Gene editing means culling human beings

 Imaginary yes, but the mind boggles at what undisciplined researchers might produce

With in vitro fertilisation and gene editing we - the human race - are at the point we were at in the 1930s and early 1940s as knowledge grew about the atom and how the energy it held could be manipulated. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, the American effort to engineer an atomic bomb, put into words what some have subsequently called the Oppenheimer Principle:

It is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. 

While world powers are trying to limit the spread or even to roll back the deployment of nuclear weapons because of horrifying prospect of acts of mutual destruction, and the spread of cell- and gene-mutating radiation, the gene-editing world is eager to press on with its research in order to bolster reputations, please narcissistic parents, and, of course, make healthy profits by offering attractive promises to those who barely understand what is being done to their offspring.

 Alan Jacobs has written:

Those who look forward to a future of increasing technological manipulation of human beings, and of other biological organisms, always imagine themselves as the Controllers, not the controlled; they always identify with the position of power. And so they forget evolutionary history, they forget biology, they forget the disasters that can come from following the Oppenheimer Principle — they forget everything that might serve to remind them of constraints on the power they have … or fondly imagine they have.

 Antonio Regalado,  the senior editor for biomedicine for MIT Technology Review, who attended 2018's Second International Summit on Human Gene Editing in Hong Kong, tweeted the following:

- holy cow! Harvard Medical School dean George Daley is making the case, big time, and eloquently, FOR editing embryos...

- he is says technically we are *ready* for RESPONSIBLE clinic use.

- he’s basically saying, stop debating ethics, start talking about the pathway forward.

- they are talking about these babies like they are lab rats.

Also from 2018, Professor John Rasko used Australia's Boyer Lectures to explore "Life Re-engineered", covering the power and dangers of biotechnology, gene and cell therapy, as scientists race each other to cure disease, prolong life and change the course of human evolution. 

Rasko is president of the International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy, head of the department of cell & molecular therapies at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and professor of medicine at the University of Sydney’s Centenary Institute. He said in the first lecture:

Nowadays, [...] we know, for instance, that some traits — and some diseases — are directly linked to specific genes. But these are the exceptions, not the rule. Most traits and most genetic diseases seem to involve multiple genes and multiple environmental factors like diet, stress, alcohol consumption and so on. Here nature and nurture combine in dizzyingly complex ways which we're only just beginning to understand.

He uses Down Syndrome to make a point about what might be called "newgenics":

Down Syndrome has no cure, but we can easily screen for it while the embryo is still in the first trimester. And an increasing number of women are having prenatal tests for this and other disorders. If the result is positive for Down Syndrome you're faced with a very difficult decision. Will you or won't you continue the pregnancy? In Europe and the US, about 85% of parents decide on termination.[5] Across Australia, the rates are similar.[6]

Science writer Philip Ball has an article in The Observer on the latest form of human selection that unchecked scientists are making available: 

The birth of the first IVF baby, Louise Brown, in 1978 provoked a media frenzy. In comparison, a little girl named Aurea born by IVF in May 2020 went almost unnoticed. Yet she represents a significant first in assisted reproduction too, for the embryo from which she grew was selected from others based on polygenic screening before implantation, to optimise her health prospects.

 For both scientific and ethical reasons, this new type of genetic screening is highly controversial. The nonprofit California-based organisation the Center for Genetics and Society has called its use here “a considerable reach by the assisted-reproduction industry in the direction of techno-eugenics”.

The polygenic screening for Aurea was provided by a New Jersey-based company called Genomic Prediction. The gene-sequencing company Orchid Biosciences in California now also offers an embryo-screening package that assesses risks for common diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and schizophrenia.

Genetic screening of IVF embryos for health reasons, known as preimplantation genetic diagnosis or PGD, is not new in itself. In the UK, it is permitted by the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority, which regulates assisted conception technologies, to look for specific gene variants associated with around 500 diseases, including cystic fibrosis and Tay-Sachs disease.

The diseases conventionally screened with PGD are mostly caused by a mutation in only a single gene. They can be nasty but are typically rare. In contrast, most common health problems, such as heart diseases or type 2 diabetes, are polygenic: caused by complex interactions among several, often many, genes. Even if particular gene variants are known to increase risk, as for example with the BRCA1/2 variants associated with breast cancer, such links are probabilistic: there’s no guarantee that people with that variant will get the disease or that those who lack it will not.

Big data arising from access to gene profiling information has allowed this statistically based polygenic engineering to occur. Ball:

So someone’s genetic profile – the variants in their personal genome – can be used to make predictions about, say, how likely they are to develop heart disease in later life. They can be assigned a so-called polygenic risk score (PRS) for that condition. Aurea’s embryo was chosen because of low PRSs for heart disease, diabetes and cancer. PRSs can be used to predict other things too, such as a child’s IQ and educational attainment.

He reports what the father of the first PGD child said about being willing to cull others of his own embryos to achieve a possibly  healthier child:

Aurea’s father, North Carolina neurologist Rafal Smigrodzki, has argued that part of a parent’s duty “is to make sure to prevent disease” in their child. Polygenic testing, he says, is just another way of doing that.

On the ethics of this new form of health science, Ball finds mixed viewpoints. First:

Ethics philosophers Sarah Munday and Julian Savulescu have argued in favour of allowing polygenic screening for any trait that can be shown to be “correlated with a greater chance of a life with more well-being”. 

Yet most regulators and many experts feel that there is not yet any justification for using them to try to improve the health outcomes of IVF children. “It’s not seen as ready for primetime use,” says [bioethicist Vardit Ravitsky of the University of Montreal]. “It’s still at a research stage. So when you start jumping straight into implementation, especially in a reproductive context, you’re in a minefield.”

An article in the New England Journal of Medicine in July pointed out that benefits of PRS embryo selection are likely to be very small, all the more so for people not of European heritage, for whom genomic data are less extensive and so less reliable for prediction.

 And once such screening methods are permitted, where does it stop? Already, American couples can screen embryos for gender, complexion and eye colour. What’s to stop a company offering to screen for a non-disease trait such as height or intelligence?

“There’s no reason to think polygenic embryo screening will end with conditions like heart disease and diabetes,” says Katie Hasson, associate director of the Center for Genetics and Society. “Screening for schizophrenia and other mental illnesses is already on offer. These directly echo eugenic efforts to eliminate ‘feeble-mindedness’. We are talking about deciding who should be born based on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ genes.”

 'Borderline malpractice'

 To avoid genetic stratification of society, some have suggest governments make this procedure free.

But Hasson believes that this wouldn’t solve the problems of inequality that such techniques could exacerbate. Even if PRSs for smartness, say, have little real predictive value, she says that “belief in genomic predictions can itself be a driver of intense inequalities in society” by reinforcing ideas of genetic determinism.

“Families that invest their money, time and hopes in this kind of screening and selection will have children they believe are genetically superior and those children will be treated as superior by their parents, care-givers and educators.”

Social pressure could make it hard to resist polygenic screening if it’s on offer in our hyper-competitive societies. “Once you do IVF, you feel pressure to use any add-on service or test that the clinic offers you,” says Ravitsky. “Look at what happens today when a woman declines prenatal screening or amniocentesis. Many women feel judged, not just by peers but by healthcare providers.” The idea that it’s all about autonomy of choice can be an illusion, she says.

This is the way Ball expresses his attitude to the process where several embryos of the same parents compete with one another for the highest scores:

Even if [these scores] have little real value in forecasting the prospects of a child, evidently a market exists for them. In countries such as the US where assisted conception is weakly regulated, companies can make unrealistic and exploitative promises. Couples might even elect to have a child via IVF specifically to avail themselves of such opportunities. It’s a gruelling process that carries risks in itself, but women might feel compelled to use it, even though Ravitsky thinks that allowing someone to do so for this reason alone would be “borderline malpractice”. 

