Tag Archives: Compassion

News

UK: Most teenage pregnancies end in abortion

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Startling news from the other side of the pond.

Story here. (H/T My friend Andrew, who has an amazing marriage to Jen)

Excerpt:

Most pregnancies among girls under 18 ended in abortion last year.

Out of around 40,000 pregnancies more than 20,000 were terminated – the first time more had chosen this option than become mothers.

The figure is higher than 2007, when it just hit 50 per cent, and consistent with a steady upwards trend since the Government started its controversial Teenage Pregnancy Strategy in 1999.

Figures out on May 21 will also show that for the first time the number of abortions performed on women living in England and Wales topped 200,000.

The teenage pregnancy strategy, which has cost taxpayers more than £300million, was meant to halve the number of conceptions among girls under 18 in England between 1998 and 2010.

Ministers have tried to slash teenage pregnancies by freely handing out contraceptives and expanding sex education.

But the fall in pregnancy rates has not met Government targets, and in 2007 the rate actually rose.

Teenage pregnancy rates are now higher than they were in 1995. Pregnancies among girls under 16 – below the age of consent – are also at the highest level since 1998.

And:

Phyllis Bowman, of the Right to Life group, said: ‘Contraception campaigners and clinics depend for their living on providing contraception and abortion to underage girls.

‘The Government listens to them, but they are responsible for this disaster.

‘We have the highest level of sexually transmitted disease in Europe and the highest level of sexual activity among teenagers in Europe.

‘Unicef says we have the unhappiest teenagers in Europe.

‘The young have been deliberately sexualised in a culture which sneers at the idea of telling teenagers they should not have sex.’

“When you tax something you get less of it, and when you reward something you get more of it.” – Jack Kemp

I have an idea. Let’s find a special group of people. They must believe that the entire physical universe popped into being, fine-tuned for life, uncaused, out of absolute nothing. They must believe that the massive amount of DNA code in each cell sequenced itself, by chance. They must believe that morality and human rights are illusory. And that the purpose of life is to have happy feelings, even if it means exploiting the weakest among us.

Then let’s vote them into office so that they can impose their irrational worldview on us by government coercion!

What could go wrong?

Commentary

Thomas Sowell explains why too much compassion is a bad thing

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Here is something you can forward to all of your progressive friends! It clearly explains what’s wrong with too much moral permissiveness and compassion. When you subsidize certain decisions, you get more of those decisions, when you tax certain decisions, you get less of them.

Excerpt:

Since the average American never took out a mortgage loan as big as seven hundred grand– for the very good reason that he could not afford it– why should he be forced as a taxpayer to subsidize someone else who apparently couldn’t afford it either, but who got in over his head anyway?

Why should taxpayers who live in apartments, perhaps because they did not feel that they could afford to buy a house, be forced to subsidize other people who could not afford to buy a house, but who went ahead and bought one anyway?

And what about saving for a rainy day?

Who hasn’t been out of work at some time or other, or had an illness or accident that created unexpected expenses? The old and trite notion of “saving for a rainy day” is old and trite precisely because this has been a common experience for a very long time.

What is new is the current notion of indulging people who refused to save for a rainy day or to live within their means. In politics, it is called “compassion”– which comes in both the standard liberal version and “compassionate conservatism.”

The article concludes with this:

Even in an era of much-ballyhooed “change,” the government cannot eliminate sadness. What it can do is transfer that sadness from those who made risky and unwise decisions to the taxpayers who had nothing to do with their decisions.

Worse, the subsidizing of bad decisions destroys one of the most effective sources of better decisions– namely, paying the consequences of bad decisions.

I would just encourage you to try to communicate with your neighbors who may not have thought clearly about “the forgotten man”, the taxpayer who works hard, plays by the rules and then is stuck with the bill for the compassion of well-meaning socialists.

In one of my more popular posts, I explained how the compassion of socialist democrats got us into this financial crisis by forcing banks to make loans to people who couldn’t afford them.