Monthly Archives: February 2019

Women Trump Children?

Sorry, but this is what we’re talking about…

Contents

1. Introduction / Evolution

2. Background: Women Before Children

3. Abortion Without Time Limit

1. Introduction / Evolution

It’s no longer about men’s rights; it’s about children’s rights.

It has been apparent for some time that the feminists set women ahead of children.

I thought I couldn’t get any more implacably opposed to feminism. It seems I was wrong.

Let me remind you of the evolutionary origin of our difficulties. The preferencing of women (call it chivalry, call it gynocentrism, call it the empathy gap, call it what you will) has its origin in the pair bond, a key Homo sapiens adaptation, central to the overwhelming success of the species (amongst other attributes). But in this regard, women – as mothers – are actually a proxy for children. Evolution cares only for reproductive success, which is manifest in children and their survival to reproductive age. When women’s primary concern was the domestic, they functioned as a suitable proxy for children. What was beneficial for the mother could be assumed to also be beneficial for the child.

But in respect of women in a non-domestic role, such as in the workplace, their preferencing is an anomaly: such preferencing is not conducive to evolutionary success. Indeed, in as far as it diminishes the birth rate (as it has), it is counter-evolutionary.

And when it comes to killing babies, there can be no clearer departure from an evolutionary optimum: no clearer indication that feminism has subverted and invalidated the proxy status of women.

2. Background: Women Before Children

Where I’m heading with this post is abortion, and, in particular, the moves to permit abortion without time limit. But first, a brief reminder of how feminism has been putting women’s rights ahead of children’s rights for decades. This has long been apparent in the context of the safeguarding of children. This arises in the context of custody/contact after parental separation. For example, Karen Woodall writes,

For four decades since the change in divorce laws, the needs of women in the family have usurped the needs of children…”

More seriously, the same focus on mothers to the exclusion of their children also occurs when social services are actively involved in a dysfunctional family. Here is Karen again, writing in 2013,

“The reports of Filicide, the murder by a mother of her child, are all over the news this week. Baby P, Daniel Pelka, Hamzah Khan, Keanu Williams being just four names that are engraved upon our consciousness, not just because of their untimely deaths, but because of the nature of the suffering inflicted upon them before they died.

Collective handwringing is in evidence up and down the land and who is to blame is being widely discussed.  The sight of the Head of Birmingham Children’s Safeguarding Board attempting to squirm out of the reality of her responsibility for allowing yet another death of a child to happen on her watch, was excruciating on the BBC news last night.  Her words, in a statement released this week scream out the reality of why children are dying,

‘I wish, on behalf of all the statutory agencies who sit on the Board to express very deep regret and distress about Keanu’s death. We apologise unequivocally for what were totally unacceptable and unnecessary failures both collectively and individually in every organisation which had contact with Keanu. We fully accept all the findings of the Serious Case Review and the recommendations made. Keanu died because there was failure across every agency to see, hear and respond to him in the context of what he was experiencing at any one point in time. Staff were distracted by his mother’s needs and by taking what she was telling them at face value.’

Staff were distracted by his mother’s needs and by taking what she was telling them at face value!  In other words, a systemic use of gender biased practice which focuses practitioners not on the needs of children, but on the rights and needs of women.  If ever there was proof needed that social work and our children and family services are, as a very senior social worker said recently, a ‘feminist industry’, this is it.  Gender biased family services, upholding the rights and needs of women above those of children, are killing those children in a neighbourhood near you and until we name it, we are never going to stop it.”

The four cases named above are not isolated. Ignoring the danger to children posed by mothers is an endemic problem. This was further exposed in the November 2017 report “Learning from Cafcass submissions to Serious Case Reviews”, by Richard Green and Emily Halliday. This report derives lessons to be learnt from the 97 Serious Case Reviews (SCRs) to which CAFCASS contributed between 2009 and 2016. These SCRs involved known or suspected abuse or neglect of a child where the child died or was seriously harmed. The key findings were,

  • Mothers and fathers were suspected perpetrators of a similar number of incidents of child homicide;
  • Allegations of domestic abuse had been made in 71% of cases, and almost all allegations of domestic abuse were against men, or included men, usually fathers;
  • Of those cases where domestic abuse allegations had been made, only in about half of the cases was the person thought to have killed or harmed the child the alleged domestic abuse perpetrator;
  • In some cases, the authorities’ concentration on the alleged risk posed by the father or male partner may have masked a greater risk posed by the mother. Quote, ‘In some cases where index incidents were perpetrated by the mother, SCRs found that the mother’s history had not been sufficiently analysed, concerns about her being overshadowed by concerns about the father or other male. It is interesting to note that such SCRs do not show a simple relationship between male domestic abuse and the fatal/serious maltreatment of children.’