“As a society, we’re very far from knowing how we want to use these potential technologies,” says Ravitsky, but, she adds, “we are already living in the grey zone”. 

Regulators of health techniques will seek the views of the public in making the rules or proposing legislation. Therefore, members of the public have to be up with the play. When called upon, we have to be ready to join with the like-minded to make submissions to avoid the Oppenheimer Principle. We don't need to go down every path that is open to scientific research. An equivalent choice, much debated, is whether we should put global resources into finding ways to defeat desertification, and global warming, rather than explore space.

But even within the world of gene manipulation, there is the victimless option of somatic gene therapy, where genetic material (RNA) is introduced into an appropriate cell type or tissue in a patient in such a way that it alters the cell's pattern of gene expression to produce a therapeutic effect. This is the view of David Jones, director of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre, which serves the Catholic Church in the United Kingom:

 The real promise of 'gene editing' techniques is the hope of ethical and effective therapy of children or adults who were born with conditions that currently have no cure. Research should focus on development of safe and effective somatic gene therapy, not on yet-more-destructive experimentation on human embryos.

How many lives are lost?

One piece of information we need to take on board is the statistic that stories and journal articles about genetic testing don't give readers: How many human embryos will be discarded in pursuit of a single "improved" version?

One answer to this question, though relating solely to in vitro fertilisation, is taken from a dissertation by a doctoral student submitted at Duquesne University in the US in 2017: 

The Church does not condemn persons created by technical procedures. Those born following in vitro fertilization possess dignity and are made in God’s image and likeness.

Of the over 400,000 in vitro fertilization babies born annually [in the United States], the concern is for the human beings created in the laboratory that will die before given a chance to live. 

It is estimated that only one in six embryos created following in vitro fertilization will make it to birth. Some estimates are as high as 30 embryos are created for every child born by in vitro fertilization. In vitro fertilization treats the new human being as little more than a cluster of cells to be graded, selected, and discarded. The loss of life is ignored and accepted by the in vitro fertilization industry. 

These failures and fatalities are not even recognized for what they are by most physicians who perform in vitro fertilization. Loss of life has become a normal and standardized aspect of the procedure. Additionally, there is significant concern for the thousands, possibly millions of human embryos who are frozen. What will be the outcome and disposition of these cryopreserved embryos? [*]

 A further concern is the lack of understanding among medical researchers that there is a spiritual element to human life beyond the physical. With recognition of the transcendental and the immortal character of the human being it becomes clear that human life is not limited by disease, pain or suffering, though they may be disabling with regard the "normal" lifestyle.

Families with a member who has Down Syndrome have hailed the love those members tend to display  or evoke from those around them.  

Researchers have also found an upwelling of positivity in families with children born with trisomy 13 and trisomy 18 (T13-18). Such children have low survival rates and survivors have significant disabilities. For these reasons, interventions are generally not recommended by providers.

The research finding published in the journal Pediatrics states:

Parents reported being told that their child was incompatible with life (87%), would live a life of suffering (57%), would be a vegetable (50%), or would ruin their family (23%). They were also told by some providers that their child might have a short meaningful life (60%), however.

Thirty percent of parents requested "full" intervention as a plan of treatment. Seventy-nine of these children with full T13-18 are still living, with a median age of 4 years. Half reported that taking care of a disabled child is/was harder than they expected. Despite their severe disabilities, 97% of parents described their child as a happy child. Parents reported these children enriched their family and their couple irrespective of the length of their lives.

The researchers add:

Parents who engage with parental support groups may discover an alternative positive description about children with T13-18. Disagreements about interventions may be the result of different interpretations between families and providers about the experiences of disabled children and their quality of life. 

That parents are able to rise to the occasion and respond with heroism in their care of a special needs child is something that researchers and healthcare providers often fail to understand. That is why those of the "expert class" cull some human beings in favour of what they consider to be an improved version.

Technologies such as those involving the harvesting of foetal stem cells, use of mitochondrial DNA and CRISPR techniques, the making of human-nonhuman chimera, and transhumanism associated with germline genetic modification, all warrant attention within the public arena, and strict supervision by government and professional bodies within the medical community. 

We must not let this area of ethics add to the list of disasters due to undisciplined scientific endeavour,  to overreach, by the scientists among us, as with the atom bomb project, which continues to threaten human existence.

[*] Stock, Gregory and John Campbell, eds., Engineering the Human Germline (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), p126.

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'Sacredness of ALL life' versus the world

It's a strange phenomenon that at the very time that the life of the natural world in all its diversity is being given increased respect, human life is increasingly treated with disdain. The life of trees, of bodies (!) of water on land or in the form of oceans, creatures down to the level of insects, are awarded central place in decision-making for official approval for projects promoted as of great benefit to a local group or the national economy. Conversely, human life at its beginning and at its close are being downgraded in significance in the pursuit of what individuals want.

In the first case, we can see the wisdom of giving regard to the wider picture of ecological well-being and the importance of protecting life as it is. We have come to accept that life as we find it has its own purpose or role in the overall scheme of things. Mostly the battle over respecting life is against corporate self-interest. 

In the second case, the battle is against human life. With abortion, one would expect activists to be pushing the boundary for recognition of human status for the foetus closer and closer to conception because the living material undergoing its transformation is human from the start. Instead, the focus is of the adult (plural) self-interest. As for euthanasia, given the zeitgeist of individualism and incredulity as to the largesse of suffering, the "right to die" is rapidly becoming the "duty to die". As shown by the case studies of Belgium and Nova Scotia, more and more people are being killed as guidelines become more permissive and categories added - children under 12  in Belgium and mental illness in Nova Scotia.  

What to make of this death-seeking activism? An Australian commentator offers some insight. 

First, there is the matter of whether the taking of human life is involved:

Those who defend assisted dying acknowledge that it involves taking a life. Many who defend abortion deny it, seeing the foetus as part of the woman’s own body. That argument recognises in part the unique status of the foetus. It begins and grows in a woman’s body, and so can be seen as part of her body. It is, however, a unique part of her body in that it has and develops the potential for independent life. To that extent it is also a living being in its own right. This double status of the move from dependence to independence of the foetus means that there is a physical difference between removing a foetus early in term, late in term and taking the life of a child after birth.

In most Australian states abortion is available for up to twenty weeks when it is conducive to the health of the pregnant woman, and also later though subject to further restrictions. At this stage the foetus can move and hear. It seems reasonable to describe abortion at this stage as taking life [...].

Second, should the focus be on the individual choice - of the person who is pregnant or who seeks assistance to die - or should there be regard to the more complex social picture? The community's  capture by the individualism of our age...

[...] prioritises one of many relationships involved in a person’s life and death. In the case of abortion, these include the relationship to the man involved in the conception, to family and friends, employers and fellow workers, [prospective adoptive parents], and doctors and nurses participating in the abortion. In the case of assisted dying, they also include family and friends, and participating doctors, nurses and hospital staff involved.

More broadly in each case they include the relationship to society as a whole through the effects that individual decisions have on social attitudes. Many people have an interest in the taking of life.  Whether the choice of the pregnant woman and the person who seeks to have their life ended should be decisive, and if so with what qualifications, is the ethical question in dispute in both cases.

Third, where does the sacredness of life, imputed to the natural world, stand with regard the human being? 

