In the early hours of October 25, 2007, 22 year old Emma Gough, a shopworker from Telford, UK, died. She had recently given birth to twins, and held the babies as her life ebbed away.
She died, despite being in hospital with a team of doctors and nurses around her. She died, even though her life could have been saved. She died because she refused to have a blood transfusion which would enabled her children to have a mother, and would have enabled her to continue to be a wife to her 24 year old husband. She died because she was a member of a religious organisation that prohibits the eating of blood. She died in the twenty-first century because of health regulations relating to a near stone age society. She died because she was a Jehovah’s Witness.
Jehovah’s Witnesses cite Genesis : 9 vs 3-4 “Every moving animal that is alive may serve as food for YOU. As in the case of green vegetation, I do give it all to YOU. Only flesh with its soul—its blood—YOU must not eat.” Also Leviticus 17 vs 14 ” Consequently I said to the sons of Israel: “YOU must not eat the blood of any sort of flesh, because the soul of every sort of flesh is its blood”. They argue that blood is the symbol of life and the sacredness of that symbol has to be maintained.
Interestingly this WatchTower Society requirement that Jehovah’s Witnesses must refuse to accept any blood transfusions dates back only to 1945. Misinterpreting the Old Testament prohibition against eating animal blood as a routine food item, the WatchTower Society began teaching in 1945 that receiving a blood transfusion was “eating human blood”. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that receiving an infusion of human blood into their body’s circulatory system is scientifically the exact same thing as eating or ingesting blood into their body’s digestive system.
“A patient in the hospital maybe fed through the mouth, through the nose, or through the veins. When sugar solutions are given intravenously it is called intravenous feeding. So the hospital’s own terminology recognizes as feeding the process of putting nutrition into one’s system via the veins. Hence the attendant administering the transfusion is feeding the patient through the veins, and the patient receiving it is eating through his veins.” — The WATCHTOWER magazine, July 1, 1951.
Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse to acknowledge that when human blood is transfused into their body’s circulatory system that the transfused human blood remains to be human blood and continues to function as human blood.
Sadly, the lethal Jehovah’s Witness argument illustrates two things so common to religious fundamentalism: an ability to select parts of the sacred book and ignore others; a perverse logic that defies rationality.
First, the Old Testament scriptures permitted the eating of unbled animal meat, which is regarded exactly the same as eating animal blood itself. In isolated occasions, when humans needed to eat unbled meat in order to sustain their own human life, the Mosaic Law permitted such, but then required the eaters to fulfill the requirements of being “unclean” for a few days. Thus, the Bible recognized that the sustaining of human life was more “sacred” than maintaining the sacredness of animal blood.
Secondly, the argument goes something like this. God created human life. Human life is sacred. Blood is the symbol of life. People who refuse blood transfusions are sacrificing their lives in order to preserve the sacredness of the symbol.
The tragedy is that the above argument makes the symbol more important than the thing is represents, and the Bible itself recognised the absurdity of that. The irony is that the Jehovah’s Witnesses are showing contempt for life and allowing people to commit suicide. It could also be argued that in encouraging others to stand by without taking action to save life, Jehovah’s Witnesses are encouraging people to be accessories to murder. And the Bible is quite clear that God hates murder.
Emma Gough died because of bad hermeneutics, bad logic, and bad faith. Sadly, many others have preceded her, and many others will follow her. What a tragic waste of life.
Bad faith indeed!
I wholeheartly agree with what you have said here.
This is just one example of where something written many many centuries ago is taken out of context.
I can’t believe God (for those of us who believe in him) would want us to die by taking such a literal stance over the ingesting of blood products written by writers of an ancient society so long ago.
This is the dangers of fudamentalism of any kind but most of all the brainwashing that any church institution can do. I have seen it in other forms, where life or death may not be at stake, but it is just as destructive and lethal.
Having spent quite a bit of time researching maternal death in the less developed world it is a tragedy where someone dies that need not have done; when there are so many dying from lack of any available maternity care and would have wished for that chance of life.
In my view,the Jehovah’s Witness organisation is a dangerous cult - a wolf in sheeps clothing.
If I had been one of those nurses there, it would have broken my heart to bear witness to this tragedy.
You are right to talk about this very emotive subject here.
[...] who leave your faith should be put to death, you would probably feel justified in killing them. If you believe that blood transfusions are wrong, you would be prepared to commit suicide by refusing a life-saving transfusion. If you believe [...]
