John C. Wright's Journal

Who here actually thinks that if a doctor makes a mistake during an abortion, and the baby is born live, they don’t just smother the baby quick with formaldehyde and pretend he was born dead?

The money quote: “The way it is dealt with is by sensible doctors and sensible
nurses keeping it under their hat and allowing the baby to pass away
peacefully.”

The article is here:

From http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/11493605?version=1

Leading doctors today called for a major overhaul to avoid babies being born
alive after abortions.

Pregnancy expert Professor Stuart Campbell has demanded rules should be
tightened after it was revealed that at least nine babies are known to have
survived terminations in recent years.

He said injections that were supposed to end their lives in the womb failed to
do so – and he called for stricter regulations to be enforced on the methods of
abortion.

Professor Campbell said that all abortions carried out after 18 weeks of
pregnancy should include an injection, followed by drugs, to induce labour and
a stillborn child.

Some consultants only give the injection in abortions after 22 weeks. Others,
he claims, do not use it at all.

Professor Campbell, who worked as an obstetrician at St George’s Hospital-
Tooting, and pioneered 4D scanning of babies in the womb at the Create Health
Centre for Reproduction and Advanced Technology in London, said: “It is really
unfair on the nurses and the parents to see the baby making some sort of
movement after birth.

“If after 18 weeks you just induce labour (without an injection first) a large
number would be born with a heartbeat and most of them will survive with a
heartbeat and will make movements.

“Certainly from 18 weeks they should inject the heart to stop it from beating,
but not everyone does this. Guidance should be given by the Royal College.

“There are cases where the injection does not work but this is very rare.”

One baby with Down’s Syndrome was to be aborted at a hospital in the home
counties but lived. It was transferred to St George’s Hospital, where it
received neonatal intensive care and survived. It is believed to have been
adopted.

Next week a motion is being tabled at the British Medical Association
conference that babies should be entitled to all the intensive care that babies
born prematurely receive. Consultant obstetrician-Jim Thornton said in the past
babies were born alive after abortion more regularly but “people didn’t make a
fuss and pretended not to realise the baby was born alive”.

He said that if a baby were to be born alive and viable then it must be given
medical help but there was a “grey area” where babies born in this manner at 22
or 23 weeks were on the cusp of being able to survive. Only 17 per cent of
babies born normally at 23 weeks survive.

Professor Thornton, of City Hospital, Nottingham, said: “Once it is born, you
can’t kill the baby but the law doesn’t say anything about to what degree you
resuscitate it.

“The way it is dealt with is by sensible doctors and sensible nurses keeping it
under their hat and allowing the baby to pass away peacefully.”

Professor Campbell does not believe that a baby born in this way should be kept
alive at all costs.

“What paediatricians do is spend resources keeping a baby that is going to die,
alive. It is absolute nonsense. It does show that is up to us (obstetricians)
to make sure the baby is not moving.”

Guidance issued by the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecologists states
that a legal abortion must not be allowed to result in a live birth.

But Professor Campbell says it does not make clear at what stage it is
necessary to stop the heartbeat before abortion.

One reviewer posts a word of warning before his reviews. He is reviewing SF from the 40’s, 50′ and 60’s.

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/sf/dani/intro.htm

I feel a frisson of horror when I come across these words in Dani Zweig’s
Belated Reviews: ” You may find yourself having to make allowances for writing
you consider shallow or politics you consider regressive.”

“Politics you consider regressive” …? Savor the implications of that phrase for
a moment. Zweig expects, and perhaps rightly, for the current generation to be
so alienated from books written only twenty or forty years ago as to require a
caution to make allowances.

The alienation has entirely to do with politics. The politics have become
central to life, affecting everything, so that even a book written for light
entertainment comes under political scrutiny for political messages. Zweig does
not caution, for example, readers of THE THREE MUSKETEERS or KNIGHTS OF THE
ROUND TABLE to hold in check their disagreement with the political and
religious system of the Catholic Monarchy. No such warning is needed. Readers
can enjoy the adventures of D’Artagnan or Lancelot without suffering a choking
wrath and disdain at the political systems governing their kingdoms. “Politics”
in that sense of the word—the art of government—is not meant. “Politics” here
refers to an all-embracing system of opinion and belief.

Note the use of the word “regressive.” Charming word. Notice what it implies.

Zweig does not caution readers to tolerate books whose politics the reader
might hold as the opinion of honorable and loyal opposition. The idea that one
could disagree with another political party, and still hold it to be a worthy
and honorable party, is forgotten in modern thought. The operative word
here, “regressive”, is one that the conservative would not use. The word means
that the political opposition comes from an earlier, more primitive (and hence
inferior) stage of the evolution and progressive enlightenment of man. As men
stand to apes, so (in the mind of the Progressive) the Party stands to the old
regime.