In both [abortion and euthanasia] the move in society and consequently in legislation is to privilege individual freedom of choice. The exercise of this right trumps countervailing claims ultimately based on the sacredness of life. By sacredness I mean the conviction that each human being and consequently their life, has such a high value that it forbids them and others from deliberately taking life for pragmatic reasons.

This evaluation of human life underlays the serious penalties against murder, the stigma attaching to suicide, and past legislation against abortion and euthanasia. Such legislation did not prevent abortion. Not did it prevent people who wished to die from arranging it. But it did initially express the shared conviction that murder, abortion and assisted suicide were destructive of society. 

The strong emphasis on the sacredness of life, however, often resulted in a stigma being attached to suicide and to abortion that could cripple the lives of people who were already heavily burdened. Public awareness of such suffering has fed the compassion that underlies the popular support for legislative change.

Therefore, we have seen individualism and an untethered compassion take hold of the public and the legislature:

[T]he sanctity of human life is no longer seen as a value that overrides other values. In certain circumstances individuals may take their own or others’ lives to secure other competing goods. They may choose to be killed rather than to live with dementia or in pain, for example, or to abort a foetus because of the burden imposed by raising a child to financial survival, to career, family relationships or reputation. Society [is granted a role to] ensure that such decisions are free, informed and duly regulated, but has no higher interest or responsibility.

 Fourth, this has consequences: 

The logic of individual choice will result in regulation being loosened or ignored over time. Think of profit-making through financial chicanery, gambling, pornography and drinking [and cigarettes]. 

If this move to privilege individual choice over the claims of the sanctity of life continues and becomes more pervasive, what will be the effects on society? They are unlikely to be immediate or dramatic.

The more significant effects of the emphasis on individual choice on the taking of life, however, lie in the nature of individual choice. Because the choice is individual it is inevitably open to conflict with the choice of others. In the case of abortion and assisted dying, the choice of the pregnant woman to abort a child or of persons who wish their lives to be ended may conflict with the choice of relatives, doctors, nurses and the owners of hospitals not to be complicit in the abortion or assisted dying.

These kinds of conflict then need to be resolved by legislation. In this way the free choice of one group of people will be privileged by the exercise of power that limits the freedom to choose of other groups. This inevitably strengthens the power of the State and of its agents in matters of life and death. 

The dangers of this can be seen in the way in which in Australia and elsewhere the State handles its responsibilities for taking life through its military actions in other nations. The will of the Executive prevails without reference to Parliament, is buttressed by secrecy, has no consideration for the effects of war on the people affected by it during the military action or after it is called off. Respect for reason, for the value of each human being and for the common good is trumped by the exercise of power for strategic and economic interests. 

It is to be feared that in time, the power of the State and its agents to regulate whether people live and die will be exercised in a similarly overbearing way that limits individual choice. The recent switch of the Chinese Government, with its increasing use of technology to control individual lives, from tacitly allowing abortions in support of its one child policy to actively discouraging them in the interests of economic growth, is a straw in the wind. 

For his conclusion, the writer of this valuable commentary, Andrew Hamilton, a Jesuit priest and academic, has this warning:

When individual choice becomes king in society, the groups most vulnerable include people who are deprived of choice by age or by marginalisation. They have no access to power. These include classically the unborn and the intellectually handicapped, but also significantly the increasing number of elderly people who suffer from dementia. 

Once governments have assumed the power to decide matters of life and death, and have in place structures that allow its educated agents to make those decisions, the pressure to assist them  to die unknowing as part of good economic management will increase. This could be commended by an appeal to compassion for their diminished condition and for their relatives who must observe it.

The suicide of the human race is upon us. Is that an exaggeration? There are many signs that it is not over the top. There is the loss of a sense of the Transcendent in WEIRD countries - Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic - giving rise to a nihilistic spirit; there is the falling birthrate that signals that the younger generations have lost hope in the future, and that they lack an appreciation of the fact that it is their role to create a future for each community. Finally, there is the impulse to kill, compassionate but in a deformed way, which we have examined here.

For the Christian, however, hope should spring eternal, to paraphrase Alexander Pope's words in An Essay on Man (1732). Pope knew that the complexities of life were nothing compared with God's power to remedy what fails to comply with his loving plan.

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Facebook: What parents can and must do

 – Guardian headline

Facebook has struggled to pick itself up off the floor after the beating by parents and public health experts over its neglect of children, especially neglect of its young Instagram customers. It has managed to offer just a smattering of actions in response to The Wall Street Journal's revelations that Facebook had a wealth of information about how its platforms were harming children but did nothing.

Frances Haugen is to be congratulated for making the Facebook documents available and appearing before the US Congress to highlight the corporate negligence that is devastating young peoples' lives, even to the point of suicide. According to one news report: 

“The patterns that children establish as teenagers stay with them for the rest of their lives,” Haugen said in Senate testimony.

“The kids who are bullied on Instagram, the bullying follows them home. It follows them into their bedrooms. The last thing they see before they go to bed at night is someone being cruel to them,” Haugen said. “Kids are learning that their own friends, people who they care about, are cruel to them.”

The remedies Facebook offered in the days after Haugen's testimony are paltry. It will be "introducing several features including prompting teens to take a break using its photo sharing app Instagram, and 'nudging' teens if they are repeatedly looking at the same content that’s not conducive to their well-being". 

[It] is also planning to introduce new controls for adults of teens on an optional basis so that parents or guardians can supervise what their teens are doing online. These initiatives come after Facebook announced late last month that it was pausing work on its Instagram for Kids project. But critics say the plan lacks details and they are skeptical that the new features would be effective.

One of those critics elaborates:

Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, a watchdog for the children and media marketing industry, said that he doesn’t think introducing controls to help parents supervise teens would be effective since many teens set up secret accounts anyway. He was also dubious about how effective nudging teens to take a break or move away from harmful content would be. He noted Facebook needs to show exactly how they would implement it and offer research that shows these tools are effective. 

“There is tremendous reason to be skeptical,” he said. He added that regulators need to restrict what Facebook does with its algorithms. He also believed that Facebook should cancel its Instagram project for kids.

The use of algorithms, the set of computer instructions for solving a problem or accomplishing a task, show up in the disturbing experience of parents as related in a Guardian report on how Facebook's Instagram compounds any emotional or mental difficulties a young person might be undergoing:

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, Michelle noticed her teenage daughters were spending substantially more time on Instagram.

The girls were feeling isolated and bored during lockdown, the Arizona mom, who has asked to be identified by her first name to maintain her children’s privacy, recalled. She hoped social media could be a way for them to remain connected with their friends and community.

But as the months progressed, the girls fell into pro-diet, pro-exercise and ultimately pro-eating-disorder hashtags on the social media app. It started with “health challenge” photos and recipe videos, Michelle said, which led to more similar content in their feeds. Six months later, both had started restricting their food intake. Her eldest daughter developed “severe anorexia” and nearly had to be admitted to a health facility, Michelle said. Michelle attributes their spiral largely to the influence of social media.

“Of course, Instagram does not cause eating disorders,” Michelle told the Guardian. “These are complex illnesses caused by a combination of genetics, neurobiology and other factors. But it helps to trigger them and keeps teens trapped in this completely toxic culture.”

This vicious situation was long known by Facebook executives, but was allowed to continue:

Testimony from the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed what parents of teens with unhealthy eating behaviors due to body-image fears had long known: Instagram has a substantial negative impact on some girls’ mental health regarding issues such as body image and self-esteem.

Internal research Haugen shared with the Wall Street Journal found the platform sends some girls on a “downward spiral”. According to one March 2020 presentation about the research, “32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse”.

But parents of teens with eating disorders [...] explained how their children had been directed from videos about recipes or exercise into pro-eating-disorder content and weight-loss progress images. And they said they struggled to regulate their children’s use of social media, which has become inextricable from their kids’ daily lives.

