Effectively, the witchfinders have come for Rebecca Lengthy-Bailey. Web site Purple Roar has unearthed Lengthy-Bailey’s responses to the query of
Effectively, the witchfinders have come for Rebecca Lengthy-Bailey. Web site Purple Roar has unearthed Lengthy-Bailey’s responses to the query of abortion on the grounds of incapacity. She wrote:
‘It’s at present authorized to terminate a being pregnant as much as full-term on the grounds of incapacity, whereas the higher restrict is 24 weeks if there isn’t any incapacity.
I personally don’t agree with this place and agree with the phrases of the Incapacity Rights Fee that ‘the context through which dad and mom select whether or not to have a baby ought to be one through which incapacity and non-disability are valued equally.’
That is, you may need thought, a fairly uncontentious commentary, primarily based as it’s on the quite basic premise that folks with disabilities are of equal worth to anybody else. And there’s no extra basic discrimination than the appropriate to kill a disabled foetus as much as delivery, which you’ll’t do to a traditional foetus.
The numbers concerned aren’t big within the context of the general abortion price of over 200,000 a yr, however they’re not totally negligible. In 2018, 3,269 abortions had been carried out on the idea that there was a ‘danger that the kid could be born critically handicapped’. That largely means situations like Down’s syndrome however may also embody situations comparable to Cystic Hygroma, which may be very nasty however don’t at all times want therapy.
But there’s been a terrific fuss concerning the revelation, leading to RLB’s workplace swiftly clarifying that she “unequivocally helps a lady’s proper to decide on”, mentioning her help for the (flagrantly undemocratic) extension of abortion to Northern Eire within the absence of the Stormont meeting. Emily Thornberry hasn’t been sluggish to reap the benefits of the scenario, saying that she has ‘been on the frontline within the battle towards…anti-abortion legal guidelines in Northern Eire’.
Truly RLB, whom I’d by no means considered in another capability than as a Corbyn continuity candidate, went additional in her interview with the Salford cathedral folks.
She defended the appropriate of anti-abortion candidates to carry elected workplace. Evaluate and distinction with the Lib Dems beneath frightful Jo Swinson, which first adopted defecting Labour MP Robert Flello however then dropped him like a sizzling pan-handle over his views on abortion and homosexual marriage, which he voted towards.
RLB’s Catholicism goes additional than these items, although. Moderately movingly, she noticed that her Catholic religion taught her that “the one society we ought to be striving for is one primarily based on love”. That’s made her appear an altogether extra rounded, attention-grabbing particular person.
The one factor that worries me about all that is the twinning of concern about abortion with Catholicism. Definitely the church has stood agency on the difficulty, however solely on the idea that it values the sanctity of human life, womb to tomb, which I’d have thought most non-religious folks do instinctively. There’s nothing non secular about being pro-life. The earlier agnostic and atheist pro-lifers break the connection between opposition to those issues and faith, the higher.