A review of scientific studies of LGBT fails to support popular LGBT beliefs

Amidst all the furore over LGBT rights, a couple of scientists reviewed over 200 academic studies to see they could answer some key questions about the sources of LGBT desires. The full review can be found at https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/number-50-fall-2016

Firstly, are LGB people "born that way" due to genetics or some other mechanism? The short answer is, "mostly no." It seems that at most, genes or other birth mechanisms are one factor among many in determining LGB attraction. However, they did find one very sad factor that correlates with LGB attraction, even if it doesn't necessarily cause it. Here are some abstracts from their abstract:

"Epidemiological studies show a rather modest association between genetic factors and sexual attractions or behaviors, but do not provide significant evidence pointing to particular genes. There is also limited evidence for other hypothesized biological causes of homosexual behaviors, attractions, or identity — such as the influence of hormones on prenatal development.  Studies of the brains of homosexuals and heterosexuals have found some differences, but have not demonstrated that these differences are inborn. One environmental factor that appears to be correlated with non-heterosexuality is childhood sexual abuse victimization"

Secondly, is there any evidence for the transgender community's theory that gender identity is largely disconnected from biological sex and/or that such 'gender dysphoria' should be treated medically? Here, the answer is "there is no conclusive evidence for these views, and some evidence against them." In their words again:

"The causes of such cross-gender identification remain poorly understood. Research has so far been inconclusive. Gender dysphoria — a sense of incongruence between one’s biological sex and one’s gender, accompanied by clinically significant distress or impairment — is sometimes treated in adults by hormones or surgery, but there is little scientific evidence that these therapeutic interventions have psychological benefits. Science has shown that gender identity issues in children usually do not persist into adolescence or adulthood, and there is little scientific evidence for the therapeutic value of puberty-delaying treatments."

They add:

We are concerned by the increasing tendency toward encouraging children with gender identity issues to transition to their preferred gender through medical and then surgical procedures. There is a clear need for more research in these areas.

So what is going on? The study sheds a little light on this by also reviewing a third area -- the belief that LGBT feelings are linked to mental health issues. The study does find evidence that such a link exists (with the sad results of increased anxiety, depression and suicide amongst LGBT people), but only found partial evidence for the LGBT community's assertion that such issues are entirely due to stigmatisation and discrimination. The study's authors suggest that trauma arising from childhood sexual abuse may be another factor causing poor mental health.

In conclusion, science has not found any conclusive causes of such feelings but has found a few factors that are correlated with them. The biggest single correlated factor is childhood sexual abuse; other linked factors are mental health issues, genetics (though no one particular gene), and differences in brain development.

My best guess based on the evidence to date is that LGBT attraction has multiple possible causes, and maybe multiple causes for a single individual.

Why Carole Cadwalladr is a Conspiracy Theorist

Carole Cadwalladr has recently gained a high profile through a TED talk or two. She's been around for a while, digging up information on the activities of data analytics companies, especially Cambridge Analytica.

Some of my friends have quoted her approvingly on social media. I was less impressed. Eventually someone called on me to do a proper analysis of one of her articles.

Here it is. The article can be found at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy?fbclid=IwAR0FD3P6OeJDT1ObEyRPx8KHQUv-PK0LM6oRU9mdEgo8fj57e7Z7YdjhFj4

If you don't want to read the whole thing, my conclusions are in the last 4 paragraphs. (Unlike Carole who likes to put her conclusions at the beginning and then makes us wait ages for any justification!)

The article says at the beginning that Cambridge Analytica won the election for Donald Trump. The statement has no supporting evidence; however it is in a quote from someone (meaning it can be disowned if libel proceedings are raised). 

The same employee then claims that CA interfered in elections around the world in ways that would be illegal in the West. Again, no supporting evidence.

Then another firm gets mentioned - Palantir. No actual link is made between Palantir and CA but the language used implies guilt by association. 

This is followed by a statement that is obviously true (probably to make it look like the whole story is true) but that on its own has little impact ("a small handful of Silicon Valley firms are at the centre of the global tectonic shift we are currently witnessing.")

Then it makes another unsubstantiated statement ("Brexit and Trump are intertwined") and makes it seem believable by saying the same thing in several different ways. 

So much for the dramatic-sounding but potentially misleading introduction. Let's get down to the main story - or rather, the "three strands" of the story. Once again, each is presented as a fait accompli with no supporting evidence. One would hope that such evidence might eventually appear somewhere in the article.

First of all, she jumps to a claim that doesn't directly support any of her three strands: "Cambridge Analytica is a central point in the Right's 'propaganda machine'" (once again, presented as a quote from someone whose reliability isn't established beyond the fact he's a professor). She doesn't define 'central point'. She misleadingly mentions the Right immediately after describing some of the activities of the 'alt-right', thus implying the two are the same. 

She does, however, define 'propaganda machine' -- but only after linking two names to it, one being a high-profile Republican political figure and both being directors of CA, on the basis that she "believed" these two guys were linked to the "propaganda machine". That's not good evidence.

Then she makes her connection to Brexit - on the basis of a quote from the communications director of Leave.EU that Cambridge Analytica was directed to "help" the Leave campaign. That quote is actually the highest quality evidence she has presented for anything so far. 

After patting herself on the back for writing an article that triggered investigations into Leave.EU, she makes her most specific allegation so far -- that four Leave-preferring campaign groups spent money with one Canadian data company and that this constitutes collusion. She then states that 'Vote Leave says the Electoral Commission “looked into this” and gave it “a clean bill of health”'... in other words, there is evidence that her accusation of collusion has been investigated and found to be false, but she wants us to disbelieve that so she puts the statement into the mouths of Vote Leave and puts the Commissions's investigation and findings in inverted commas. Much later in the article she expands on her scepticism by quoting 'sources close to the investigation' -- so not even attributable quotes. 