A parent living in the San Francisco Bay Area, Neveen Radwan, said that social media:

[...] “has played a humongous role” in her 17-year-old daughter’s eating disorder. The teen had been harmed not only by content that was explicitly pro-anorexia or weight loss, but also by edited photos of influencers and real-life friends. 

“The second she opens the app, she is bombarded by photos that are filtered, that are manipulated,” Radwan said. “She is trying to attain something that is unachievable.”

Over the past few years, Radwan’s daughter has journeyed down a long road of recovery from a severe eating disorder. At one point, her weight was down to 74lb. Her heart stopped beating and she had to be airlifted to a specialized facility.

To help her daughter avoid the triggers she believes helped send her to the hospital, Radwan tried installing a number of safeguards on the girl’s phone. She uses built-in iPhone tools to keep her daughter from downloading apps without permission and monitors her online activity.

Recently, after a year and a half in treatment, Radwan’s daughter was allowed to have her phone back. But within 30 minutes, the teen had sneaked around the restrictions to log into Instagram from the phone’s browser, Radwan said.

When her daughter had opened the app, her algorithm had been right where she had left it, Radwan said, in the midst of an endless feed of unhealthy eating and diet content.

“Once you look at one video, the algorithm takes off and they don’t stop coming – it’s like dominoes falling,” Radwan said. “It is horrific, and there is nothing we can do about it.” 

The Guardian article continues this valuable reporting by investigating where possible solutions can be found:

Experts say that Facebook, however, could do something about it. There are a number of proven tools that would prevent the spread of harmful content and misinformation, especially as it relates to eating disorders, according to Madelyn Webb, associate research director for Media Matters for America.

She explained that the algorithms recommend content similar to what users have shared, viewed or clicked on in the past – creating a feedback loop that some vulnerable teens cannot escape.

“But they will never change it because their profit model is fundamentally based on getting more clicks,” she said.

Haugen, in her testimony, suggested Facebook return to a chronological rather than algorithmically driven timeline on the platform to reduce the spread of misinformation and inflammatory content.

Facebook has said it works to minimize such content by restricting hashtags that promote it. But a report released in September by the advocacy group SumOfUs found 22 different hashtags promoting eating disorders still existed on Instagram at the time, and were connected to more than 45m eating disorder-related posts.

The report found 86.7% of eating disorder posts the researchers analyzed were pushing unapproved appetite suppressants and 52.9% directly promoted eating disorders.

Read the article in full. It relates other cases and links useful for parents facing this predicament. Read also about the Chinese government's action to rein in its big tech companies by having those corporate giants limit teens' use of video games to only three hours a week (!), from 8pm till 9pm on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with an extra hour on public holidays. The government has called social media in general "spiritual opium" that turns the young generation into addicts unable to support a healthy society.

What parents can do

So what can parents do immediately to rescue an often intense situation, or to prevent one arising?

Be a parent: Parents must embrace their God-given authority over their children. The permissive style of parenting is a thing of the past given the desperate straits society is in.

Age limit: Parents need to set an age limit for having a smartphone, which is, of course, more than a phone, given the internet link it provides.Whereas US law sets 13 years as the entry point for social media: 

In her testimony, Haugen suggested raising the age limit to 16 or even 18. There has been a push among some parents, educators and tech experts to wait to give children phones — and access to social media — until they are older, such as the “Wait Until 8th” pledge that has parents sign a pledge not to give their kids a smartphone until the 8th grade. 

 “There is not necessarily a magical age,” said Christine Elgersma, a social media expert at the nonprofit Common Sense Media. But, she added, “13 is probably not the best age for kids to get on social media.”

It’s still complicated. There’s no reliable way to verify a person’s age when they sign up for apps and online services. And the apps popular with teens today were created for adults first. Companies have added some safeguards over the years, Elgersma noted, but these are piecemeal changes, not fundamental rethinks of the services.

Talk, talk, talk: Enjoy this effort as a platform for forging close family links.

Start early, earlier than you think. Elgersma suggests that parents go through their own social media feeds with their children before they are old enough to be online and have open discussions on what they see. How would your child handle a situation where a friend of a friend asks them to send a photo? Or if they see an article that makes them so angry they just want to share it right away?

For older kids, approach them with curiosity and interest.

“If teens are giving you the grunts or the single word answers, sometimes asking about what their friends are doing or just not asking direct questions like ‘what are you doing on Instagram?’ but ‘hey, I heard this influencer is really popular,’” she suggested. “And even if your kid rolled their eyes it could be a window.”

Don’t say things like “turn that thing off” when your kid has been scrolling for a long time, says Jean Rogers, the director of Fairplay, a nonprofit that advocates for kids to spend less time on digital devices.

“That’s not respectful,” Rogers said. “It doesn’t respect that they have a whole life and a whole world in that device.”

Instead, Rogers suggests asking them questions about what they do on their phone, and see what your child is willing to share.

Kids are also likely to respond to parents and educators “pulling back the curtains” on social media and the sometimes insidious tools companies use to keep people online and engaged, Elgersma said. Watch a documentary like The Social Dilemma that explores algorithms, dark patterns and dopamine feedback cycles of social media. Or read up with them how Facebook and TikTok make money.

“Kids love to be in the know about these things, and it will give them a sense of power,” she said.

Limits on use: Having a central household security box to hold all devices is one way of breaking the habit. Other ideas: 

Rogers says most parents have success with taking their kids’ phones overnight to limit their scrolling. Occasionally kids might try to sneak the phone back, but it’s a strategy that tends to work because kids need a break from the screen.

“They need to an excuse with their peers to not be on their phone at night,” Rogers said. “They can blame their parents.”

Parents may need their own limits on phone use. Rogers said it’s helpful to explain what you are doing when you do have a phone in hand around your child so they understand you are not aimlessly scrolling through sites like Instagram. Tell your child that you’re checking work email, looking up a recipe for dinner or paying a bill so they understand you’re not on there just for fun. Then tell them when you plan to put the phone down.

Get support:  Facebook has said it would welcome governmental regulation to allow transparency but also, presumably, to protect itself from any advantage companies that are not self-disciplined might have. Write to your representative for government action. Join groups - refer to the non-profit organisations referred to in this post - and go online for ideas on how to be an effective parent in this regard.

Parents, you can do it! In fact, you have to do it, for your family, and for the common good. Obviously, for you to be serious about your parental duty you have to be countercultural on several levels. To sum it all up, the future is relying on you! 

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Trans and reality: a refresher course

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon from Pexels

Welcome fresh perspectives on transgender issues became available in recent days, giving insight into how to judge the contentious logic of those wanting an overthrow of the human ecology recognised universally until this era of self-invention, where will is asserted over reality. 

The report from United Kingdom's sports bodies makes some unambiguous statements about trying to shoehorn transgender people into general sporting activity. Of course, it has been the attempts of transgender biological males to enter female sports have aroused the greatest amount of noise. But there's no escaping reality - males are different from females.

 The Sports Councils’ Equality Group's guidance for transgender inclusion in domestic sport states:

The inclusion of transgender people into female sport cannot be balanced regarding transgender inclusion, fairness and safety in gender-affected sport where there is meaningful competition.

This is due to retained differences in strength, stamina and physique between the average woman compared with the average transgender woman or non-binary person assigned male at birth, with or without testosterone suppression.

The review group said its findings after an 18-month investigation proved that the current approach to the inclusion of trans athletes in sport "requires a reset and fresh thinking". To quote further from the Inside the Games sports website:

Evidence gathered suggested it is "fair and safe for transgender people to be included within the male category in most sports", but that "competitive fairness cannot be reconciled with self-identification into the female category in gender-affected sport".