One might have hoped that after a sequence of very high profile cases, and the acknowledgement of an issue by CAFCASS, and repeated assurances that “lessons would be learnt” that lessons would indeed be learnt. But no. To think that lessons would be learnt is to underestimate the depth of resistance that exists within the social services and other authorities to the notion that mothers, too, can pose a risk to their children – not just men.

As Karen Woodall has identified, the root cause of the problem in acknowledging the potential risk to children from women is that the mother’s wellbeing is actually being placed ahead of that of the children. To demonstrate that lessons have not been learnt, consider the London Safeguarding Children Board (and I expect much the same will hold for other Safeguarding Children Boards). Their advice on “Safeguarding children affected by domestic abuse” runs to 58 pages and over 18,000 words. In all those 58 pages there is not even a hint that mothers might pose a risk to their children. The advice is entirely based on the assumption that the danger, to both mother and children, is from the father or male partner. For example, the primary purpose of the advice is,

  • To support the mother to assist her to protect herself and the children; and,
  • To hold the abusive partner accountable for the violence and provide him with opportunities to change.

Symptoms of abuse uniformly assume a male perpetrator and include, for example,

  • …controlling who the mother or children see or where they go, what they wear or do, stalking, imprisonment, forced marriage;
  • …the severity of the violence against the mother is predictive of the severity of abuse to the children;
  • The child being abused as part of the abuse against the mother:
  • The children are often reliant on their mother as the only source of good parenting, as the abusive partner will have significantly diminished ability to parent well.

One needs to imagine this sort of stuff continuing over 58 pages. Where there is an oblique nod to a potential for mother’s culpability, the blame is redirected at the nearest man, the mother having no recognised capacity for reprehensible agency, for example,

  • Being forced to participate in the abuse and degradation by the abusive partner.

Since drugs and alcohol play a major role in domestic abuse, any culpability of a mother who so indulges is also explicitly deflected to the nearest man,

  • Mothers may have started using legal drugs prescribed to alleviate symptoms of a violent relationship. Mothers may turn to alcohol and drugs as a form of self-medication and relief from the pain, fear, isolation and guilt that are associated with domestic abuse. Alcohol and drug use can help eliminate or reduce these feelings and therefore become part of how she copes with the abuse.
  • Mothers can be coerced and manipulated into alcohol and drug use. Abusers may often introduce their partner to alcohol or drug use to increase her dependence on him and to control her behaviour.

“may”, hmmm.

The mindset is that women are never guilty of child abuse. And yet the reality is that mothers are at least as likely to perpetrate child abuse as men, including being responsible for child deaths. My own 332 Child Homicides concluded that, where culpability was established, the mother was the lone perpetrator in 36% of cases and either a lone or a co-perpetrator in over half of cases (58%).

But there is a steadfast refusal – as evidenced by the Child Safeguarding Boards – to acknowledge that women are not all angels, and, in fact, are no better than men. The price for this conceit is paid by children, whom the so-called Safeguarding Boards prefer not to protect if it means knocking women off their pedestal. But off their pedestal they must go, or this perversion of morality will only worsen. It already is doing.

And this brings me to the latest horror in the abortion saga.

3. Abortion Without Time Limit

Unlike many within the MRM, I’ve never been against abortion – before. I could not go along with the Catholics, or other Christians, who maintain that even a zygote is a sacred life. I was of the view that abortion, within some time limit, is the lesser evil compared to bringing an unwanted child into the world. To me, the issue was viability. If the embryo is not viable outside the uterus, then abortion could be tolerated. The current 24 week limit (in Great Britain) could, admittedly, do with review, since a 24 week old foetus can be viable with modern medical technology. So it should only be revised down.

