A roundup of news and commentary from the front lines of the culture wars.
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The chief medical officer at the Department of Health actually apologized for referring to “Black and Puerto Rican mothers,” calling it an “oversight” and saying that “we apologize for inadvertently gendering Black and Puerto Rican birthing people.”
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The horrors of “at-home abortions” continue to unfold. From U.K. Right to Life:
A sixteen-year-old girl has described the horror of home abortion after a phone consultation miscalculated her gestation by 12 weeks.
Savannah, not her real name, had a phone consultation with the abortion provider, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) who determined that she was less than 8 weeks pregnant. When she went to the clinic to collect the abortion pills, the medical professionals did not perform a medical examination or a scan.
After Savannah took both abortion pills at home, she felt “really bad” pain. “My relative called another ambulance because when I was pushing, my boyfriend could see feet”, she said. Her son was born alive, with his heart beating and they both had to be taken to hospital. The hospital concluded that Savannah had been between 20 and 21 weeks pregnant.
Abortion kills babies. It really is that simple.
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Over at The Postliberal Order, Gladden Pappen has an excellent essay on what Orban’s victory in Hungary means. The whole thing is very much worth reading, but this section stood out:
Before the war took the central place of the campaign, the government’s child protection referendum was on track to be a focus of the campaign. A key example of proactive, pro-family measures as I suggested above, new amendments to Hungary’s Child Protection Act came into force in 2021 to provide an umbrella of care to children. As we know from life in the United States and western Europe, LGBT ideology has rapidly transformed from a movement seeking toleration and privacy to one seeking to indoctrinate children in matters of sexual identity and even “gender transition” that have no place in schools.
For a referendum to be valid, according to Hungary’s constitution, 50 percent of the electorate must participate and cast valid votes. Unfortunately, the left-wing opposition and foreign NGOs called on voters to spoil their ballots (e.g., by marking both “yes” and “no” to each question), thereby undermining the democratic results. We can, nevertheless, gain a fairly clear picture of what happened.
The Hungarian government posed four questions to voters in yesterday’s referendum (results):
Do you support the holding of sexual orientation sessions for minor children in public education without parental consent?
No: 63.6%. Yes: 5.2%. Spoiled: 31.1%.
Do you support the promotion of gender reassignment treatments for minors?
No: 65.5%. Yes: 2.8%. Spoiled: 31.7%.
Do you support the unrestricted introduction of sexual media content to minors, which affects their development?
No: 65.0%. Yes: 3.2%. Spoiled: 31.8%.
Do you support the display of gender-sensitive media content to minors?
No: 64.8%. Yes: 3.3%. Spoiled: 31.9%.
Because the opposition had its voters spoil their ballots, the referendum did not reach the minimum threshold for validity. Nevertheless, a clear picture emerges: two-thirds of Hungarian voters are resolutely against the promotion of sexual content, including sex-reassignment content, to children. Only a tiny fraction of voters dared to express support for these propositions. Facing another landslide defeat, the Left chose to have liberalism cancel democracy rather than allow democracy to cancel liberalism.
What is particularly encouraging about this is that we know majorities in many countries oppose the diktats of the sexual revolutionaries—but do not seem to be able to stop the juggernaut. In Hungary, they have. It is worth paying attention to.
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The legalization and mainstreaming of assisted suicide has spawned a thousand tragedies and will spawn a thousand more. This essay, from the National Post, highlights just one of them. Please read it. An excerpt:
Nurses chattered in the corridor. A medication cart rumbled by. Trish and Gary gazed wordlessly at Alan perched on his bed. A few days before, he’d removed the cochlear implant from his right ear. He refused to talk to them. Only the beeping of his IV line broke the room’s silence. Their eyes burned dry. They’d done most of their crying already, wondering how 50 years of looking after Alan could end without their consent, authorized by hospital staff they’d never met.
The two brothers had spent the previous day together, sharing meals, walking and talking. As a young man, Alan had worked for Cannor Nurseries, where he was a proud member of the Bulb and Burlap crew. That’s where he’d met his close friend, Bob, whose climbing death hit Alan, a lifelong bachelor who struggled with relationships, hard. He suffered another blow in 2004 with the death of their father. During their visit, Gary told Alan that if he wanted, Gary could retire and move back home from Edmonton to be close by. Alan had answered, “I wish I would have known that.”
“We were numb. It was like a dream,” Gary recalls. A nurse got emotional. She had to leave the room. After the first of three intravenous injections Alan slipped into sleep. He was dead 15 minutes later.
On the same subject, here’s a National Post article on how Canada’s suicide regime will soon expand to include those with mental illness. A cruel, cruel thing.