Also, it was found that suppression of the male hormone testosterone is "unlikely to guarantee fairness between transgender women and natal females."

The International Olympic Committee allows transgender athletes to compete in women's competitions if their testosterone levels are under the 10 nanomoles per litre limit for at least 12 months.

However, the SCEG said this is "unlikely to result in the achievable minimisation of physical capacity." 

The Olympic Committee said after the Tokyo Games that there would have to be a  review of this aspect of  international sport.

To continue using the summary from Inside the Games:

The report said that a "case-by-case" judgement would be "unlikely to be practical nor verifiable", and that "categorisation by sex is lawful".

Governing bodies needed to decide whether their top priority is inclusion, fairness or safety, and use this to inform their policies. 

The new guidance offers three options for consideration:

The first was the option of prioritising the inclusion of transgender people into the sport's existing sex categories, which it recommended for sports that have "determined that inclusion rather than fairness is the objective of the category".

For such sports, it recommended that a five nanomoles per litre limit rather than the IOC's 10 would be more suitable for including transgender women, non-binary or gender fluid people recorded male at birth in its female categories.

An alternative approach suggested was running a "female" and "open" competition, with competitors in the former having to declare themselves as recorded female at birth and the latter open to anyone.

The third possibility was additional competitions including "universal admission" being created which are not dependent on sex or gender, which could lead to adaptations such as non-contact versions of team sports, the introduction of handicaps or the use of non-traditional formats or distances.

Additional guidance includes:

 That sports should try to find new formats and “innovative and creative ways to ensure nobody is left out” to allow greater inclusion.

“In order to survive and thrive in the future, sport must adapt to reflect modern society, and that often, it is too slow to do so,” the guidelines state.

“Sport must be a place where everyone can be themselves, where everyone can take part and where everyone is treated with kindness, dignity and respect.”

This guidance for sports administrators was issued after a review of international research literature.

So that is one element of the effort to focus the attention of all parties involved in settling transgender people into a suitable sporting environment  As the guidance points out, biological males cannot just thrust themselves into female sport. Reality reigns over perceived rights. [*]

Free speech and the transgender world

The second breath of fresh air relating to this significant social issue is the defence of reality given in the first instance by Dave Chappelle, a leading African American comedian, who used a Netflix show to comment on the woke attempt to control what can be said - and laughed about - with regard a whole area of human experience, the ever-expanding homosexual and transgender world.

There was a torrid rush of condemnation in the reviews from the usual media outlets but Chappelle's  work was applauded by Andrew Sullivan, who has been until recently at the vanguard of the homosexual rights movement. His moderate voice has been welcome in a sphere where craziness is not unusual.

Sullivan devoted his latest "Weekly Dish" column on Substack (behind paywall) to Chappelle's show and the hyper-reaction from some woke quarters. The point he wants to convey is made in this subhead: "The comedian defends reality. Which is currently under siege."

Because Sullivan has gained a certain status as a leader through his long campaigning for the needs of homosexuals, and for his forthright participation in public intellectual discourse, his views are worthy of respect.

Sullivan starts his column this way:

There’s an understandable tendency to view the debate about transgender ideology today as a marginal issue, affecting a minuscule number of people, and at most, a trivial matter in the larger culture wars. And I can see why. It does seem on the surface to be about maybe 0.2 percent of humanity. And if you venture an opinion on it, the consequences are intense — so why bother?

And, overwhelmingly, the elite media in the United States prevents readers from knowing that a debate is even happening, let alone what it is really about. If the argument about gender theory is mentioned at all, it is dismissed as a bunch of “anti-trans” bigots [...] hurting a beleaguered and tiny minority, for some inconceivable, but surely awful, reason.

Chappelle's content in the show - The Closer - was "alternately hilarious and humane, brutal and true".

It is extremely funny, a bit meta, monumentally mischievous, and I sat with another homo through the whole thing, stoned, laughing our asses off — especially when he made fun of us. 

The way the elite media portrays us, you’d think every member of the BLT community is so fragile we cannot laugh at ourselves. It doesn’t occur to them that, for many of us, Chappelle is a breath of honest air, doing what every comic should do: take aim at every suffocating piety of the powers that be — including the increasingly weird 2SLGBTQQIA+ mafia — and detonating them all.

As well as being funny, the show was in convicting the anti-reality of the woke narrative. Sullivan says:

The Closer is, in fact, a humanely brilliant indictment of elite culture at this moment in time: a brutal exposure of its identitarian monomania, its denial of reality, and its ruthless tactics of personal and public destruction. It marks a real moment: a punching up against the powerful, especially those who pretend they aren’t. 

Anyone who can watch this special and think Chappelle is homophobic or transphobic is either stupendously dumb or a touchy fanatic. He is no more transphobic than J.K. Rowling, i.e. not at all, and the full set masterfully proves it to anyone with eyes and ears.

Assuming that marginalized people cannot tolerate humor at their own expense is as dehumanizing as assuming they have no agency in their lives. It is a form of bigotry — of the left.

We laugh, above all, at the absurdity of our reality. And yes, that’s the second point Chappelle makes: there is something called reality. We can deny it; or we can accept it. Comedy’s key role is that it helps us accept it.

[...] Like Rowling, Chappelle supports every law protecting trans people from discrimination; and believes in the dignity and equality of trans people, as he insisted in the show. But he also believes that it is absurd — absurd — to say that a trans woman is in every way indistinguishable from a woman. Because she isn’t. 

The debate, rather, is about whether a tiny group of fanatics, empowered by every major cultural institution, can compel or emotionally blackmail other people into saying things that are not true. This, in Chappelle’s words, is what they are trying to force people to deny:

Gender is a fact. Every human being in this room, every human being on Earth, had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on Earth. That is a fact. Now, I am not saying that to say trans women aren’t women, I am just saying that those pussies that they got … you know what I mean? I’m not saying it’s not pussy, but it’s Beyond Pussy or Impossible Pussy. It tastes like pussy, but that’s not quite what it is, is it? That’s not blood, that’s beet juice. 

Yes this is shocking, funny, wild. But not wrong. And this seems to me to be exactly what a comic is supposed to do: point out that the current emperor has no clothes. A transwoman cannot give birth as a woman gives birth. She does not ovulate. Her vagina, if it exists, is a simulacrum of one, created by a multiple array of surgeries. Sex in humans is binary, with those few exceptions at the margins — mixtures of the two — proving rather than disproving the rule. Until five minutes ago, this was too obvious to be stated. Now, this objective fact is actually deemed a form of “hate.” Hate. [Sullivan's emphasis]

This means that the debate is no longer about 0.2 percent of humanity. It’s about imposing an anti-scientific falsehood on 99.8 percent of humanity. It means that we have to strip all women of their unique biological experience, to deny any physical differences between men and women in sports, to tell all boys and girls that they can choose their sex, to erase any places reserved exclusively for biological women, like shelters for those who have been abused by men, and to come up with terms like “pregnant people” to describe mothers. Yes — mothers. The misogyny buried in this is gob-smacking. Is Mothers’ Day next for the trans chopping block? 

The question of trans rights has been settled by the Supreme Court. I’m delighted it has. What we’re dealing with now is something very different. It’s an assault on science; it’s an assault on reality; it’s an attempt not to defend trans people but to cynically use them as pawns in a broader effort to dismantle the concept of binary sex altogether, to remove any distinctions between men and women, so that a gender-free utopia/dystopia can be forced into being.