I believe that a patient has the right to choose whether to be treated or not. That decision is the patient’s own and doesn’t have to be agreeable to anyone else. That being so, Emma Gough was perfectly within her rights to refuse a blood transfusion even if her reasons seem silly to you and me. In other circumstances, someone who preferred to die rather than betray a sincerely held belief would be admired not criticized.
If the JWs, as an organization or as individuals, had somehow coerced her into refusing the transfusion when, left to her own devices, she would have accepted one, then that would indeed be an offence more or less equivalent to murder. However, we have no reason to believe that she did not take her decision of her own free will out of deep personal conviction.
Like you, I think the JWs’ interpretation of the Biblical passages is not merely mistaken but very obviously mistaken but I would say there is an even bigger mistake: that of adhering strictly to the words of an ancient book at all. However, they do so and that’s up to them.
The case is sad but I think the sort of strident outrage seen in some organs of the media is misplaced. As long as laws are not being broken, people should be free to do whatever they wish to do.
I hope my blog doesn’t come under the category of “strident outrage”. I agree, people should be allowed to do what they want provided it doesn’t harm others. However, I think I was just trying to express exasperation and sadness at the belief behind the refusal. I wouldn’t ever want to advocate compulsion.
Deep personal conviction V coercion?
I think Silvertiger does have a point. All I would add to that is in The JW organisation it is difficult to distinguish what is coercion based on the preaching of their dangerous doctrine, on not receiving blood transfusions and where there is personal choice and deep conviction.
In this case I would say the former is more likely than the latter.
People will go to extraordinary lengths in actions as well as words to persue and enforce their believes on others, which may not be in the best interests of that other person.
JW could be viewed as one fanatical organisation based on extreme and unsound views to the debtriment of others. In this case a women’s unnecessary death.
Danny Haszard, a 3rd generation Jehovah’s Witness, makes some interesting points on this posting in my parallel blog:
http://a-thinking-man.blogspot.com/2007/11/destructive-faith.html
Yes, just read it and I have learnt something more. Thanks for highlighting it. Everyone should look at it on here.
Re: Strident outrage: I did carefully say “seen in some organs of the media”, which I do not think quite fits your blog.
Re: Claims of compulsion: Some years ago, it was fashionable to decry “cults” and claim they “brainwashed” their members. A number of careful investigations showed the claims were exaggerated to the point of being false and we don’t hear so much about it these days though a sort of superstitious dread of the imaginary horrors perpetrated by “cults” endures in the popular mind. (The word “cult” is no longer used by serious researchers into religious beliefs and behaviours.)
Suppose I join the Moon Worshippers who have very strong and rigorous beliefs and suppose I really, really embrace the faith and my behaviour comes to be seen as extraordinary and weird by my family and erstwhile friends. Who can say where the line lies that divides my now strongly held convictions from “brainwashing” and coercion by the group? I submit that no one can do so.
In a case like that of Emma Gough, the media have two choices, to make her out as some sort of reckless fool or to show her as a helpless victim. In terms of newsworthiness, the latter is more attractive so “she was brainwashed”. When family and friends see someone become estranged from them they are hurt and can’t believe he would abandon them of his own accord, so “he was brainwashed”. Worse still, it is decided that he needs “rescue” and “de-programming”. Yet if he became a Roman Catholic, no one would say a word.
The JWs attract a lot of negative press and though I understand why, I feel that a lot of it it based on ignorance, superstition and hearsay. The right to freedom necessarily includes the right to be free to do things others disapprove of. Look around the world and you will see people doing all kinds of strange things off their own bat without any compulsion.
For all we know, had Emma Gough survived child birth, she might have walked out of the hospital and under a bus. We do not know the future. Was her life “wasted”? Perhaps or perhaps not. It is not for us to say. Maybe she died happy that she was obeying her God and going to glory. If so, she will never know that she was mistaken.
I believe her life was wasted because the chances of her surviving would have been very, very high, if she had accepted a blood transfusion.
She died because she felt unable to accept one, directly influenced by the teachings of JW.
The word cult was used here because of its definition- that being a system of religious beliefs, particulary the rites of those beliefs; in this case not being not to accept a blood transfusion. Though the JW will accept plasma and other glucose and intravenous fluids.
Her actions because of those convinctions have resulted in two twins having no mother and a husband now a widower. I just hope the husband never leaves the JW , because he is going to be such an angry man if he does, realising his wife’s death has been for nothing.