But in January 2019, New York state passed a law allowing abortions without a time limit. This breaks new ground, though it is an objective which feminists have been pursuing for a long time, including within the UK. In May 2016, the Royal College of Midwives announced their decision to support a campaign to scrap the time limit on abortion and sweep away all current legal restrictions. Thankfully, there was a storm of protest, both from rank-and-file midwives and also MPs. It appeared that the Royal College’s chief executive, Cathy Warwick, had “ridden roughshod” over majority opinion. The new law proved more popular in New York, where the passing of the Act was greeted with an “eruption of applause” in the senate.

The rot in the USA is not confined to New York. A Bill in Virginia, proposed by Fairfax County’s Kathy Tran, is also set to permit abortion up to birth. She has confirmed that her Bill would permit “abortion” even after the women in question has already gone into labour.

The so-called “moderate” Democratic Virginia Governor, Ralph Northam, deepened controversy by stating that the baby in question might be born , alive, but then killed subject to the mother’s wish and agreement by two doctors. To be accurate, in the video recording of this statement, Northam alluded to the foetus being severely deformed and perhaps non-viable. He also suggested the baby, once born, might be resuscitated if necessary, before being dispatched if the mother so wished.

However, Kathy Tran’s Bill would not make abortion, even at the point of delivery, conditional upon non-viability, or even any problem at all with the baby. Instead either severe foetal abnormality or a claimed adverse impact on the mother’s health would suffice to justify the killing. And what would constitute a challenge to the mother’s health? Answer,

all factors – physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age – relevant to the wellbeing of the patient

We need look no further than our own law of abortion in Great Britain to expose the paper thin fraudulence of this faux-protection. This is actually abortion on demand, without time limit.

Here is the existing law in Great Britain according to the Abortion Act 1967. Abortion is legal in Britain up to 24 weeks if either of the following holds: (a) continuance of the pregnancy risks injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman or any existing children of her family; or, (b) there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped. After 24 weeks abortion is legal only if there is a substantial risk to the woman’s life or there are serious risks of foetal abnormalities.

In 2017 there were 197,533 abortions in England & Wales. Only 2% of these were due to foetal abnormalities. 98% of abortions (around 193,600 per year) are carried out ostensibly due to the risk to the physical or mental health of the women. Really? How credible is this?

In 2017 there were 679,100 live births in England & Wales. Had the 193,600 aborted babies been permitted to be born, we are being asked to believe that 22% of these births would have resulted in harm to the mother serious enough to motivate the abortion. In fact, the actual implied percentage would be far bigger because this would imply that quite a sizeable proportion of the 679,100 babies actually born would cause their mothers’ harm too.

For comparison, just 0.008% of mothers die in childbirth in the UK.

And just 0.6% of babies are stillborn or subject to natural foetal death in utero.

In truth it is clear that ideological sympathy for “a woman’s right to choose” leads practitioners to interpret frustrating the mother’s wish for an abortion as a challenge to her mental health. The issue of harm to the mother is a ruse, a subterfuge. The existing British law is, de facto, abortion on demand before 24 weeks.

The NHS makes abortion on demand unambiguous. In their guidance on the conditions applying to abortion, the NHS makes no mention whatsoever that there are supposed to be medical grounds to justify it. Instead the NHS states bluntly,

Some women may be certain they want to have an abortion, while others may find it more difficult to make a decision….The decision to have an abortion is yours alone.

You may also want to speak to your partner, friends or family, but you don’t need to discuss it with anyone else and they don’t have a say in the final decision.”

So, we should not be fooled by the new law in New York, or that being proposed in Virginia, as regards the medical proviso. That is a mere sop. What these laws will be, in reality, is abortion on demand without time limit, even up to and including the point of labour.

This is murder.

This is no longer a matter of opinion.

There is no functional difference between a baby which is just days, or a few weeks, from full term and a new born baby. The only difference is their location in space.

Feminist moral corruption and self-aggrandisement has now reached the point at which they present women as deities who may decide life and death over others. They need to be stopped.