In previous columns Sullivan has decried how trans activists have, by "literally falsifying history", linked their appeal for support with the appeals of truly marginalised groups, thereby capturing the social elite, and in the process "re-making the English language to make it conform to their ideology". He continues:

The weapons deployed in pursuit of this fantasy are those that are always used by those seeking to impose utopia on free people: the brutal hounding of dissent, the capture and control of every single cultural institution, the indoctrination of the young, cancellations, bullying. The costs are mounting. Across the West, people are being fired, targeted, prosecuted, even jailed, for stating biological facts.  

The trans movement is now, tragically, the vanguard of the postmodern left’s goal of dismantling science itself because they believe that science is, in fact, merely an instrument of “white supremacy”.

In this battle, Chappelle is on the front lines. Not of bigotry. But of objective reality. Remember Orwell’s critical insight into totalitarian thought: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” Who else, one wonders, has the courage to disobey?

That's Sullivan's guarded conclusion as to where we stand in the global effort to protect reality as the narrative of the elite dispenses with science and respect for the variety of human experience. 

(For more important commentary on how transgenderism has become a driving force behind the warping of medical care, and the undermining the status of the family, go to the Substack column of Bari Weiss for a report by a leading researcher Abigail Shrier. The column can be found here, and a summary and associated commentary here.) 

[*] See reaction to the sports guidance report here.

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Facebook evidence calls parents to arms

Social media generate huge pressure to conform, ending in despair for those who can't.  

The heroic act by Frances Haugen of blowing the whistle on Facebook's loose regard for internal research findings about the lack of safeguards for children against predators and harmful content, once again highlights how crucial it is for parents to embrace the responsibility of parenthood and supervise their children's use of all social media platforms.

One of the findings that the Wall Street Journal exposed in its reporting on the leaked Facebook material is that 32% of girls who felt bad about their body knew that their consumption of Instagram content made them feel worse. 

The impact on girls was extensive:

For some of the teen users, the peer pressure generated by Instagram led to mental health and body-image problems, and in some cases, eating disorders and suicidal thoughts, the research leaked by Haugen showed.

The Journal also reports:

Inside the company, teams of employees have for years been laying plans to attract preteens that go beyond what is publicly known, spurred by fear that it could lose a wave of users critical to its future. “Why do we care about tweens?” said one document from 2020. “They are a valuable but untapped audience.” 

Facebook has offered a defence to the increased public concern prompted by the leaked documents over the effect on young users and its efforts to create products for them. It also announced it was holding off on launching a kids' version of Instagram.

However, the Journal declares:

Researchers inside Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, have been studying for years how its photo-sharing app affects millions of young users. Repeatedly, the company found that Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of them, most notably teenage girls, more so than other social-media platforms.

In public, Facebook has consistently played down the app’s negative effects, including in comments to Congress, and hasn’t made its research public or available to academics or lawmakers who have asked for it. In response, Facebook says the negative effects aren’t widespread, that the mental-health research is valuable and that some of the harmful aspects aren’t easy to address.

Internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show the company formed a team to study preteens, set a three-year goal to create more products for them and commissioned strategy papers about the long-term business opportunities presented by these potential users. In one presentation, it contemplated whether there might be a way to engage children during play dates. 

In her testimony to Congress, Haugen said Facebook is designed to exploit negative emotions because people spend more time on the platform.

“They are aware of the side effects of the choices they have made around amplification. They know that algorithmic-based rankings, or engagement-based rankings, keeps you on their sites longer. You have longer sessions, you show up more often, and that makes them more money.”

Facebook’s annual revenue has more than doubled from $56 billion in 2018 to a projected $119 billion this year, based on the estimates of analysts surveyed by FactSet. Meanwhile, the company’s market value has soared from $375 billion at the end of 2018 to nearly $1 trillion now.  

She also told Congress:

“Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy. The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people.”

“Congressional action is needed. They won’t solve this crisis without your help.”

This report of her testimony goes on:

Haugen suggested, for example, that the minimum age for Facebook’s popular Instagram photo-sharing platform could be increased from the current 13 to 16 or 18.

She also acknowledged the limitations of possible remedies. Facebook, like other social media companies, uses algorithms to rank and recommend content to users’ news feeds. When the ranking is based on engagement — likes, shares and comments — as it is now with Facebook, users can be vulnerable to manipulation and misinformation. Haugen would prefer the ranking to be chronological. But, she testified, “People will choose the more addictive option even if it is leading their daughters to eating disorders.”

This is where parents must come in to ease the minds, and sometimes save the lives, of their children. This blog has pointed out previously how children have been found to be caught up in peer-driven contagion of belief that they should identify as the opposite sex or that they are homosexual. For those posts see here, here and here. 

But for an in-depth approach to safeguarding children on social media and video games, parents will do well to act on this advice from Courtney Chase, the executive director of the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington’s Office of Child and Youth Protection and Safe Environment: 

Most recently predators have been using gaming systems – such as X-Box and PlayStation – to contact young people.  Predators try to entice a child with game credits, e-cash and other “high value temptations.”

“We want parents to be educated and aware that predators are now infiltrating once-safe devices. The struggle is to get students to understand that predators camouflage themselves as students. They study and learn the environment that students inhabit and pretend to be a student, maybe from another school.”

Chase said that predators will “groom, coerce and intimidate (young people). And these crimes do not discriminate” based on race or gender.

Sometimes when a young person has been tricked or coerced into sending or sharing sexually inappropriate images, the predator will then blackmail or threaten the youth with exposure unless the interaction continues.

“Many times a child is afraid to come forward because they feel their parents will take away their phones or their computers. The key for parents is to have information and open lines of communication.” 

 In addition to sexual exploitation, social media are also employed by some students to bully others. “Bullying on social media causes damage you cannot imagine,” she said.

“Parents think that the schools and principals can control this, but the answer lies in the home."

Therefore, she offers these tips, where rules would be adjusted according to age: 

🔆 Parents should not be afraid to ask their children questions – "Discussion and planning are open and active parts of keeping children safe."

🔆 Parents should have the passcodes for all their child’s electronic devices – phones, tablets and computers.

🔆 Parents should actively monitor each of their child’s social media accounts.

🔆 Keep families safe by not including identities or locations on pictures posted online.

🔆 Be careful about posting pictures with a (child wearing a) school uniform. The uniforms can be identified and traced and can lead to stalking. Some hackers also can put a child’s face on sexually inappropriate images.

🔆 Because some homework assignments may require Internet research, “there should be a central place where a child works so that parents can monitor Internet activity”.

🔆 Parents should make sure they know the name of every person to whom a child sends a text. Children should not be texting to numbers the parents do not recognize or know.

🔆 Monitor the frequency of texting to a particular number. The amount of texts – and the time of those texts – could be a red flag. “It is imperative that kids never hide their phone from their parents,” Chase said.

🔆 All electronics should be stored overnight in one designated place and parents should impose “an electronic curfew” on their child. Chase said this limits overnight, unsupervised texting and social media usage.

By setting limits in this way, children have an excuse not to engage with online activities they would rather not be involved with.

In essence, with this serious threat to a child's well-being, it comes down to each parent fully appreciating their God-given role in striving to protect their children. In other words:

Parents, know your dignity!

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Trauma from abortion - why the surprise?

Lucy Burns... "After the abortion, I had a mental breakdown." Publisher's photo

Uma Thurman became pregnant as an aspiring actress when an older teenager. She wanted to keep the baby, but her family persuaded her to have an abortion. In an article, she describes the “shame” she internalised as she went through with the procedure, adding:

There is so much pain in this story. It has been my darkest secret until now... The abortion I had as a teenager was the hardest decision of my life, one that caused me anguish then and that saddens me even now...