I struggle here to not feel anger towards the women who in giving life has felt unable to think about her babies and family more than her own convictions.
If the JW said it is ok now to have blood, she would have gone along with the new rulling, of that I am sure. This suggests to me what I have always thought, that JW beliefs do have a direct influence on the minds of their followers.
what if she had said:
” But you told me accepting blood was wrong, I want to stick to my original view.”
The JW organisation would have disowned her - ex-communication. Her family would then have had to disown her then until she came back to their stance.
Surely if not a cult, then a very controlling organisation.
I just hope the twins do not grow up indoctrinated in the same thought system, deeply flawed and dangerous when there is life and death at stake here. I fear they will.
If they are girls, do the same potential fate await them if they have childern? Yes, it does.
I can’t wait for the JW’s to turn up at my door next time.
I will certainly have some questions for them to answer.
(Though I hear they have been partiulary well trained to answer the thorny question of blood transfusions.)
So strong then, for the need of JW’s to keep this ridiculocus death sentence going that they support.
You cannot condemn Emma Gough on the grounds that she left her children without a mother because it was never her intention to do so. This result was forced on her by her obedience to what she saw as a higher imperative. Moreover many people have done do precisely this and been praised for it, for example those who participated in the French Resistance and died as a result. They, like Emma Gough, were responding to what they saw as a higher imperative.
Likewise you cannot reasonably say that her life was wasted on the grounds that she could have recovered for her illness because you don’t know that. She could equally well have died anyway from other complications. The balance of probabilities is indeed that you would have recovered but it is not a certainty.
As for the “defellowship” business, yes I can imagine that committed members would feel very hurt by suffering that and can see that it might well act as a strong persuasion to toe the party line. On the other hand, don’t we all have the right to dissociate ourselves from people who, so we think, have reneged on principles we hold dear? All clubs have rules and expel members who break them. How are the JWs different?
The difference, I think, is that while we would understand a club that expelled a member for stealing or bringing the club into disrepute, we feel that to do so for accepting a blood transfusion (which we regard as a normal human right) is a bad thing to do. In other words, we are judging according to our beliefs, not the stated beliefs of the JWs.
We certainly have the right to disagree with the JWs over blood transfusions and we certainly have the right to regret the death of Emma Gough but does that give us the right to rail at the JWs for their beliefs? I am not sure it does. As long as they apply their rules to themselves and don’t attempt to inflict them on the rest of us, then I think their beliefs are their own business.
I think the issue that is raising all the ruckus is not the belief system—which in the case of Jehovah’s Witnesses changes with the weather–the issue is duress and free will. Does someone like Emma Gough- 22 years old, female shopworker JW wife–really have FREE WILL when ticking off that consent form?
I’ve seen JW’s blood beliefs compared to folks who eat, drink, or drug themselves to death. While we can argue whether someone in the throes of substance abuse is really ill or not, I don’t think these people, usually, are COMPELLED to smoke, drink alcohol, or abuse drugs. Also, we save people every day against their will who have attempted, or are trying to attempt, suicide. THAT’S a more accurate, although still inaccurate, comparison.
Anyone who investigates the white male-dominated top-down heirarchal structure of the Watchtower will LAUGH at the idea of a young female JW wife making decisions with FREE WILL and without DURESS.
1) It is a sin against God himself to disobey Watchtower; the elders (the hospital liason committees are always made up of elders) are shining like stars and to disobey THEM is a sin against God himself. What rational person doesn’t call this DURESS?!?
2) Women in the Watchtower are second-class citizens. They are weaker, they contribute most of the money and time and work —and cleaning the bathrooms–but they own nothing and have no say in anything with regard to religious policies. Their husbands OWN them. Walk into any Kingdom Hall and watch a meeting. Women are not even allowed to READ the BIBLE from the stage, or carry a microphone, they can be interviewed is all. They hold no office or position, and sometimes they must cover their heads if they say a prayer in front of their own minor son, so powerless and worthless is their position in the organization. So in the case of Emma Gough, 22 year old shopkeeper wife—does any rational person really believe that in the face of watchtower elders and her JW husband, she has FREE WILL or is not UNDER DURESS?