Next she makes the most meaningful statement in her whole article to date: that Britain's electoral spending laws are no longer fit for purpose. It's a statement that is pretty clearly true but doesn't provide any evidence towards her various unsupported conclusions. 

Then she alleges that CA and the Canadian data company were intimately entwined. Once again this is presented as a quote from a former employee. She presents no further evidence beyond that.Next she heads down yet another side branch, claiming that CA's parent company SCL was "part of the British defence establishment" because it has a "Director of Defence Operations" who was a former military head of psyops. That's waaay too strong a claim. Lots of companies contract to the Ministry of Defence and lots hire ex-military personnel to help them win and manage contracts. The most she has actually established is that SCL made plans to win contracts from the MOD and that they had a psyops expert on board. 

Back to the main story: she claims that CA collected loads of data from personality quizzes on Facebook and from other stories and used it to create profiles of individual voters, who could then be sent targeted messages. This is pretty much established as truth and has been decried since as unacceptable, causing CA to go out of business. (And it's now specifically banned by GDPR). 

She then (finally!) gives some evidence for one of her 'three strands': "How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire." Actually, she isn't talking about British democracy yet, and all she has established is that CA had the data to send people highly targeted messages, which doesn't prove that democracy was thereby subverted. But she does manage to get the billionaire's involvement in. 

She does try to prove her point about subversion (which is critical to her whole argument) with yet another quote from someone -- an associate professor of philosophy (!!!) I would have expected a full professor of psychology at least for such an important point. Maybe she thinks that by the time people have got this far through the article they will have given up checking whether her quotes come from reliable-seeming sources. 

Then she's off on a side channel again, this time claiming that CA and the Canadian company supported the development of a Minority Report-like system in Trinidad in 2013. Apart from smearing CA's moral standards, the only thing this proves as far as the main argument is concerned is that CA and the Canadian company had had a close working relationship. So she's generated some evidence to support one of her other side branches. 

Now she jumps from this side channel to one of her three strands -- that the US is laying a basis for an authoritarian surveillance state. Her argument is that the same company that did the thing in Trinidad (which she calls 'the company that got Trump elected', a claim she still hasn't proved but seems to be trying to establish by repetition) has been awarded contracts by two US government departments - Defense and State, Oh, and the political guy who was director of CA is now high up in the White House. This is nowhere near enough evidence that the US is laying a basis for an authoritarian surveillance state -- if one of my students tried to make this link, I would fail them. If we had a clue what the contracts were for or how big they were, that might give us a clue -- but in the US as in the UK, all sorts of companies work with Defense. We can't assume that building data profiles of individuals suitable for 'Minority Report'-style monitoring was the only kind of work that CA did, whereas the author apparently does assume that here.

In her next paragraph she says "Documents detail Cambridge Analytica is involved with many other right-leaning billionaires, including Rupert Murdoch". What documents? Involved how? She gives one example -- CA tried to place an article in the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal and Murdoch himself allegedly had some involvement. So what? 

Now she drags Palantir back into the story -- because they too are owned by an (allegedly) right-leaning billionaire. And they too do data analytics. I think this must be her evidence for her third strand -- that "we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data." It's weak evidence, to put it kindly. 

Then it's back to Vote Leave and the Canadian company. Her primary allegation is that the link was forged because Vote Leave's Chief Technology Officer was a former CA employee. This is one of her better pieces of evidence.

Next is a graphic showing how everyone is allegedly linked. It's misleading (again) -- firstly for including Donald Trump (who hasn't been mentioned as having any role so far); secondly by linking Trump directly to CA as well as through Steve Bannon (there's no evidence AT ALL for a direct link in the article); and thirdly by including a firm and a person who haven't previously been named (another thing my students get marked down for). 

I'm going to stop my analysis here, except for one thing. Apparently the £100,000 sent to the Canadian firm by Veterans for Britain led to "a small number of people they identified as “persuadable” [being] bombarded with more than a billion ads, the vast majority in the last few days."

Seriously??? A 'small' number of people -- let's be generous and say 'small' is 10,000 people. They have been sent more than a billion ads? That's 10,000 ads each! No way could even the most dedicated social media user have seen 10,000 ads in a few days, never mind Veterans for Britain. Even if it's more than 10,00 people, or the article is using an American billion rather than a British one, we're still talking hundreds and hundreds of ads in a few days. 

My conclusion: This is indeed a conspiracy theory because it alleges covert collusion between multiple individuals to do something/things that was at best unethical and at worst illegal. 

The article has three 'strands'. None of those strands come close to being proved by the evidence presented. One is based on a lot of supposition about the nature and extent of CA's contracts with Defense and State in the US. One is based on the views of a mid-level academic in philosophy about psychology. And the third is generalised from two examples -- and it's not even clear that the allegation is true in one of those two cases.

And then there's the fourth claim -- that Cambridge Analytica got Donald Trump elected. Repeating the claim several times without presenting any supporting evidence does not make it true. 

Finally the article is misleading on several occasions. I cannot prove that it is deliberate but I would be very, very surprised if it isn't.

Why Progressive Politics Will Collapse

February, I am told, was LGBT Pride Month. In truth, LGBT “awareness” is so pervasive in our society that I saw little change except for a few cases where the letters LGBT were attached to increasingly unlikely events (LGBT Computer Game Jam?).

There is no obvious sign that LGBT pride events will become a thing of the past – indeed, to all appearances the movement seems to be growing stronger all the time. Yet that is exactly what I am going to predict: that the promotion of progressive politics (typified by the twin policies of abortion rights and LGBT rights) will, at some point, be consigned to history.

What is the basis for my prediction? To answer that I need to begin with a (short!) history lesson.

