The Act of Settlement 1700 section II prohibits the new royal baby boy (qua successor to the throne) from ever being a Catholic. Hasty efforts by way of the Succession to the Crown Act 2013 are still not law.[fn] The Succession to the Crown Act must be accepted in each of the 15 Commonwealth countries where the Queen is head of state. While three countries, Canada, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, have approved the law, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Papua New Guinea, Barbados, Tuvalu, Grenada, Solomon Islands, St Lucia, and the Bahamas still have not.[/fn] At the same time, the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill 2013 has received the Royal Assent. The requirement of any constitutional consensus across the Commonwealth has been by-passed.
Continue reading “Royal Successor Can’t Marry a Catholic But Can Marry a Man”Normalising a Homicidal Culture of Healthcare
The question of widespread neglect and passive euthanasia in hospitals, hospices and care homes has long been the subject of public and professional disquiet. For years, many of us have been warning of the lethal implications of institutionalising passive euthanasia and, in particular, sedation-dehydration regimes, as part of any national strategy especially in view of the catalogue of financial, political and research interests that there are ininstitutionalising homicide. The sick and elderly are costly and time-consuming, tissue and body parts are valuable, hospital beds, expensive, and cadavers all too useful.
Continue reading “Normalising a Homicidal Culture of Healthcare”Perils of Hyperovulation
Describing the process of becoming biological mother to at least two children she will never herself nurture or rear, a former Californian college student, Leah Campbell, highlights the perils of hyperovulation. In a naive yet candid account, she describes the pleasure of having passed the “pre-screenings with flying colours” and her hopes of paving the way to a “debt-free postgraduate life for [herself]”. A good-looking young woman, it is not difficult to see why, eugenically speaking, she would pass the fertility industry’s eugenics test with flying colours.
Continue reading “Perils of Hyperovulation”Presumed Consent to Organ Harvesting
Wales is now the first country in the United Kingdom to enforce a system of presumed consent to use of a person’s organs for transplant. The introduction of this legislation has set a dangerous precedent for the UK. Interestingly it was assisted by supine ‘faith leaders’ whose nauseating appeasement of oppressive and reckless practices meant that they agitated only for ‘soft’ presumed consent legislation instead of opposing the practice altogether.
The system has long been pressed by the international transplant lobby, body parts industry and utilitarian philosophers (invariably under the sway of big Pharm) with a penchant for “end-justifies-the-means” thinking and a persistent failure to understand the nature of human ignorance and vice.
Continue reading “Presumed Consent to Organ Harvesting”Genetically Modified Humans and Three Parent Children
The British fertility industry and theDepartment of Health have announced their intention to press ahead with attempts to introduce internationally novel legislation to permit human germ-line gene modification involving genetic material from three human parents. As well as scrambling a child’s identity in new ways this would allow, for the first time, designer human beings.
The new techniques – Pronuclear Transfer (PNT), Maternal Spindle Transfer (MST) and Nuclear Genome Transfer (NGT) are presented as a minor extension of IVF. The introduction of genetically modified humans born of biological material from three people, however, heralds a novel assault on human identity and the start of a designer eugenics race.
Continue reading “Genetically Modified Humans and Three Parent Children”Public Order Act Amendments Confer Few Article 9 Protections
Proposed amendments to the Public Order Act aim to protect from prosecution, although perhaps not job loss, those who believe same-sex marriage to be contrary to public interest. These amendments highlight an important conceptual problem. In Eweida and Others v. UK four Christian applicants challenged employment tribunal decisions against them largely on Article 9 (freedom of belief) grounds. Although Nadia Eweida’s case in favour of wearing a small cross to work at British Airways was successful in the ECHR, three other applicants failed. In particular, Lillian Ladele lost her job as a registrar for failing to perform civil partnerships once the Civil Partnerships Act 2004 was enacted.
Continue reading “Public Order Act Amendments Confer Few Article 9 Protections”Not in My Name
A recent report by a Commission on Assisted Suicide funded by euthanasia advocates, Terry Pratchett and Bernard Lewis, ushered in by euthanasia supporter and Labour peer, Charles Falconer, and sponsored by Dignity in Dying (formerly the Voluntary Euthanasia Society), has found, predictably, that a legal framework should be investigated that would allow medical complicity in suicide. The fact that the 11-strong commission was made up of nine well-known proponents of euthanasia, led, inexorably, to an early-stage boycott of the inquiry by over 40 organisations, including the British Medical Association.
Continue reading “Not in My Name”Incentivising Death
The recent revelation that the rolling out of the Liverpool Care Pathway as the NHS National End of Life Care strategy in 2008 had been financially incentivised and implemented with astonishing compliance emerged as a thought-provoking development. Many of us have been warning for years of the financial, political and research interests that there are in institutionalising sedation-and-dehydration regimes, and then, inevitably, medical homicide. Freedom of Information Act requests exposed the millions of pounds that have been paid for the implementation of this national end-of-life care strategy. Much more interestingly, they showed that some hospital trusts had been paid these funds for ensuring that up to two thirds of all deaths were Pathway deaths.
Continue reading “Incentivising Death”Infanticide: A Reply to Giubilini and Minerva
In this article I reply to Alberto Giubilini and Francesco Minerva’s recent infanticide proposal which, I argue, is predicated on their personism and actualism. According to these related ideas, human beings achieve their moral status in virtue of the degree to which they are capable of laying value upon their lives or exhibiting certain qualities or being desirable to third-party family members. This article challenges these criteria, suggesting that these and related ideas are rely on arbitrary and discriminatory notions of human moral status. Our propensity to sleep, fall unconscious, pass out and so on, demonstrates that we often exhibit our status as ‘potential persons’ who are not in the condition of attributing any value to their own existence. Our abilities, age and desirability can and do fluctuate. The equal dignity principle, distinguished in turn from both the excesses of vitalism and consequentialism, is analysed and defended in the context of human rights logic and law. The normalisation of non- and involuntary euthanasia, via such emerging practices as the self-styled Groningen Protocol, is considered. Substituted consent to the euthanasia of babies and others is scrutinised and the implications of institutionalising non-voluntary euthanasia in the context of financial, research and political interests are considered. The impact on the medical and legal professions, carers, families and societies, as well as public attitudes more generally, is discussed. It is suggested that eroding the value of human life carries with it significant destructive long-term implications. To elevate some, often short-term, implications while ignoring others demonstrates the irrational nature of the effort to institutionalise euthanasia.
Imprisoned by the Court of Protection
Years before the Mental Capacity Act 2005 came into force, the proposed Mental Incapacity Bill, as it was then called, was criticised as raising serious human rights concerns involving degrading treatment, gross discrimination and threats to life and liberty. Among other matters, the legislation implied the following:
Continue reading “Imprisoned by the Court of Protection”