2) Shunning. Whole websites or sections thereof are devoted to Watchtower and the horrific shunning policies they still uphold, so I won’t go into detail here. If Emma had accepted blood, she would have been shunned by the Witnesses –every Witness on the planet–and shunned by her own husband in her own home for who knows how long, until she expressed shame and sorrow and regret for accepting blood and living. If she went to the Kingdom Hall-which she would have had to do to get the shunning lifted–she would have to face the whole congregation– possibly a hundred or more members–knowing they believe she should have died and that she is a traitor to their cause. Five hours a week, for months. This is what is in the mind of a JW when they sign those consent forms. Does any rational person really believe that in the face of horrific shunning, the Emma Gough’s of the world have FREE WILL or are not UNDER DURESS?
3) Changing policies. As noted, the ban on blood only started in 1945. This included vaccinations, blood products, organ transplants, PLANT FERTILIZER containing blood for crying out loud, improperly bled meat. SINCE THEN, organ transplants, vaccinations, and MOST blood products including RH factor, clotting factors, and COW’s BLOOD!?! We save attempted suicides all the time against their will because we know 999 times out of a thousand they won’t feel the same afterwards. Emma Gough was a good case for compulsory transfusion in her particular circumstances becdause of her age, and her position in the Watchtower (lower than a housefly) and in the face of the shunning she would have faced. As it is, she died for a policy that will likely not exist in a few years.
If you really want to take all these feelings and do something good with them: investigate the Watchtower and get familiar with their blood policy and their shunning and the role of women and children. Contact the medical care providers and centers in your neighborhood–start with the ones you use yourself–and pass this information on to them. There will always, it seems, be people in this world who eat, drink, smoke, and starve themselves to death. They do NOT have to be 22 year old JW wife and shopworker Emma Gough’s.
Thanks for reading.
The one person who could answer the question - Emma Gough - is of course not available for comment. We can only speculate on what she might say.
If a mugger puts a knife to my throat and demands I hand over my wallet, it is fair to say that I do so “under duress”: the duress is present and visible. If I am out alone among strangers and tempted to eat something forbidden by my religion and I abstain, knowing full well that even if I gave in to temptation, no one from my religious community would ever know, am I still acting under duress?
My point is that it is a common fallacy to present cases like that of Emma Gough as people acting entirely against their will but forced solely by coercion from their community. If that were true - if all JW’s followed the laws of their community only under psychological and emotional coercion from their leaders - then the JW community would be tiny. It would bleed to death as people ran away from it.
The point you have to grasp is that along with the coercion goes conviction. That is why it is so hard for people who have lost their faith to escape from the deadly embrace of their religion. By all means question and condemn the methods used to instill the conviction, the methods of coercion used to enforce it and maintain it but don’t underestimate the conviction itself.
It is amazing how much stick believers will take from the organization before they even begin to question its validity. You hear this again and again from people who have finally made a break. They tell how their suspicions were aroused and how they suppressed them, believing that the organization must be right. Coming to doubt it is coming to doubt themselves: the foundation of their life falls away.
The gun-at-the-head model is unsubtle but worse, it is unfair to the victims themselves whom we should strive to understand, the better to help them.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are over a hundred years old; their blood ban is over fifty years old. IF they want ‘no blood’ options then let them become doctors and nurses, let them take their 2 billion dollars and found their own hospitals and birthing centers. If JW’s, in emergencies, are consistantly and persistently trashfused blood when needed, then Watchtower is going to relax their blood policy. If Emma had been involuntarily transfused, she would still be alive to sacrifice herself another day, and she WOULD NOT huave been shunned.
The only people we have to understand is ourselves. It’s time fo rus as people….a few billion of us…to stand up to this multi-million dolar empire and say NO, just as we have said NO to female genital mutilation, just as we have said NO to domestic violence, whether religion is involved or not JUST SAY NO it is way overdue.
I find this puzzling. You seem to imply that the beliefs of Jehovah’s Witnesses somehow impinge on me. Sorry, no, they don’t. The only people they impinge on are Jehovah’s Witnesses. What JWs believe would not prevent me accepting a blood transfusion, for instance, or accepting one for my child.
As for saying “No”, most of us have already said “No” by simply ignoring the JW movement. The only people being harmed by it are its members and where they are autonomous adults I suggest we have little or no right to interfere with their beliefs any more than JWs have a right to interfere with your atheism or whatever belief set you hold. You can say “No” until you are blue in the face and it will not prevent another JW going down the same path as Emma Gough.
