Mary Kenny“The latest announcement by the World Health Organisation…is surely an example of demanding inflated and unrealistic ‘rights’ from nature” writes Mary Kenny
More than 200 years ago, that remarkable Irish political thinker Edmund Burke warned against the French Revolution’s affirmation of ‘human rights’.
We would first demand rights from the state, said Burke. Then we would demand rights from our neighbour. And finally we would demand rights from nature itself.
Burke was a conservative reacting to the violent political upheaval of 1789. Then, in our lifetime, Pope John Paul II overturned much Catholic thinking along Burkean lines by embracing the concept of ‘human rights’.
He did so because he knew where such rights had been so grievously denied – in the Warsaw Pact countries held in thrall by the Soviet Union. Imaginatively, the Polish Pope also applied such human rights to causes such as that of the unborn child.
So nowadays we are not in accord with Burke’s rebuttal of human rights as a theory, and there are a range of rights we usually uphold: the Irish Constitution of 1937 is enlightened about the rights of a citizen under the law, and the responsibility of the state to protect those rights.
Demanding
But surely Burke was wise when he warned against demanding ‘rights’ from Nature itself? The latest announcement by the World Health Organisation – an arm of the UN – is surely an example of demanding inflated and unrealistic ‘rights’ from nature.
The WHO, which defines infertility as ‘a disease’, has now adopted a claim by Dr David Adamson, a senior American fertility doctor, that every person has the ‘right’ to have their own genetic child. This right extends to any and every individual, without any spousal or family context.
A single man, unable or unwilling to find a woman with whom to share parentage, should have the ‘right to reproduce’ and this ‘right’ should be guaranteed by all nations associated with the UN.
Notices will be sent out to international national health services next year that the ‘right to reproduce’ should be guaranteed to all citizens.
On a practical level, this could put enormous pressure on health services in many countries, which are often already struggling with health care issues.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that UN agencies are demanding these rights from nature, as Burke predicted: modern reproductive technology is enabling ever more surrogacy on a widespread scale. In India there are baby-farms where poor women rent out their wombs for rich foreigners.
Yes, infertility should be a source of medical investigation and wherever possible, help and cure. But to guarantee every individual the ‘right’ to genetic reproduction flows from the distorted thinking of demanding rights from nature.
The law should not concern itself with ‘trifles’
The Ashers’ bakery case – the Belfast Christians who declined to ice a cake with the message ‘support gay marriage’ – has now been taken up by libertarians who uphold the right to free speech and freedom of opinion. They point out that to force a small business to inscribe a political message on their product could set a precedent for all kinds of coercion.
I have thought from the beginning that prosecuting this small bakery was bullying by the equality enforcers. But I also think that it’s a pity the law no longer upholds the principle of ‘de minimus non curat lex’ – ‘the law does not concern itself with trifles’. Baking (or icing) a cake should surely be dismissed as a trifle.
But lawyers have discovered that contentious cases can be a bonanza and so every trifle is now blown up into a matter of major injustice. Who foots the bill? The taxpayer.
Good counsel from an honourable figure
Aidan Hennigan, a very fine journalist and reporter – he was the doyen of Irish journalists in London – died recently aged 90, and was duly honoured in many obituaries. Aidan, from Ballina, was for many years the London correspondent of the Irish Press, a fair, thorough and balanced reporter who sought out the truth.
As a person, he was immensely cordial, always laughing. I sometimes encouraged him to marry because I knew he had a fondness for a certain lady, but he joked that he was “an old Mayo bachelor farmer at heart”. Actually, I think Aidan was a genuinely content bachelor and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Aidan gave me the best advice I ever had, as a journalist. “Always do your homework,” he’d say. “If you prepare properly, and do your research, you will be all right.” Like much advice to the young, its value only sunk in over the years – I was often too feckless to take good advice seriously in my 20s. But I’ve come to treasure that counsel over the years and have often thought of Aidan when it comes to mind. Preparation is everything.
Aidan’s funeral is at St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Harrow on November 9 and I know his life will be lovingly remembered by all who knew him.