Zweig’s caution is repeated on another page: “The mores and prejudices of the
writers will rarely match our own. Their books may strike today’s readers as
racist or sexist or intolerant or naive. Fair enough: Ours could as easily
strike them as godless or obscene or pornographic or naive — and I’d love to
know what faults people half a century from now will find in our favorite
works…”

Note, again, there is no mention of the art of governing. “Politics” these days
is taken to include a set of attitudes and beliefs about relations between the
races, between the sexes, the moral stance of toleration and related
(progressive) beliefs.

In additional to being central, politics is also more divisive than before.
Previously, a book was written in for an audience that could be fairly assumed
to agree with the author on a number of basic, unquestioned, assumptions and
values. At that time in America, the two political parties agreed on the
basics: both were patriotic and religious, honoring God and Country. The
disagreements, with few exceptions, were about means to achieve agreed-upon
ends: the preservation of the civilization of the West, the American Way of
life.

The disagreements these days not as deep as before the Civil War, but they are
deeper than postwar America. The disagreement now centers around whether morals
are objective or subjective, whether the West merits preservation or
destruction. There can be no rational debate and no compromise where
disagreement runs so deep: small wonder our political debates these days are
little more than name-calling shouting-matches. The common ground needed for a
civilized debate of issues is absent.

I am not disagreeing with Zweig, by the by. I am merely horrified that politics
has taken all the all-embracing aspect of a religion and a culture, and that
two cultures, mutually incompatible, now exist in America.

When the children can no longer understand the thoughts of their neighbors, or
read the books their fathers wrote, something barbaric has happened.

The most recent Harry Potter movie, HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKHABAN might be a good movie or might be a poor one. I could not tell, because I could not take my eyes off the horror that was the costuming.

More hideous than the Dementors, some Hollywood hophead made the decision to dress the English schoolchildren, not in their handsome uniforms, but in scuffed-looking slovenly rags, perhaps suitable for drudges and slatterns. There were two scenes where the uniforms were worn, but in both cases, shirt tails were left out, neckties hanging loose, and a general atmosphere of ugliness settled over the scene.

The beautiful Hermione Grangier was forced to spend the entire film in some hideous get-up that looked like she just fell off a rag-picker’s wagon. When the Prisoner of Azkhaban makes an appearance, dressed in his tatters and rags, he is better turned out than the main characters.

You may be wondering how a viewer could notice or care about so small a thing as the dress of the characters, when so much attention had been lavished by the director on the plot, the drama, the lighting, the sets, the special effects. Perhaps no one else in the audience will notice or care. But for me, the decision to have the children look like scruffy castaways was as distracting as if the director had told them to pick their nose in every scene. I do not care if you are Lawrence Olivier reciting Hamlet: if you have your finger up your nostril, no one will notice your diction and comportment. So it was in this film.

Poor, poor Hermione. She would have looked so good if she had been allowed to wear something presentable.

No words of mine can convey how bad it looked. Maybe next film the costume department will have the children wear swim fins, shave their heads in patches, get a few tattoos and lip studs, give Harry a nipple ring, and and grow their armpit hairs to a length of two feet. No doubt that will make the American audiences swoon with admiration. Too bad this should have been a film about the characters invented by J.K. Rowling, the English school kids we loyal readers fell in love with.

I suppose the rest of the film was OK. I cannot really remember. I was too busy fighting the urge to dig my eyes out of their sockets with my thumbnails.

Boy Scouts still under heavy fire
David Limbaugh

June 4, 2004

One of the most outrageous injustices occurring in our society is the
homosexual activists’ relentless assault on the Boy Scouts of America (BSA),
all because the BSA will not conform its standards to accommodate their
lifestyle.
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John C. Wright will give a reading from his newly-published fantasy work, LAST GUARDIAN OF EVERNESS at the South Street Seaport Museum Melville Gallery, 213 Water Street, New York City, NY, on Monday, June 14th, 7.00 PM. Doors open at 6.30. The event is hosted by the New York Review of Science Fiction. For details see http://www.hourwolf.com/nyrsf/

The Longest Day was the first of a war that lasted for 45 years
By Kevin Myers
(Filed: 30/05/2004)

Sixty years ago, most of the landmass of the Eurasian continent and its
attendant islands was in thrall to totalitarian dictatorships. Freedom had
retreated to the Anglophone societies of Britain, its Empire and Commonwealth,
and its former colony the United States. In the history of the world, there has
never been such a titanic contest to the death between two sets of values: the
free, common-law societies of the English-speaking peoples against an entire
continent of various dictatorships with their hundreds of millions of
regimented slaves.
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