 The Anabaptists

We’ll begin with an attempt to establish a theocracy in the city of Munster in Germany in the early days of Protestantism. Munster had a long history of anti-Catholic feeling from its Lutheran pastor and a man called Bernard Rothmann who regularly churned out pamphlets opposing Catholic doctrine. Towards the end of the German Peasants’ War of 1524-25, Rothmann’s pamphlets started to proclaim that the Bible called for the absolute equality of man in all matters including the distribution of wealth. The pamphlets, which were distributed throughout northern Germany, successfully called upon the poor of the region to join the citizens of Munster to share the wealth of the town and benefit spiritually from being the elect of Heaven.

A group of Anabaptists (Protestants whose key belief was adult baptism) arrived in town and were quickly elected to the city government. As moderate Lutherans hurriedly left the city, their property was shared out to the poor. Soon there was a proclamation that all property was held in common.

The city was soon under siege by forces led by the local Catholic bishop. It did not stop the development of new polices. Everybody was re-baptised. Icons and other images were smashed in cathedrals and monasteries. Then a new leader was appointed (because the old one believed he had a prophecy that he should set forth from the city to fight the Catholics with just twelve men – it didn’t work) who proclaimed that he had the royal authority of David and that the city was the new Zion. And because there were far more women of marriageable age in town than men – most of them ex-nuns – polygamy was legalised. The leader took sixteen wives.

All the while people were starving because of the siege. In the end the city was taken, the leaders killed, and the new Zion was at an end.

The French Revolution

The French Revolution of 1789-1799 began with an uprising among the heavily taxed and starving common people against the aristocracy and clergy, led by some middle class men with radical ideas. It took three years of political struggle before the revolutionaries were fully in control; the king was executed shortly afterwards.

Very soon after that the radical Robespierre and his Jacobins assumed power. The following two years brought a mixture of good and bad ideas – price controls on food, abolishing slavery, expelling all religious leaders, creating a new secular calendar – but it also brought public executions of anyone remotely suspected of opposing the Revolution, giving the period its name of the “Reign of Terror”. There are stories of farmers reporting that their neighbours had expressed anti-Revolutionary sympathies and then taking over their farms after the inevitable execution. Old scores were settled in a similar way; there was no effective court system to weigh competing claims for justice, just a swift route to the guillotine for those who were accused.

The next government suspended elections, repudiated debts (creating financial instability in the process), and further persecuted the Catholic clergy. They did have significant military successes abroad but charges of corruption facilitated a coup led by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799.

Soviet Communism

Soviet Communism lasted from 1917 until 1989-91. Like the French Revolution, it started as a peasants’ revolt led by some radicals. Once established, they introduced a planned economy in which all industries were nationalised and controlled by the State. They too introduced a new calendar.

The Party was supposed to represent the interests of the workers, with Congress as its highest decision making body. However after Stalin took power, Congress became largely symbolic.

The centralised economy was rarely as well run as economies in Western countries. For example, the “One Big Factory” system where one factory would be the only supplier of a certain object for the whole Soviet Union was probably designed more to enforce dependency of the various internal republics on each other than for efficiency of production. It did not help that every factory had a manager and also a Party representative; the former could take no decisions without the approval of the latter, and the cost of running the huge Party bureaucracy was significant.

However, the economy showed its worst face during the “Holodomor” famine in Ukraine in 1932. The comparatively small harvest that did grow was shipped elsewhere (and considerable amounts were sold abroad) while the people literally starved to death – and were forced to watch films which portrayed peasants as counterrevolutionaries hoarding grain and potatoes. The number who starved to death in 1932-33 across the USSR (but mostly in Ukraine) was probably higher than the six million Jews who were killed by Hitler; as a measure of the desperation, 2500 people were convicted of cannibalism during that period.

Communist rule was sustained by suppression of alternative views by arrests or (in neighbouring countries) military force; by suppression of news from the West (many people were banned from travelling to non-Communist states); by inculcating a fear of Americans in particular; and by various economic tricks that robbed individuals in favour of the State. Eventually a new young leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, decided on a policy of openness to the West instead and granted free elections. The whole Communist system collapsed shortly after that.

 So why is this history lesson relevant to modern progressive politics? 

 It’s relevant because there is a pattern to the above stories. It goes like this:

1. An (arguably) good cause triggers a major change in official policies.
2. The new policies take time to be fully established.
3. When they are, they are taught in schools and elsewhere as “the right way”.
4. The movement is taken over by even more radical people and produces ideas that are obvious lunacy to anyone who is not a radical.
5. The new somewhat crazy system is sustained by suppression and oppression of alternate views.
6. The whole system suddenly collapses.

I believe that progressive politics has reached stage 4: the stage of lunatic policies. It has certainly reached the previous stage, in lobbying if not in law: OFSTED’s head wants LGBT issues to be taught in primary schools (where they don’t even have sex education yet!) and the BBC recently screened a series of LGBT children’s stories on young children’s channel CBeebies.

 Let’s take two examples of the lunacy, both from the USA whose politics tends to be a few years ahead of the UK’s:

Abortion

As President Trump and various US states have introduced limits on abortion, other Democrat-controlled states have gone the other way. It has now reached the stage where bills in some states and in the US Senate have been proposed to guarantee that babies who are accidentally born alive during an abortion should have a right to life and medical care – and every bill has been vetoed by Democrats.

Yes, you read that right. Democrat support for abortion has reached the stage of supporting infanticide (by deliberate neglect) of live babies. Every Democrat currently in the running to oppose Trump at the next election supports this kind of infanticide.

In many ways it’s just the logic of abortion taken to its ultimate extreme. Abortion rights advocates pay no attention to the rights of the baby; it’s all about the rights of the mother. Yet now the pretence that abortion doesn’t matter because an unborn baby is not a human being is gone; the belief is seen in its fullness. And to many Americans, it’s obvious (and horrifying) lunacy.

