Bad ideas die hard. One that remains undead, no matter how many stakes are driven into its bad old socialist heart, is the idea that the state knows best. It’s an idea that haunts this country still, despite all the bitter lessons of the 20th century.
Dracula no longer goes about revealing his fangs, however; he is now dressed in a sympathetic disguise. He wears a face of caring and social inclusion and is wrapped in the vast, all-embracing cloak of human rights. Under the guise of the human rights agenda, and all its good intentions, the spirit of socialism is undead and well, here in Britain.
Last week’s news of the 14-year-old schoolgirl who, without her mother’s knowledge, had an abortion arranged by a 21-year-old “health outreach worker”, is a case in point. This girl is still a child legally, still in the care of her mother, and yet her school and her outreach worker and the medical staff involved were all prepared to exclude her mother from the serious crisis she faced, and to take it upon themselves to advise and direct her child in her place.
I suppose it is possible that there might be some special circumstances which haven’t yet emerged that might justify such an outrage. There are, sadly, a few mothers who are so inadequate or so threatening or so mentally disturbed that they ought to be kept away from their daughters, particularly at times of great need. However, this girl’s mother appears to be perfectly normal, and is even a care worker herself. Admittedly it doesn’t say much for her judgment that she has given details of the story to a tabloid newspaper, but that is — after all — sadly normal these days.
It is news to me that a girl well under the age of majority can, by law, have a serious medical intervention, like an abortion, without the consent or knowledge of the mother (or father). Doctors are usually extremely wary of proceeding without parental consent, without careful legal advice, and rightly so. Abortion can have many psychological repercussions and carries some medical risks.
Quite apart from that, there are moral questions about abortion, and practical questions about how a girl’s parents might help her or which doctor they’d prefer her to see. Any mother who is deliberately excluded from such discussions, just because her young and irresponsible daughter is afraid that she might be angry and upset, is being deliberately deprived of her responsibility for her child, by people who might not even know her. For this to be a matter of normal practice is absurd. It is taking the idea of patient confidentiality to the point of stupidity.
As the law stands, it seems a minor can have an abortion without parental consent if two doctors agree that it is in her best interests and she is competent to understand the implications.
It is glaringly obvious to me that a young and irresponsible girl, irresponsible enough to have knowingly “taken a risk”, is unlikely to understand the implications, even after quite a lot of caring chats with health workers. Indeed in this case the girl soon afterwards said she hadn’t been ready to make the decision, and would probably have told her mother and kept the child, given another chance.
The best people, normally, to help a young girl understand the moral, social and emotional implications of life are her family, particularly her mother. That ought to be the presumption. Here, the presumption seems to be the other way. It is a totalitarian presumption; you can almost see Dracula’s cloak twitching.
I don’t mean to suggest that we live in a totalitarian state. Nonetheless, undermining the family is something that totalitarian states have always tried to do, and driving a wedge between parents and children is one of the traditional ways of doing it.
The reason is obvious; the united family has always been strongly resistant to the power of the state. I don’t really suppose that there has been any well-articulated conspiracy in this country to undermine families, or any conscious attack on family values. But quasi-socialist policies have served those purposes well since the war, in particular the attempted nationalisation of the family by the welfare state.
Today it is not ideals of welfare, specifically, but ideals of human rights that threaten the family, and swell the power of the state and the intrusive armies of quangocrats and functionaries, to impose those rights on us.
Poor foolish 14-year-old Melissa has the “right” to patient confidentiality, the “right” to a lonely trip to a clinic, supported by a text message from her outreach worker, and the “right” to deceive her mother, because she has a “right” to underage sex; a case was reported last week of a girl of 13 who was taken away from her adoptive parents because she has a “human right” to a sex life and they were trying to stop her.
The disabilities lobby is obsessed with rights. In a field I know quite well, people with learning disabilities have pressed upon them their “right” to have a baby (though not necessarily their “right” to keep it), and even their “right” to sit on juries or to be trustees of complex organisations, even though their disabilities, sadly, disqualify them.
A right appears to be something that someone rather fancies, or thinks is a right, no matter how unrealistic, and they seem to be limitless. New ones emerge all the time, as do jobs to “support” them.
However, some rights are more equal than others. We do not often hear of a mother’s right to the authority of a mother, or a mother’s right to information about her young child, or a mother’s right to contest the decisions of doctors or nurses or teenagers.
Last week the creation of a new monster superquango was announced. A new and powerful Equality and Human Rights Commission will take over in 2006 from the three “rights” quangos we have already — the Commission for Racial Equality, the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Disability Rights Commission. It sounds even more aggressively active than they are.
It will be “a strong and authoritative champion for equality and human rights”. It aims at “creating a society that is able to respect and celebrate difference while at the same time recognising and challenging discrimination”.
How the heart sinks. The only hope is that the entire human rights superstructure, here and across Europe, will before long collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions (as expressed in the self-contradictory mission statement, quoted above).
Even in the deluded world of rights activism, it is clear that rights constantly conflict, as people’s interests do. Equality cannot coexist with diversity. The right to be different conflicts with someone else’s right to be equal. And what about my human right to discriminate? Under what article of faith must I be denied my right to discriminate between doctors, au pairs, care workers, assistants and friends? And so on.
Even the vastest of armies of outreach workers will in the end be defeated by battling against the impossible. Meanwhile, we should reach for the garlic when people talk of “human rights”.