If your motive is to bring to an end what you perceive as the abuses of the JW creed, then I suggest you will get nowhere by railing at them in the same way that religious fundamentalists rail at atheists. The way forward to to engage with believers - many of whom have little or no idea of what we dreadful atheists believe in - and for that you need a little human understanding.
Your vehemence suggests to me that you have personally been injured by the JW movement. If so, then you need to deal with that as a personal problem. Repeatedly pouring out scorn and hatred on the movement will not help.
If I want to go to war and fight the taliban and get myself killed, would that be ok with you? After all I would be helping my country. If I don’t want to accept a blood transfusion because God, not you, says it is sacred, would it not be my right to do so? I in fact have done that, almost died, but I will not kill anyone nor will I go against Jehovah’s commands. Use any Bible you choose, tweek it anyway you want. Blood is sacred to God.
And, believe it or not, katy, human life (and you) are more sacred to God than blood. According to your Bible, Christ shed blood, treated it with contempt, threw it away, in order to save you.
Katy, no doubt sincerely, believes that “blood is sacred to God”. What she may have missed is that this is an opinion, not a fact. It is the opinion of people who interpret the Bible in a particular way. This means that before we even get to the “blood is sacred to God” belief, we have to confront two other prior beliefs, firstly the belief that the Bible is telling the truth and secondly, that this interpretation of it is correct. That’s an awful lot of opinionating in order to be so sure of the resultant belief.
That aside, Katy asks whether she has the right to refuse a blood transfusion. The answer is yes, she does. (The fact that Emma Gough was allowed to refuse a blood transfusion proofs the point, does it not?) The important point to note is that you have the right to refuse a blood transfusion for any reason or none. It doesn’t depend on your religious convictions. Or on our opinion, for that matter.
If you wish to sacrifice your life to your religious convictions, then as long as you do so of your own free will, I have absolutely no objection. I may feel it is sad and pointless but that needn’t detain you as that is merely my opinion. What I would object to is if you performed such an act , not because you genuinely wished to do so of your own volition, but because someone with authority over you told you that you must. I would regard such a person as virtually a murderer and you as a virtual murder victim. It is up to you to know which is the correct scenario.
As for you going to fight the Taliban, I think I certainly would object, not because you might get yourself killed (why not simply commit suicide if you want to die?) but because the implication would be that you wanted to kill members of the Taliban. Wanting to kill someone is a bad thing in my book and actually killing them is even worse. It is surely also against your religion.
Finally, I cannot help wondering why katy and lambsmarch respond to these discussions so angrily. Shouldn’t your faith be a joyful thing, katy? Or does the anger supply the energy needed to smother doubt?
Personal attacks on my character and motivations aside, JW’s and other insular groups try to make out the issue as being religious belief. What moral people are putting forth is that the issue is of FREE WILL and THAT is the issue that eventually will be decided–whether or not the Emma Gough’s of the world are actually exercising FREE WILL without duress. From what I have seen especially of the husband’s ridiculous comments after Emma’s death, Emma did NOT exercise free will and did NOT refuse blood without duress. Emma was a good case for involuntary transfusion, with her age, and position (what there was of it)and history in the Watchtower organization. IF there had been time, and the doctors sought a court order for involuntary transfusion, I believe they would have gotten it since they usually do once knowing the personal history of the patient and they are often though of as abuse victims. In the words of a judge in a well-publicized JW-related case:
“However, religious beliefs should not be an absolute defense to conduct that is harmful…The implications..arising from negligent advice given by a church official could be enormous. It would provide complete immunity for potentially serious wrongdoing for which there might be no other remedy…In the Jehovah’s Witness faith there is an even closer and more dependant relationsip between members of the congregation and the clergy than is the case in most religions. For members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, religion is a pervasive and dominant influence in everyday life. Social contact with others outside the faith is discouraged and adherence to the instructions of the elders is required…“certain relationships, especially those in which there is a significant imbalance in power or those involving a high degree of trust and confidence, may require the trier of fact to be particularly careful in assessing the reality of consent.”…the pervasive nature of the Jehovah’s Witness religion’s presence in the everyday lives of its adherents, the specific religious requirement of obedience, and the direction to avoid worldly ways and social interaction outside the faith…The elders were, therefore, not only aware of her dependence and vulnerability, they were responsible for it.”
And for those that need to know, my discomfiture over Emma’s death is not religious, but stems from my being a health care provider by profession. I am a trained, licensed and experienced advocate, and nobody needed a knowledgable and effective advocate more than Emma did that day as she lay there with her life ebbing away.