LGBT 

The lunacy in LGBT is coming from the T – transgender rights. Apparently anyone can declare themselves to be transgender whenever they feel like it. Men can do so in a shop if they want to use the women’s toilets – an employee of the Target chain was fired for denying a man this ‘right’. Transgender people can compete in sports for the opposite sex which means several US women’s sports events are now being won by “transgender” men. And for good measure, there aren’t just two genders to choose from; you can be somewhere in between. New York State has defined a list of 23 genders that people can officially be (with a handful of new pronouns that people are legally forced to use), and a politician elsewhere in the US managed to find reference to 71 different genders. (He did it because his state’s legislature had to vote on whether to approve each one separately, and as he had hoped, they ran out of time!)

All of this has greatly upset feminists and other women who feel unsafe in public toilets where men are allowed entry (with good reason). Marina Navratilova, known as a lesbian as well as a star tennis player, has called the admission of men to women’s sports “insanity” – and has been roundly condemned by the current generation of LGBT lobbyists for doing so.

 The feminists are right. Martina is right. This is lunacy.

What happens next? 

What happens next is suppression and oppression of views opposing the progressive orthodoxy (which can already be observed, for example in the 'debate' about “gay conversion therapy”) followed by collapse of the whole belief system. I cannot say when this will occur, only that the collapse may well be sudden. I know of someone who predicted the collapse of Soviet Communism in an article written in May 1989 – but it wasn’t published until 1990, by which time it looked far less prescient than at the time it was written.

After that – who knows what will happen. If good sense prevails then being lesbian/gay/bisexual will probably be viewed as involuntary but not ‘normal’. A desire to change gender (to the other one – there are only two) will be viewed primarily as an unusual mental condition and treated as such, with transgender surgery only being a last resort. Abortion will be recognised as ending the life of a human being whose rights must be weighed against the mother’s. Maybe, to some extent, the father and the rest of the family should have a say too.

No doubt there will be some “true believers” in progressive politics who will fight against the new ways to the end of their days. After all, Russia still has a Communist party. There just won’t be enough of them to make any major difference any more.

Abortion, the Medical Profession, and Hard Cases

A short while ago, a friend posted a list of “emotional doctor stories in one tweet” on social media. (You can see them all at https://www.boredpanda.com/emotional-doctor-work-stories-shareastoryinonetweet-twitter/). They are heartwarming, tear-jerking, and superb summaries of the unique joys and difficulties those in the medical profession face. Here are a couple of examples:

“Delivered a 450g baby. Told she was too small- had no chance. She kept stopping breathing so stayed up with her for 2 nights rubbing her chest for every breath. Consultant said I was wasting my time.

She just performed her first ballet as a healthy 6y.o.”

And another:

“You were hit by a car right in front of me while walking your dog

I ran to you, did CPR, didn’t think you’d live

I was burned out, empty, ready to quit med

6 mo later, you called me on Christmas Eve & told me I saved you

And you ended up saving me.”

And one more because it’s too good to leave out:

“You came into ICU with a dissecting AAA at age 19. We coded you for hours. MD told family you had passed, not knowing we just got a rhythm. They came to say goodbye and I had you give them the thumbs up. You graduated college 4 years later. “

It’s tremendous testimony to the hard work and dedication, and emotional pressure and difficulty, that medics face in their working lives.

And yet, in the midst of all the inspiration and human stories, there are a couple that jarred me. Here they are:

“While in Kenya, a woman came in septic & haemorrhaging from an unsafe abortion.

Performed a hysterectomy, gave blood, antibiotics, and she died anyway. She was a 24yo college student. Abortion bans don’t limit abortion. They just make them unsafe.”

And this:

“Raised with first world privilege- catholic & anti-choice by default. Then in Africa I met a 14 year old child pregnant as a result of gang rape. She was in obstructed labour & died on arrival. No one came to collect her body. I think of her daily.”

Why are these jarring? Because I see little difference between a baby about to be born and a baby who has just been born; human life does not begin at birth but a long time beforehand (for more discussion, see this blog post). Why do medics who are dedicated to saving lives work so hard to save newly born babies and yet support the killing of babies before they are born?

Medics and Abortion

I can think of four reasons why being a medic might lead to greater support for abortion:

1/ Medics treat the patient in front of them. Their focus is on fixing an immediate problem. Long term care issues are typically handled by social services, elderly care homes or similar groups.

This would explain why medics might discriminate (consciously or otherwise) between babies who have been born and those who haven’t. When a baby has been born it is a patient in its own right and medics automatically give such babies the full benefits of medical treatment or go above and beyond the call of duty (as in the first tweet above). When the baby has not been born, it is the mother who is present in front of the medic. The temptation to focus on the mother’s health first and the unborn baby’s second must be considerable.

2/ Medics are trained to intervene. They must find it incredibly hard to see a difficult situation and not to carry out a medical procedure that might save a life… even if, as with abortion, it does so by taking a life.

3/ Medics want those who are unwell to have the best care possible, which increases their opposition to unsafe abortions.

4/ Medicine is an emergency service, so they get to see first hand the results of the dark side of pregnancy: miscarriages, under-developed children trying to give birth, stillbirths, unsafe abortions. It’s hardly surprising some seek ways to reduce that pain for mothers and for themselves.

Are there any responses to such beliefs? I believe there are:

·         Pregnancy is indeed a dangerous medical condition. Even today, it kills roughly 3% of mothers in the poorest countries of the world, and an average of 0.21% worldwide. Thankfully that figure is 44% lower than it was in 1990. It also causes ill health for a number of months to many more mothers.

Those figures are comparable with deaths from illegal drug use. Estimated figures suggest 200 million illegal drug users in the world and about 250,000 deaths annually. Compare that with 130 million babies born worldwide each year (and therefore around 125 million pregnant women, allowing for multiple births) and about 300,000 deaths of mothers. Illegal drug use has other negative effects on health, too.

