. The first means lifting people up on the basis of merit, and the second means bringing successful people down.

[…]In a 2005 Syracuse University poll, researchers asked a cross-section of Americans if they b14elieve that “everyone in American society has an opportunity to succeed, most do, or only some have this opportunity.” Some 71 percent of respondents said that all or most Americans can get ahead.

This is consistent with most of our experiences. It’s almost impossible to argue that American success is not earned. We can all think of times when our hard work has gotten us ahead or when we’ve been punished at work or in life for making poor decisions. Even if America’s not perfectly meritocratic, we all see how hard work pays off.

Now, of course, America is far from perfectly fair. But that‘s because life isn’t fair. For instance, all other things being equal, taller men and prettier women make higher salaries than their shorter, plainer counterparts. Believe it or not, there are studies that show these things (as if we needed them). More seriously, some people have substandard elementary education or childhood nutrition, which creates a lifelong disadvantage. Worse still, some children are born into families that don’t emphasize the values that beget opportunity: honesty, hard work, and education.

We need to address these inequities. Still, we shouldn’t abandon the idea of meritocratic fairness just because not everybody has completely equal opportunity. But this is what the president appears to be asking us to do.

America is built around the shared values and aspirations of mobility, opportunity, and merit. Even if only, say, half the outcomes in our life are due to merit, that’s still the half within our control. We should focus on increasing the role of merit, not dismiss the idea because it’s imperfect. Without a belief in meritocratic fairness, we have little incentive to work hard, be honest and optimistic, and create value in our lives and the lives of others. Fatalism and envy are simply not American values.

We need to make the case for the free enterprise system now, using moral arguments like this, otherwise we are going to find ourselves treading the path of countries like Greece, where almost no one works and almost everyone depends on the government to take care of them. It’s not sustainable.