Though Thurman is pro-abortion now, she obviously wasn't when she was carrying the child. She has had three more children and counts her ability to be a mother to them as a benefit of her gruelling experience. But the abortion still saddens her.

Meanwhile, Lucy Burns, the young writer of a book on her experience of having an abortion, "found terminating an unwanted pregnancy to be both a physically and mentally traumatic experience", as a Sunday Times review puts it.

In a Harper's Bazaar piece, Burns talks about the abortion aftermath:

After the abortion, I had a mental breakdown. I became obsessed with anti-abortion memes. I thought that people could tell that I’d had an abortion just by looking at me. I was so terrified of being exposed that I kept a list of everyone who knew about the abortion. The anger, the paranoia, and the intrusive thoughts were exhausting. It wasn’t until I wrote about the experience of having sex for the first time after the abortion that I realised how disconnected from my body I felt. And it wasn’t until I tried to put everything in chronological order for the book (and saw that I couldn’t remember what happened when) that I realised I probably had post-traumatic stress disorder.

Burns's book, Larger Than an Orange, is a personal account but highlights what a Guardian columnist sees as useful for all, namely, that: "what has become difficult to acknowledge is that for some women, even a legal, safe abortion can be a traumatic experience." 

My point here is not to promote the concept of a post-abortion syndrome that would affect all women in that gruelling situation, but to draw attention to the feeling that women commonly have that there is more to their abortion than removing a few cells.

We can judge the factual state of affairs from reviews of medical literature, as with that by Reardon (2018)*. Referring to the abortion and mental health controversy, this journal article states:

[B]oth sides agree that (a) abortion is consistently associated with elevated rates of mental illness compared to women without a history of abortion; (b) the abortion experience directly contributes to mental health problems for at least some women; (c) there are risk factors, such as pre-existing mental illness, that identify women at greatest risk of mental health problems after an abortion; and (d) it is impossible to conduct research in this field in a manner that can definitively identify the extent to which any mental illnesses following abortion can be reliably attributed to abortion in and of itself.  

We learn from this that abortion is likely to have consequences for the would-be mother. 

Burns talks of some of her friends' reaction to her book: 

“So many of my women friends have said, ‘I knew this to be true, it had to be true, but I have never heard anyone say it before.’ Which is mad.” 

The columnist adds: "As for her male friends, many of them had no idea what abortion even involved." (But note that the fathers of aborted children can also suffer severe mental distress. See here.)

I find it interesting that the women friends would say "It had to be true", about the anguish over having an abortion. Women appreciate that abortion involves guilt in the ending of a life; they know that within the woman is what will be a child, that is, that there now exists a separate entity that has a unique gene structure, that has distinctly female or male cells, an entity that is already experiencing the change in bodily form that will continue until natural death. Of course, necessarily, guilt is in the emotional and spiritual mix affecting the mother's mental state.  

This relates to a rhetorical line from the Guardian columnist: about pro-life supporters being "still bogged down in emotive, religious arguments about when life begins".

When, then, does that writer accept that a new life exists? Is it purely at viability despite the fact that early on there is a separate genetic identity and defined sex? Those "cells" are not the woman's but the "alien" baby's. Would that writer support the killing of a healthy baby close to full term, or one born alive as a result of an induced abortion as would be permitted under the legislation recently passed by the US House of Representatives?

That legislation, the so-called Women's Health Protection Act, would prohibit restrictions on abortion after fetal viability "when, in the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care provider, continuation of the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant patient's life or health". Note, "health" is not defined, meaning completely unrestricted abortion in practice. 

Partial birth abortion was only used on late-term children and involved cutting a hole in the base of their heads and sucking their brains out with an aspirator. (Source)

There is another concern arising from the freedom young people feel about aborting human life, as if it had no significance for the rest of society. Burns writes: "I’m not ashamed that I had an abortion", and the same attitude is highlighted by the Guardian columnist:

Accepting that abortion will be traumatising for some women adds force to the argument that no one should have to jump through hoops or stick to a legally mandated script in order to access it. To have to subject your feelings about an unwanted pregnancy to a box-ticking exercise is not a sign of a humane, holistic system.

Rather, legislation about this important act is seen to be crucial because of its significance, brought into perspective by the fact of the mental illness - distress, at least - that runs at a noticeable level, and the loss of a new member of society. Society certainly has a role to institute measures that are "humane, holistic" - but to protect its members, whether women or babies. Society exists to protect its own.

Insight on this matter is offered by Giles Fraser in the British publication, Unherd.  He states in an article titled, "The oppressive individualism of human rights":

Much that has been achieved by an appeal to human rights has been laudable. But I remain cautious about the inherent individualism of human rights, that a right is regarded as the property of individual human beings and as the foundational basis for this whole moral philosophy. Cautious because, for most of human history, ethical consciousness has been structured around a sense of corporate responsibility – of the ‘we’ coming before the ‘I’.

Writing in the Human Rights Law Journal in 2016, Hurst Hammun, Professor of International Law at Tuft University, offered the following warning:

“Unless there is a conscious attempt to return to the principles of consensus and universality, the increasingly strident calls from European and other ‘Western’ human rights activists for adherence to the contemporary liberal European construct of society is likely to create a backlash in the rest of the world. This tendency is concurrently exacerbated by activists who see an expansive concept of ‘rights’ as the primary means to effect domestic social and political change.”

[...] in the ideology of human rights, the rest of the world and all other people are regarded as satellites to the solitary individual who is demanding their ‘rights’ as a form of moral self-assertion. And as self-assertion knows no limits, so the sense of what rights one is entitled to inevitably grows and grows.

This is the mission creep of human rights language. “The defence of human rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenceless,” wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. And that was way back in 1978. Since then human rights have demanded ever greater jurisdiction.

There are those, especially in Muslim countries, who regard human rights as a means of ushering in Western liberal values against the will of the majority. They argue that the expansion of human rights language has coincided historically with the liberal hegemony in the West and that it fails to respect other moral systems like Islam – or even Judaism and Christianity with their communitarian moral consciousness.

But the doctrine of human rights was substantially the creation of seventeenth century Christian political theology. It was John Locke that argued that human beings had been granted their rights by God and as protection against tyrannical government. “All men … are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” as the Declaration of Independence put it, drawing on Locke.

And the protection of minorities – women, children, ethnic minorities, homosexuals – against the power and prejudice of the majority has been at the heart of its moral successes. But no one considered that the language of rights could itself become a form of tyranny – a means of imposing liberal values on the majority of society against their will.

Fraser worries that "without (Locke’s) God to underwrite its claims to an unbreakable connection between morality and the human individual, it becomes ever plainer that human rights only exist because we believe in them". 

This description of the effort to believe in "rights" that have no deeper significance than they seem a good idea creates the image in my mind of a political rally where policies are being launched, not with a clearly enunciated argument and firm principles but with flags and banners and chanting activists. All too often, it does not matter to those campaigners that the policy may be destructive, as long as it espouses a fashionable cause and promises a feel-good future.

[*] Reardon D. C. (2018). The abortion and mental health controversy: A comprehensive literature review of common ground agreements, disagreements, actionable recommendations, and research opportunities. SAGE open medicine, 6, 2050312118807624. https://doi.org/10.1177/2050312118807624 See at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6207970/ 

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'Woman' struggles against unreal foolishness

From the cover of Material Girls: Why Reality Matters to Feminism

This is the way the leading British publication The Economist opened a leader/editorial column* this month:

“Bodies with vaginas” is an odd way to refer to half the human race. Yet it was the quote that The Lancet, a medical journal, chose to feature on the cover of its latest issue, telling readers that “historically, the anatomy and physiology” of such bodies had been neglected.