The big difference is that pregnancy is seen as valuable to society while drug use is not. So as a society, we accept the health risks of pregnancy – while doing out utmost to minimise them -- in order to achieve the greater goal of having children.

Medics suffer because they are an emergency service for problem pregnancies. I don’t see that as a good reason to end a pregnancy through abortion, because society accepts the risks involved in pregnancy for good reason. And for the record, abortion is not a risk-free procedure: depending who you believe, between 25,000 and 75.000 women per year worldwide die as a result of having an abortion. Again, the majority of these are in developing countries but not all of them are.

·         Pregnancy is almost unique amongst medical conditions in that two lives are affected by any treatment the mother receives rather than one. It’s disingenuous to claim that saving the life of a pregnant woman saves two lives, but that abortion does not end one life.

That’s why the “treat what is in front of you” and “trained to intervene” mentalities are a problem in this case. In the vast majority of medicine it works well, but not in the case of pregnancy.

Hard Cases

There is a saying that “hard cases make bad law”. The examples quoted in the tweets above are definitely hard cases. However, they are also real examples of agonies faced by real women. What can be said about the difficult issues expressed in these tweets?

Pregnancy through rape

Rape is viewed as a serious crime and rightly so. It violates a woman at many levels. So if she becomes pregnant even those who oppose abortion will sometimes allow an exception for such pregnancies.

The trouble is, the rape was not the baby’s fault. If we allow abortion in cases of rape then we are killing a person who wasn’t even there at the time of the crime! But if we disallow it, we force a woman to change her life dramatically for a year at least and perhaps longer… though I must add, some women have raised and loved their child of rape and while they hate the cause, they are actually grateful for the effect.

I’m going to try to be dispassionate. If we weigh a human life against a year of serious disruption to a woman’s life then I would vote to save the human life. However, I’d also expect society to supply considerable resources to the woman – care, compensation, whatever – in return for bearing a child she may not want and enduring the consequences of that.

Unsafe abortions

One of the tweets above said, “Abortion bans don’t limit abortion. They just make them unsafe.” To add to this, a friend who recently discussed a country that has an abortion ban said, “The legislation doesn’t work” – because women there can easily travel to neighbouring countries to get abortions.

Both these statements disagree with statistics. This blog says, “What we see in all of the countries where actual data exists is a dramatic increase in abortion frequency in the years immediately following its legalization. We also see that even minor restrictions to the circumstances under which abortion is permissible can significantly reduce the rate of abortion. Waiting periods, mandated counselling sessions, parental notification laws—all of these requirements reduce a woman's likelihood of going through with an abortion.”

Let’s make the comparison with illegal drugs again. There are regular calls to legalise the taking of some drugs and one reason often given is that “bans don’t work”. What the speakers  mean is that in their experience, illegal drugs are easily available. But just because people defy the law it doesn’t make it a bad law. And I’m sure plenty of people stay off drugs (or hard drugs) because of fear of legal consequences—that’s how all legislation works.

Let’s be honest. If a country that permits abortion introduces a ban, will that increase the number of illegal abortions? Yes. Will those abortions be unsafe? Some will. Will it reduce the total number of abortions? Yes, probably dramatically.

So, should we allow the killing of unborn babies to save mothers from the risk of unsafe abortions? Again, being entirely dispassionate, the answer would be No because of sheer numbers: the number of abortions worldwide is (depending who you believe) between 4 million and 40 million per year, against maybe 50,000 who currently die in unsafe abortions.  That’s somewhere between 80 and 800 babies for every 1 mother.

Of course, it’s a tremendously difficult subject to be dispassionate about. I am writing this the day after the referendum on abortion in the Republic of Ireland. I shall finish with a quote I heard during that campaign which is emotive, but so is this whole subject:

“Would you still be pro-choice if you were the one chosen?”

FairTrade or Fairly Traded?

This blog is about Sainsbury’s decision to stop stocking “FairTrade” tea and to replace it with” Fairly Traded” tea. As I understand it, “Fairly Traded” is an equivalent organisation to “FairTrade” with two key differences:

• It’s run by Sainsbury’s;
• Instead of the profits going directly back to farmers, they go to a central fund run by Sainsbury’s which farmers have to apply to for grants.

The scheme has been widely condemned on social media – and, as usual, misrepresented (I saw one post claiming Sainsbury’s scheme was called ‘Fairer Trade’ which seemed to treat ‘Fair Trade’ as a second class rival. That name is fake).

At first, I joined in the condemnation. I think FairTrade is a great concept and I couldn’t see the point in setting up a second bureaucracy to do the same job. It seemed like a waste of money. But then I thought about it a little more, and I wasn’t quite so certain that “Fairly Traded” is a bad idea.

Let me explain. The condemnation on social media seems to centre on two assumptions:

• Giving the profits made from selling goods directly to farmers is a good thing.
• Sainsbury’s are a big corporation so their ultimate motive must be profit.

I’ve given each of these a subheading.

Giving the profits made from selling goods directly to farmers is a good thing

This is one of those assumptions that everyone makes because it feels right. People who work hard to grow tea or other crops should not be forced to accept minimal prices so that others in the chain should make money – they should get a fair return for their labour. Local people are the ones who know best how to use the money for good. Central funds with few administrators encourage corruption. Words like ‘empowerment’, ‘investment’ and ‘micro-finance’ get bandied about.

But let’s assume for a moment that some local farmers are actually just as corrupt as (some of) their politicians. Some have formed into cliques and use the money to undercut rival farmers or to overbid for vital equipment.  Some cliques control the local flow of money and will only give it out to those of the same tribe, religion or political party. Some simply use the money to bribe local politicians and regulators.

