This, seems worth pondering on the state of the US’s ongoing 4th generation civil war as a civilisation level issue: A draft Supreme Court opinion overruling Roe v. Wade has been leaked to the press in one of the greatest scandals to ever hit the nation’s highest court and a possible attempt to intimidate one or more justices to reverse their vote or to ignite a liberal brushfire to pack the Supreme Court before Democrats lose Congress in November. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” the possible draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito reads, making the case that where the Constitution is silent, the American people govern themselves Read More ›

Guttmacher: Unintended pregnancy and abortion are experiences shared by people around the world. These reproductive health outcomes occur irrespective of country income level, region or the legal status of abortion. Roughly 121 million unintended pregnancies occurred each year between 2015 and 2019.* Of these unintended pregnancies, 61% ended in abortion. This translates to 73 million abortions per year. Worldometer has flopped over to 2021. A captured image gives abortion numbers per WHO for 2020: The 30 million spread simply tells us that these statistics are problematic. However the message — an ugly one — is clear. END

Of course, first, a happy new year! However, as we ponder the cultural consequences of inherently amoral evolutionary materialistic scientism, the following clip should give us pause: >>More human beings died in abortions than any other cause of death in 2019, a new report indicates. A heartbreaking reminder about the prevalence of abortion, statistics compiled by Worldometers indicate that there were over 42.3 million abortions world-wide in 2019. The independent site collects data from governments and other reputable organizations and then reports the data, along with estimates and projections, based on those numbers. When contrasting the abortion numbers to other causes of death, including cancer, HIV/AIDS, traffic accidents and suicide, abortions far outnumbered every other cause. By contrast, 8.2 million Read More ›

Pediatric neurosurgeon Michael Egnor : Fetuses not only experience pain but experience it more intensely than do adults: “Much of pro-abortion advocacy is science denial—the deliberate misrepresentation of science to advance an ideological agenda. Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University, wrote a misleading essay on that theme in the New York Times, “Science won’t end this debate” (January 22, 2019).” Michael Egnor, “More.” at Mind Matters     See also: The Governor Of Virginia: Killing Babies Is OK By Me (Barry Arrington) and Does brain stimulation research challenge free will? (Michael Egnor) Follow UD News at Twitter!

Today is the March for life in Washington DC. Speakers include: Rep. Paul Ryan, Pam Tebow, Matt Birk and others. We have someone on the ground from the UD family and will be giving updates as we get them across the day. Remember, globally, the abortion holocaust toll rises at a million or thereabouts per week, on Guttmacher-UN figures. The total since the early 1970’s exceeds 800 millions. For shame! So, developing: U/D No 1: I found a live stream here. (I won’t even try an embed with this one.) U/D 2: US Pres Trump is to address the MFL by satellite feed, 100,000 expected. A first. U/D 3: Live address is to be at 1 pm EST, and will Read More ›

In a current thread that is nominally on the latest allegedly earth-like exoplanet, predictably that is where distractors will come up on things like: >>[RVB8, 21:] “800 million (unusual figure) unborn aborted fetuses. Perhaps this is true, it’s certainly true abortions have occured, and probably happen at a faster rate now becuse of the ‘day after’ pill.”>> Of course, equally predictably, this sort of talking point did not crop up in the many threads where I have repeatedly outlined exactly how this estimate was put together. (Such are the now all too predictable patterns of objections and dismissals we see at UD and in the penumbra of attack sites. More on that in the PS.) I answered in a following Read More ›

In my last post, I commended Professor P. Z. Myers for arguing that children with Down syndrome are fully human, and that their lives are worth living, even as I noted that Myers and I disagree on the morality of abortion. In a new post, Myers proposes a thought experiment in support of his pro-choice stance. Astonishingly, he maintains that a pregnant woman has the right to end the life of the embryo or fetus she is carrying, even if (hypothetically) it were as intelligent as you or I. In a previous post, Myers had written: Even if I thought embryos were conscious, aware beings writing poetry in the womb (I don’t, and they’re not), I’d have to bow out Read More ›

If I hadn’t read it myself, I would never have believed that a professor of biology could have written this: “A liver cell cannot survive on its own except in the body (or a Petri dish), and a fetus cannot survive on its own until well into pregnancy. So if other cells are parasitic on the organism, and have DNA, and that DNA could potentially produce an entire person, why aren’t all of our cells ‘persons’? Is it not murder to pluck out a hair?” Jerry Coyne is a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. On December 27, he wrote a post entitled, Vatican scientist claims that “reason was created by God”; gets Read More ›

(In case you imagine this to be purely academic, cf. here) UD News has recently highlighted a  debate on how the academy has reacted to objections to a bioethics paper that advocated “post-birth abortion.” (Cf. a noteworthy objection, here.) Including, “post-birth abortion” of the healthy but undesirable. A telling clip from the JME paper: we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be. Such circumstances include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk. Accordingly, a second terminological specification is that we call such a practice ‘after-birth abortion’ rather than ‘euthanasia’ because the best interest of Read More ›

Richard Weikart’s essay, “A History of the Impact of Darwinism on Bioethics”* appears in 150 Years of Evolution: Darwin’s Impact of Contemporary Thought and Culture, showing the way that Darwinism has impacted discourse on eugenics, infanticide, euthanasia, etc.: In November 2009, scholars representing academic disciplines from across the globe gathered at San Diego State University to celebrate Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday and the sesquicentennial anniversary of the publication of his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Out of this event now comes 150 Years of Evolution: Darwin’s Impact on Contemporary Thought and Culture. Edited by Mark Richard Wheeler with the assistance of William A. Nericcio, this compelling, interdisciplinary anthology features studies of interest to diehard Darwin Read More ›