After complaints about dehumanising language, the Lancet apologised. But it is not alone. A growing number of officials and organisations are finding themselves tongue-tied when it comes to using the word “woman”.

Other instances it cites of the reulting outlandish language are these:

A British hospital has instructed staff on its maternity wards to offer to use the phrase “birthing people”. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of America’s Congress, talks of “menstruating people”. On September 18th the American Civil Liberties Union republished a quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Supreme Court judge, on the anniversary of her death. The quote was a defence of a woman’s right to have an abortion. But the ACLU’s version—for which it, too, later apologised—replaced every instance of “women” with “people”. In Britain, the opposition Labour Party is tying itself in very public knots over questions such as whether only women possess cervixes.

See here Labour's shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves struggle with the absurdity of the party's position.

Turmoil about whether we can use the word "woman" any more - while there is no such upheaval over "man" - arises for reasons the editorial column makes clear: 

This linguistic shift is being driven by both compassion and fear. Compassion, because organisations are keen not to be seen to be excluding those whose sense of their gender does not match their sex, such as people who identify as trans or non-binary. And fear, because they are worried about attracting the wrath of online mobs should they be deemed to have violated a set of rapidly changing taboos about gender and sex that hardly existed five years ago—and which, outside a few rarefied circles, still don’t. 

Activists tend to hold that men can be women. But the language used to state this can be "dehumanising":

As the Lancet discovered, many people—trans men as much as anyone else—dislike being described as collections of ambulatory body-parts and secretions. More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.

 Furthermore, understanding could suffer. Medical advice, for instance, has to be clear and intelligible by all. That is why Britain’s National Health Service often prefers words like “stomach ache” to “dyspepsia”, or “heart attack” to “myocardial infarction”. One survey conducted by a cervical-cancer charity suggested that around 40% of women are unsure about the details of what exactly a cervix is. This implies that asking “people with cervixes” to turn up for screening appointments may not be clear or intelligible, especially to women who have English as their second language.

Most broadly of all, the point of language is to communicate. Insisting on unfamiliar or alien-sounding terms will make it harder to discuss issues that affect only or disproportionately girls and women, such as female genital mutilation, domestic violence, child marriage or the persistence of pay gaps.

The Economist concludes its assessment of society's sorry state of affairs because of the deliberate rejection of what is a factual matter with a warning on the use of social media in particular to propel among the elite the fashionable acceptance of a fictional reality:

Cowed by the insults and viciousness such discussions provoke, many people are fearful of taking part. If harshly policed, baffling and alien-sounding language is added to the price of joining the debate, even fewer will be willing to elevate their cephalic protuberance [their forehead] above the parapet. 

The manner in which transgender activists do, indeed, promote a fictional reality is examined in a valuable review of the book Material Girls:Why Reality Matters for Feminism, written by Kathleen Stock, a professor of analytic philosophy at the UK's University of Sussex.

Trans identification is a form of immersion in fiction, she argues, which can enrich human life in many ways. It’s both real and not-real.

The review, by Mary Harrington, a writer whose articles are endowed with great clarity of thought, continues:

“Immersion” is also both real and not-real: a state of awareness halfway between full belief and full disbelief. Both these states matter in different ways. We may be absorbed by a film at the cinema, and find a particularly good one deeply satisfying and life-enhancing, but that wouldn’t stop us from leaving in a hurry if the fire alarm goes off and the room fills with smoke. But, [Stock] suggests, recent activism has sought legislative changes that in effect compel everyone to act as if we believe these fictions are in all ways identical to reality. 

And this, she argues, has negative effects, especially for women and same-sex attracted people, because underlying realities continue to be politically salient. [...]  Consider the now-notorious case of “Karen White”. This individual, a convicted sex offender, is in all respects physiologically male but was moved to a women’s prison after claiming to identify as a woman. White then sexually assaulted several female inmates.

 [...] The example of Karen White is a textbook instance of the warning sounded in On Miracles by one of [the Enlightenment’s] foremost thinkers, the humanist Voltaire: “Once your faith […] persuades you to believe what your intelligence declares to be absurd, beware lest you likewise sacrifice your reason in the conduct of your life […] Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

The reviewer, Harrington, examines closely how reason is no longer the currency of social and political discourse:

The activism [Stock] seeks to challenge is the political wing of a contemporary cultural movement committed to dismantling the Enlightenment’s intellectual foundations. [...] 

Stock wants us to see the world as it is. As she puts it: “Features of the world, and our collective human interests in them, are not arbitrary, and that’s what we should be trying to make concepts responsive to”.

But her antagonists dissent from this basic premise: as they see it, our ideas about the world do help to create “the world as it is”; and to make matters worse, it is arbitrary. What emerges in Material Girls is a tussle between these radically mutually incompatible understandings of the relation between knowledge and power.

[...] for Stock, knowledge is what matters, while power can and should be relegated to background enabling condition for the production of more and better knowledge. So, for example, the “main point” of universities is in her view “to produce and disseminate socially useful knowledge”. 

However, Harrington highlights how it is power that is at the forefront of transgender activism:

[Stock] lists, for example, the use of institutional power to enforce “preferred pronouns”, and social taboos against “misgendering” in educational contexts. She further details what she characterises as “propaganda” employed by activists in pursuit of their political aims: statistical sleight of hand, emotive talk of suicide risks, and the growing institutional popularity of the startlingly pseudo-religious Transgender Day of Remembrance. 

So it is power not reason that is valued in this post-truth age. As Harrington puts it:

And even as [Stock] expertly wields the discursive tools of the Age of Reason — its careful logic, efforts at good-faith representation of the opposing argument, and so on — to dissect this emerging paradigm [...] the same implicit acknowledgement of the limits to rational analysis emerges [...where] self-organised groups of activists “held meetings, made websites and wrote blog posts, marshalling their tiny resources highly effectively against well-embedded organisations like Stonewall, Mermaids and the Scottish Trans Alliance”. 

Somehow, by dint of determination, these groups pushed back against well-funded and politically connected lobbies to effect meaningful change. In other words: it wasn’t reasonable persuasion as such that moved the needle. It was leaning as hard as possible on every available lever of political power.

The transformation of public discourse from reliance on reasoning to a fictional realm where power reigns supreme is almost complete. Harrington says: 

[W]e are now, as a culture, losing such faith as we ever collectively had in facts and reason. In its most grounded version, this manifests as a dizzying discourse of political claim and counter-claim, all supposedly backed by objective statistics. At its more baroque end it drives the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories. The point is that it’s not just angry students with “woke” ideas who think reality is old hat: it’s everyone.

I’m unconvinced that this new paradigm can be effectively contested using the tools of the old one. Stock’s analysis is razor-sharp, in Enlightenment terms, and her prose is finely-honed. But it doesn’t matter how exquisitely crafted your knife is, if you’re bringing it to a gunfight you’re still going to lose.

Notice Harrington's call to action in the last sentence of the following paragraph: 

For our emerging post-Enlightenment politics has abandoned even the pretence of persuasion when it comes to pursuing cultural and political change. Today’s modus operandi is a pincer approach characterised by policy capture backed by the threat of social sanction, whether enforced by HR departments or by punitive online mobs. And evidence so far – including that cited by Stock — suggests this works just as well in defence of “reality” as in undermining it.

Committed people, with a willingness to show strength of conviction, can follow the example of  the trans activists and fight back by the use of shame and embarrassment, not in a vindictive manner, nor as a harsh means to achieve a good end, but by way of converting our treatise to a viral tweet. "Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone" (Colossians 4:6).    

[*] See the editorial here also.  

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