Is this true? I hope not, but the history of human endeavour suggests that everywhere you find people, you find goodness and evil. So it might be happening. The best way to prevent it  would be for the FairTrade organisation to have some checks and balances in place to see how the money has been used in the past before they give out money in the future.

I do not know whether FairTrade apply any such system. It may be that their remit is simply to pass the money back to the farmers with as little interference as possible. Sadly, the lesson of history is that where a significant quantity of money suddenly becomes available, there is an inverse relationship between the degree of supervision of how the money is used and the amount of money that is misdirected.

There are, of course, plenty of stories of how the money that flows from FairTrade or other sources to the developing world is put to good use by local entrepreneurs. Here we come to one of the really odd things about this debate: how various semi-political groups in our country have flipped their usual position. Our media tend to report the good news stories of how small amounts of finance have produced good results in the developing world, but don’t report the bad news about times when money has been wasted or mis-used. This contrasts with their usual policy of emphasising bad news.

Meanwhile, those who are most vocal opponents of Sainsbury’s because of their supposed capitalist intentions are arguing against having a benevolent central agency to control the distribution of finances, in contrast to their typical socialist approach to UK politics where they want the State to manage everything. Perhaps it’s because the central agency of “Fairly Traded” would be controlled by a corporation rather than a government. Which brings me to the next section.

Sainsbury’s are a big corporation so their ultimate motive must be profit.

This assumption is too simplistic. Two 19^th century firms who were in the same line of business as Sainsbury's – selling food products made from 3^rd world crops – were notable for their commitment to benefitting their communities and the welfare of their workers. Cadbury’s and Rowntree’s were both founded by Quakers, and streets of houses that those companies built for their workers can still be seen. And in the modern day, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are giving away significant amounts of the profits from their corporations. So assuming that a corporation’s only motive is profit is far too simple.

Sainsbury’s do not stand to make any direct profit from “Fairly Traded” given how it is set up. So why have they done it? From a neutral point of view, I can think of 3 possible reasons:

i) They are aware of corruption with funds from FairTrade and want to introduce significant supervision over how the money is used, so they have set up something similar to the UK’s research grants funding system.

ii) They are wary that FairTrade is a monopoly supplier and want to introduce competition.

iii) They want some good news stories from the grants they provide that they can use in their marketing.

Option (ii) is indeed focussed on profit. It could be argued that option (iii) also contributes to profit, but it’s pretty indirect. Option (i) is not about profit for Sainsbury’s at all; it’s about benefitting the farmers.

Summary

I still think FairTrade is a great concept. I still think that setting up a similar organisation with a second bureaucracy is a waste of money compared with making any necessary improvements to the FairTrade organisation itself.

However, I allow the possibility that FairTrade may not be working as well for those in the villages that supply the crops as it ought to be. If supervision of how money is used is needed, and FairTrade won't change their approach to do it, then Sainsbury’s approach is a good idea, even though it adds extra bureaucracy.

If anyone knows of a decent and fair audit report/survey on the effects and value of FairTrade, I’d be interested to read it. Meanwhile, I shall hold fire on criticising Sainsbury’s until the underlying situation is clearer.

Abortion: Science, Politics, and a bit of Economics

About a week ago (i.e. before the 2017 General Election), I bought a book of compiled blogs by the guys who wrote ‘Freakonomics’ and ‘Superfreakonomics’. I read through several of their blogs, occasionally nodding at some of the ideas.

But there were a couple of blogs where I thought, “No, they’ve not understood this; that idea won’t work.” One of them was about abortion. Their idea was that abortion clinics would be sponsored for every pro-life protester who turned up outside; so the more protesters who appeared, the more money the clinic would get. They predicted that this idea would be taken up widely because it would discourage pro-life protesters from turning up.

My immediate thought was that this was a misunderstanding of why pro-life protesters do what they do. Their primary goal is not an economic one, to put abortion clinics out of business; their primary goal is to save lives. They’re not actually there to target the clinic; they’re there to target the women going into the clinic, hoping to engage them in (gentle!) conversation and to change their minds. Outside the clinic just happens to be the easiest place to meet those women.

So I started thinking about this blog. And then the 2017 General Election happened, and the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party unexpectedly became part of the Government, and the issue of abortion shot up the UK political agenda because the DUP are officially anti-abortion. So I decided to write this blog now.

First, some notes on terminology, because this subject is so hotly disputed that even the words used are under debate. The two sides usually call themselves “pro-life” and “pro-choice”. Neither term is entirely accurate; pro-choice folks usually only favour choice for the mother, not for the father or the grandparents or anyone claiming to represent the interests of the baby. And if pro-life folks support capital punishment, their label doesn’t fit especially well either. Nevertheless, I shall use those terms in this blog.

There’s also the question of what to call the thing that is inside the mother’s womb. Is it a “bundle of cells”; a “foetus”; or an “unborn baby”? I suppose you could describe any living thing as a “bundle of cells”, but such a description is too unspecific to be useful. I’ll use a mixture of the other two terms in this blog.

There are even disputes over basic facts. Below are are two pictures of what a foetus looks like at nine weeks’ gestation; the first comes from a US abortion clinic, the second from a pro-life blog. In this case, photographs of miscarried babies show that the pro-lifers are right, but this illustrates the depth of disagreement on the subject.

Abortion: The Science

To discuss the science and politics of abortion, it’s essential to recognise that there are two crucial questions which must be treated separately. These questions are:

1/ At what point does a foetus become entitled to human rights?

2/ How should the human rights of an unborn baby be balanced against the human rights of its mother (and possibly others too?)

Conveniently, the first of these questions is primarily a scientific one (although there are legal issues too) while the second is primarily a political one.

So: at what point does an unborn baby obtain human rights? The obvious answer is, “When it becomes a human being”. But when is that?

