Is having a child a right?
Ian Murray over at The Conrer has an interesting post on whether having a child is a right or, as one British MP asserts, a privilege. The discussion stems from a Sun article in which 59-year old Sue Tollefson tells the paper that she plans to use In vitro fertilisation (IVF) to have a baby. The MP, Tom Harris, contends that the state should be able to ban IVF at that age because “of course 60 is too old to become a mum.” Harris argument is actually quite interesting:
I agree that it’s not fair that some women who desperately want to have children reach the age when they can collect their pension but still haven’t achieved that ambition. But what’s even more unfair is knowing that a child is born with the near certainty of being left motherless before it reaches its teens, or will spend their formative years as a carer. Children are not lifestyle choices. They’re not possessions to be added to our collections of material wealth as we grow older: first car (used), first flat, first house, second car (new), baby, bigger house… Children are precious for their own sake. The happiness and fulfilment they offer to their parents is secondary.
As for Ian Murray at The Corner, he argues that there exists a right to have a child: “Now I’m not one for long lists of positive rights, much preferring short lists of negative rights, [ ] it says something that every statement of human rights since the 1948 U.N. declaration includes the right to marry and found a family.” I can imagine, though, that some of his colleagues will take an opposite position. For faced with a common conservative dilemma — what to do when rights conflict with religious belief — many will see IVF as unnatural and, thus, immoral in itself.
-Marc
Should health care cover spiritual medicine?
Science vs. religion in the pursuit of healing
The Washington Post had an article yesterday on efforts by the Church of Scientology to get Congress to include in health care reform a provision that would require insurers to reimburse patients for the cost of prayer practitioners. In the United States, health care is most often administered through scientific-based medicine - medication, surgery, etc. However, for much of human history, there has been a concept of faith healing - the idea that religious belief, prayer and rituals can evoke divine power to remedy disease and disability.
Like doctors, prayer practitioners claim to be able to heal the sick. So, the argument goes, insurance should cover the cost of prayer. So should it? Read more
Is gay marriage pro-family?
The Washington Post had an interesting article Sunday on a group of people rarely thought of in the debates over gay marriage - the straight ex-spouses of formerly closeted homosexuals. As the article describes, “many of these former spouses…see the legalization of same-sex marriage as a step toward protecting not only homosexuals but also heterosexuals.”
On Friday, I linked to a discussion on The Corner about whether abortion could be a pro-family policy. Today, I wonder if gay marriage could be a pro-family policy? As the article suggests, if gay marriage was more accepted these straight ex-spouses “might have been spared doomed marriages.”
-Marc
Is the Right pro-family or anti-abortion?
The Corner has an interesting discussion of a post by HalfSigma suggesting that being pro-choice makes you pro-family. HalfSigma argues that single motherhood is the largest contemporary threat to the family and that abortion cuts down on single motherhood. So, the logic goes, If abortion as a policy leads to pro-family outcomes, than being pro-choice is one way to express pro-family tendencies.
The Corner folks, not surprisingly, go wild in response. The more philosophical posts comes from Andy McCarthy and Jonah Goldberg. McCarthy, correctly points out that “opposition to abortion is a moral position. It’s not a strategic position that you tweak to get a better [pro-family] outcome.” In other words, the Right is not anti-abortion because it leads to pro-family outcomes; they are anti-abortion because they are anti-abortion.
But the Right also claims to be pro-family, so HalfSigma’s argument is worth considering: in being anti-abortion, the Right is anti-family, to a degree. The question is which are they more: pro-family or anti-abortion? Goldberg responds: “I’m perfectly fine conceding that abortion would help to alleviate some of the problems associated with single motherhood, but I don’t see why people so often think this is a blockbuster argument that’s going to change peoples’ minds [regarding abortion].” Goldberg’s answer: more anti-abortion than pro-family.
-Marc
Gay marriage, continued . . .
Andrew Sullivan refers readers to a virtual exchange on whether marriage is a human right. Norm Geras, defending marriage as a human right, calls it a “liberty right”–something that can’t be prohibited.
Jake has put together one take on this. To me the operative question has more to do with what marriage is than what constitutes a right. If marriage is some kind of spiritual pledge between two people, it’s hard to imagine legitimate state restriction. If marriage is a set of privileges under the law, I have trouble conceptualizes what it would mean for gay marriage (or any kind of marriage) to be a human right. Is the argument that thriving as an autonomous individual requires tax advantages that encourage couple-dom?
Not trying to pooh-pooh the thought, but curious for more reader specification/meditation on why gay marriage should be a human right — as opposed to a legal right — in the United States.
–Sam
Private values, public policy
Senator Jeff DeMint (R-SC) says that America has three core values: “faith, family and freedom.” Now, he argues in today’s Washington Times, we’ve lost the connection between lawmaking and those basic principles:
Political leaders since Mr. Reagan have destroyed our national consensus by disconnecting our beliefs and values from national policy, and by telling Americans we can have it all without making the difficult choices.
–Sam
Human rights and gay marriage
Why same-sex marriage should not be a human rights issue
Many have argued that to deny marriage to LGBT people is to deny them a human right. The Human Rights Campaign is probably the largest LGBT organization, with gay marriage obviously serving as one of their priorities. This leads us to tricky foundational questions: What is a human right, and is the right to marry one of them?
The term human right is flexible, like almost all individual moral concepts. And more than that, we as a community have not come close to agreeing upon what definition, among the many possible ones, we endorse. By comparison, the concept of “freedom” is similarly flexible, but there is more agreement within America as to what that the term definitively means. In some sense, even though the concept of human rights has been around for a long while–inspiring many individuals, organizations, and nations–it’s not unreasonable for us to sit back and analyze not only what the concept means, but rather decide what we want the concept to mean, or rather how we want to flesh it out.
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