Double Standard

10 August 2010

I just sat and shook my head in amazement at the hypocrisy.

I have seen the word flabbergasted before and even used it at times but I had not ever felt it to this degree.

I was embarrased on behalf of those who would exhibit such a double standard.  It made me enormously uncomfortable even being aware of it.  No... I am not talking about the behavior of someone in my congregation, community, or office.  I'm referring to certain individuals with the medical journal "Lancet".

CNN ran an article entitled Home births: No drugs, no doctors, lots of controversy on August 9th.  In it they quote a Lancet editorial as follows:

"Women have the right to choose how and where to give birth, but they do not have the right to put their baby at risk. There are competing interests that need to be weighed carefully." [emphasis added]

This is the same journal that, prior to launching their "sexual and reproductive health series", provided a press release that declared:

The greatest challenge to sexual-health promotion in almost all countries comes from opposition from conservative forces to harm-reduction strategies, such as supplying contraception to sexually active young people and providing safe, legal abortion services.

and

When abortion is made legal, safe and easily accessible, women's health rapidly improves, according to the fourth paper in the Series. An estimated 19 million unsafe abortions take place every year. Women should have access to safe, legal abortion services as a fundamental right, irrespective of where they live, state the authors. [emphasis added]

What?!?  Women who choose to give birth at home are somehow placing their baby "at risk" but if that same woman chooses to murder the baby outright during an abortion procedure then that is their "fundamental right"?  What kind of twisted, flippin' logic is THAT?!?!

I don't know if I am more angry or more embarrassed by their hypocrisy.

I am, however, deeply flabbergasted.

Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!  (Isaiah 5:20)

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