I can think of four possible points when a foetus might be considered to have become a human being:

1/ At the moment when the sperm fertilises the egg.

2/ At the moment when the unborn baby’s heart starts beating (about 6 weeks’ gestation).

3/ At the moment when the foetus can (eventually) survive unaided outside the womb (currently 20-24 weeks’ gestation).

4/ At the moment of birth.

Let’s discuss each of these.

1. When the sperm fertilises the egg. This is the moment at which a new individual is formed, according to embryology textbooks. So if humanity is defined according to individual identity, then this would be the answer. On the other side of the coin, at this point the foetus is literally a bundle of cells, bearing no resemblance at all to a human being.
2. When the unborn baby’s heart starts beating. This fits with the legal definition of death, which was (until recently) the moment when the heart stops beating. (Nowadays it’s defined as the moment of ‘brain death’, which allows for hearts to be kept going by artificial means – and, more controversially, for people whose hearts function but who show no other signs of life to have life support withdrawn). If we decide that humans are entitled to human rights from the moment they are alive, then that’s a good argument for this definition.
3. When the foetus can eventually survive unaided outside the womb (though may initially need medical intervention). This is the basis for current abortion law in the UK (for most pregnancies).
• Unfortunately, defining ‘humanity’ as starting at this point has two big problems. The first one is that, as medical technology improves, babies can survive being born earlier and earlier; in the 50 years since the Abortion Act was passed, the ‘viable limit’ has dropped from 28 weeks to about 20 weeks. How can a baby not be human if medical technology to sustain it is unavailable, but the same foetus be human if the technology is available?
• The second problem is also linked to medical technology. If an adult or child is terminally ill and needs medical help to stay alive, they will never again survive unaided, but they do not lose all their human rights. Human rights are based on the fact that they are alive now, not on whether they will be alive in the future. Applying a different standard to foetuses of less than 20 weeks' gestation is hypocritical.
4.  At birth. From one viewpoint, this is the easiest point at which to declare that a baby becomes entitled to human rights. But from another, it makes very little sense. If two foetuses are conceived at the same time but one is born prematurely while the other goes full-term, why should the premature baby have human rights while the other does not?

The conclusion I draw is that a foetus should be entitled to human rights either from the moment of fertilisation or from when its heart starts beating. Options 3 and 4 just don’t make sense from a scientific viewpoint.

There’s a bit more science in the next section, but it’s mostly about politics.

Abortion: The balance of human rights

The second big question relating to abortion is how to balance the rights of the unborn baby with the rights of the mother and others. I’ll focus on the mother’s rights, as many do. I’ll assume that the foetus does indeed have human rights.

The effects of pregnancy and giving birth on a woman are undeniably life-changing. It is likely to cause her discomfort and eventually severe pain. It may permanently change her body with anything from a Caesarean scar to a reshaping of her pelvis. It may affect her career and will certainly affect her finances and free time. It may affect her relationship with the father or with other members of her family, positively or negatively. It may change her circle of friends. It will bring a new person into her life who is utterly dependent on her, is very cute, and has no manners whatsoever. So forcing a woman to go through with a pregnancy is a very big imposition on her human rights.

If the pregnancy is truly unwanted, the woman may become emotionally desperate and threaten suicide. This is touted as a major justification for abortion by some pro-choice folk, on the grounds that it’s worth losing the baby’s life to avoid losing both the baby’s and the mother’s. Unfortunately for this view, a scientific study (actually, a combination of eight studies) concluded that giving a woman an abortion “does not reduce her mental health risks of unwanted or unintended pregnancy” [1]. But even without this argument, is it right to place such a big imposition on the human rights of women?

The answer lies in one’s view of human rights. If you take the view that the right to life supersedes all other human rights, then yes, it’s right to ban abortion after the point when the foetus becomes human. From this viewpoint, even in cases of pregnancy due to rape, abortion should not be permitted – for if it is, then rape becomes the only crime where the penalty for the crime includes capital punishment for a person who wasn’t even present!

If you take the view that human rights should be modified according to a person’s value to society, a different view emerges. Hardly anyone officially holds this view because it can lead to all kinds of inequality and discrimination. But in practice, if you ask people to decide whether a woman who plays a highly valued role in society which would be severely curtailed by pregnancy (say, an athlete who represents the national team) should be permitted to abort a foetus which currently plays no role in society, some folk are more likely to answer ‘Yes’ than they would in other cases. This ‘social value’ attitude also manifests itself in our current laws about aborting disabled babies; it’s legal in the UK to abort such foetuses right up to birth, and it's hard to think of a reason for such discrimination apart from the view that the disabled are of lesser value to society. So while the ‘social value’ view isn‘t officially acknowledged, it’s prevalent.

You may hold other views. My own view is the first one: the right to life outweighs everything else. But this raises a new question: how should society deal with women who are required to go through with unwanted pregnancies? I’ll come back to that at the end of the next section of this blog.

Abortion and current politics

I’ve demonstrated above that the UK’s current laws on abortion are a bit of a mess. I believe the reason is that they are actually biased towards women’s rights rather than foetus’s rights, for the stark reason that women vote and unborn babies don’t.

There is a historical analogy that is very appropriate here: it’s the analogy of slavery. It was once legal to own slaves in this country. Slaves were human beings, but were often viewed as sub-human and had very few human rights; it was legal for a slave-owner to kill a slave in many circumstances (though not all). Slave-owners and those who benefitted from slavery could vote; slaves could not. Courageous individuals sought to rescue the few slaves they could, and were roundly condemned for doing so.