I don’t know where you or your motivations have been attacked. Perhaps I missed something.
I don’t doubt your sincerity for a moment and I think I have indicated that I agree with you in many ways. What I am saying is that I think it wrong to suppose what someone’s motives are when only the person can know them for sure.
The fact that you are a health care provider perhaps makes the dilemma sharper for you but it is irrelevant as far as the arguments are concerned. You have no more right than another person - me for example - in saying how a case like Emma Gough’s should be dealt with.
Let’s simplify the case and suppose that what we are dealing with is someone without religious affiliations who decides to commit suicide. Does he have the right to do so? Do you have the right to stop him?
My answer is that if an adult of his own free will wishes to commit suicide, neither you, nor I, nor Santa Claus, has the right to stop him. If we have reason based on strong evidence to believe that the person is committing suicide only because he has been coerced into this by another, then I think we have a right to intervene and perhaps at least demand that the act of suicide be postponed pending clarification. But if the subject is an autonomous adult, I think that you cannot morally impose a postponement even in those circumstances.
When it comes to religious groups, it is temptingly easy to believe that when they do things we disapprove of it is because they have been forced, that they are not doing this out of their own free will. By what right do we make that judgement? If a Jain wishes to starve himself to death, what right do I have to claim that he has been coerced into this by his guru? None at all. And especially not without very good evidence.
In any case, since when was not wanting to do something an excuse for not doing it? Most of us do things that we don’t want to do out of a moral sense or out of a sense of duty. What about the soldier who throws himself onto a grenade to protect his companions? Was he coerced? Or did he do it out of a sense of duty? Or was he depressed and took the opportunity to commit suicide? How will you ever know?
It would be very arrogant of us to go around telling people what they should be allowed to do and not to do and claiming that whenever they do things we disapprove of that they must have been coerced. Life simply ain’t that simple. Sometimes we have to accept that people have a right to do things that we consider are a tragic waste of their lives.
from a christian point of view, for those who contend that life is more sacred than blood, and it is foolish to die instead of accepting blood transfusions, then explain why so many early christians were tortured & killed by romans in the arenas when all they had to do was eat blood sausage? wouldn’t that seem a lot easier to do then die? yet apparantly they accepted death in order to adhere to god’s standards knowing they would be rewarded. i suppose they must have been brainwashed by jesus at the time….
I believe and always have believed that it is the right of every human being over the logical age of majority to kill themself directly or indirectly if they so choose. Think! What right has the government or any other authority to dictate whether one lives or dies? I pay taxes, I am a citizen, it stands to logic that if I want to cut my brachial artery or whatnot, or refuse a treatment that would save my life, I should have the right to do that just as I have the right to vote. Also, I have the right to kill my child in utero if I become pregnant accidentally. Why, then, if I have ultimate jurisdiction over the life of a potential baby (who gives me no consent to kill them), do I not even have jurisdiction over my own life, when I give consent. It makes no sense. America makes no sense.
T’Kral, if I had the right to kill myself I would want to make sure that I was doing so for a good reason. The point of my original posting was to argue that the apparent reason that Emma Gough had was based on a profound misunderstanding.
[...] To an outsider it would seem that many people have been seriously damaged by the cult and there is a case for law enforcement agencies and mental health professionals to getting involved to protect the children from further abuse - though I accept that the practicalities of that make any involvement extremely difficult if not impossible. The whole religion just seemed another hideous example of bad faith. [...]
I would just like to see someone espouse support for the Watchtower or JW (not the same thing despite what they claim) without using logical fallacies. Perhaps it simply cannot be done.
“Also, I have the right to kill my child in utero if I become pregnant accidentally. ”
There is no such thing as this, and that is why there continues to be so much controversy and litigation over it especially in the USA where fundamentalist religion still has so much control of our legal system. No one has the RIGHT to kill an unborn fetus, the government has a responsibility to refrain from interference on that personal a nature–as long as the decision is made with free will and without duress. Same as for suicide; we have no RIGHT to commit an overt act of suicide, but we have the ability to do it slowly and, so far, the government has a responsibility to refrain from interference on that personal a nature. These are two separate issues that people with destructive group thinking–and their supporters and enablers– like to mix.
[...] Let’s begin with an example I found on another blog site (A Thinking Man) article entitled “Bad Faith”. “In the early hours of October 25, 2007, 22 year old Emma Gough, a shopworker from Telford, [...]