Slavery was ended by long-term lobbying challenging the view that slaves were sub-human. Once it was accepted that slaves were fully human, conscience and public opinion turned against the whole idea of slavery. I look forward to the day when we look back on the days when we didn’t grant human rights to unborn babies with the same horror as we now look back on our ancestors’ attitude to slaves. I also wonder whether those pro-life folk who protest outside abortion clinics would do well to take tips from the anti-slavery campaign and to show images of healthy unborn babies with the message “I am human”, rather than displaying gruesome images of aborted foetuses as they often do now.

We can also take tips from the anti-slavery campaign on what we can do for women who are required to go through an unwanted pregnancy. When slavery was banned in Britain, slave owners were compensated for the loss of their slaves. There was a transition period for slaves to find new opportunities or even study for a new career. Similarly, I wouldn’t want to see pregnant women – particularly pregnant single women or girls -- treated as pariahs but  instead given financial and other support during pregnancy; and if they choose to give their babies up for adoption rather than to raise them, to have a transition period and maybe even stay in touch with the adopting family. In short, treat all concerned with as much practical love as possible.

Coming back to economics (finally!), it will cost money -- but isn't life worth more than money?

References

[1] Abortion Has No Benefits, But Does Have Risks, New Research Shows. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, April 2013. http://afterabortion.org/2013/abrotion-has-no-benefits-but-does-have-risks-new-research-shows/

A Day In The Life

3.36am Awoke, at home in Derbyshire. I had gone to bed at 9:30 planning to wake up early, but not THAT early! Shaved and dressed as quietly as possible.

Pre-dawn Derbyshire

4.45am Left home for York, for the second day of a conference on cybersecurity. There was a queue on the M1 already (!) so I took Speed Camera Alley – the A619 from Chesterfield to the M1, seven speed cameras in ten miles. Survived that.

Up the M1 and onto the M18. I’ve NEVER seen so many lorries at once. I was on the M18 for ten minutes and I must have passed at least a hundred.

Onto the A1(M) – the traffic finally stopped being busy past the M62 -- and into York. Parked at York Racecourse, where the conference is, at 6.15 am and promptly fell asleep in the car.

7:30am When I awoke I wanted breakfast and I wanted to see York. There wasn’t time to see the normal tourist sites (and they were closed that early) so I just walked to the edge of town looking for a breakfast café. 

River Ouse

River Foss 

 Google told me that most of the cafes were also closed. But The Hilton Hotel opposite Clifford's Tower was open, so I treated myself to a slap-up breakfast in there. Very nice it was too.

Clifford's Tower

On the way back, I found myself amongst the housing that must have been built by Joseph Rowntree for the workers in his sweet factory. Photos are of Rowntree Park, Terry Street, and a nearby Methodist church.

9:30am The conference was pretty good in content (with 8 parallel sessions, it ought to be!) and unusually well organised. First conference I’ve ever been to where the schedule arrived not in a website but in an app; first one I’ve been to where they scanned your badge to register you as having attended a talk or visited an exhibition stand; and first one where one of the exhibitors turned up not with a few posters and tables but with an entire bus! Photo below. (By the way, if your work has anything to do with keeping personal data about people, and you don’t know what GDPR is, you *really* need to find out…)

Oh, and on the unofficial measure of how good a conference really is – the quality of the freebies – it got very high marks. Adam was overjoyed when I presented him with a handful of mini torches, a multi-highlighter pen and an executive toy yesterday.

1:30pm I quit at lunchtime – the talks in the afternoon has interesting titles such as “What Cybersecurity managers can learn from an Olympic Gold Medallist” but weren’t directly relevant to my own work, and I needed to get away because I had to drive from York to Croydon! So it was back on the A1(M), and then the A1, and then a detour to avoid a traffic jam on country roads and the A606, and then getting stuck in a 20 minute traffic jam on the M11, and then over the QEII bridge at Dartford which I love driving over (photo below – no I didn’t take it!!!) and then more traffic heading towards Bromley and Addington in rush hour. It’s a trickier drive than taking the M1 – both the A1 and M11 are two-lane rather than three-lane in most places, which means that whenever a lorry wants to overtake another lorry, all the cars in the outside lane have to slow from 70ish to 50ish. There were times when I chose to drive in the inside lane doing 50 with the lorries because it was easier and safer than playing concertinas in the outside lane. But there are no ‘smart’ motorway restrictions to worry about, and the only speed trap I saw was an old-style one; when I did my detour, there was a country lane shortcut that was very straight, and halfway down it there was a police car parked among the trees – entirely invisible until you got close to it. No, I wasn’t speeding.

6:15pm I got to Mum’s house where she had provided me with an evening meal – but I had done so well at breakfast and at the conference lunch that I couldn’t eat much of it. Then I logged onto Facebook…

…and found that one of my long-term friends, who I remember as an enthusiastic Christian but who has political views far to the left of mine, had put up a post about the Manchester bombing that offered the usual far-left perspective on who is to blame for terrorism (Western governments) and then added comments from the Old Testament suggesting Christians/Jews were no better than Muslims at being people-destroyers.

It made me feel … ‘bad’ is way too shallow a word, but I can’t explain it. It was so far away from what we should be concentrating on, so ungracious, so… wrong. It made me feel attacked and wounded by someone who I would have expected to be supportive. Admittedly this friend now lives abroad so the most charitable interpretation I can give is that he has woefully misjudged the prevailing mood in the UK. But even so...

Last night I was at a prayer meeting at our church in Chesterfield which concentrated on the incidents in Manchester (which isn’t far from Chesterfield). At the end, our pastor encouraged us to be positive on social media this week, especially regarding this topic. So how do I respond to this?

I’d love to end this story on a strong positive note, but real life isn’t always like that. I wrote ‘goodbye for now’ on his post and used Facebook’s ‘unfollow’ button so that I don’t have to read anything more that he posts for a while. I figured that was at least better than using the ‘unfriend’ button; if I can't say anything positive, I won't say anything at all.

And now for an early night!