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The Forum > Article Comments > Abortion and the human person > Comments

Abortion and the human person : Comments

By Peter Sellick, published 9/7/2018

It seems impossible to refuse the conclusion that the foetus is a potentially self-aware human being and that it may not be disposed of as passive tissue or as animal life.

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Dear David f,

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You wrote :

« Perhaps, English democracy is like English cooking. [David F]. It is a democracy without Separation of Powers between the executive and the legislature. It is a democracy with a monarch »

As you say, David, “English democracy is like English cooking”. Let’s say it’s a sort of a porridge – not so easy to describe but easy to swallow, and with a little sugar, served nice and warm, it doesn’t taste too bad either. The Westminster system of government and judiciary is exactly that : a sort of porridge.

The UK, of course, does not have a written constitution and because there is some overlapping between the executive and the parliament (the Prime Minister and ministers are part of the Executive and the Parliament), the system is, in many respects, more a “fusion of powers” than a “separation of powers”.

However, in practice, it seems that, in recent years, the UK’s unwritten constitutional “porridge” (the ingredients of which are : statute law, common law, parliamentary conventions and “works of authority”) is sufficiently malleable to allow it to respect the principle of the “separation of powers” to some degree.

While Australia does have a written (colonial) constitution, and is also a constitutional monarchy on the Westminster model, the respect (to some degree) of the principle of the “separation of powers” is fairly similar :

http://www.peo.gov.au/learning/fact-sheets/separation-of-powers.html
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You also wrote :

« If Winston Churchill had died in 1925 he would be remembered like Saddam Hussein as a person who ordered the Kurds to be gassed »

I find your judgment a bit severe, David. I presume you are referring to Churchill’s decision to re-establish the gold standard as the basis of value of the pound sterling after he took up office as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

That caused economic turmoil in the UK and triggered a flight of speculative capital to Wall Street that helped fuel the 1929 “black Thursday” stock market crash. But that was not entirely his fault and he did not deliberately try to kill or harm anybody.

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Posted by Banjo Paterson, Tuesday, 31 July 2018 8:37:57 AM
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Dear Banjo Paterson,

I was referring to the allegation that Winston Churchill in 1924 ordered the RAF to gas the Kurds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_British_use_of_chemical_weapons_in_Mesopotamia_in_1920

Apparently the use was considered.
Posted by david f, Tuesday, 31 July 2018 8:50:36 AM
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//« If Winston Churchill had died in 1925 he would be remembered like Saddam Hussein as a person who ordered the Kurds to be gassed »

I find your judgment a bit severe, David. I presume you are referring to Churchill’s decision to re-establish the gold standard as the basis of value of the pound sterling after he took up office as Chancellor of the Exchequer.//

I suspect what he is actually referring is the alleged gassing of the Kurds in 1920. Churchill did sanction the use of gas, but it wasn't actually used. Conventional munitions were considered more effective.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill#Return_to_Parliament
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_British_use_of_chemical_weapons_in_Mesopotamia_in_1920
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/605488?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Posted by Toni Lavis, Tuesday, 31 July 2018 8:55:03 AM
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Dear david f, Dear Toni Lavis,

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The bottom line seems to be that while Churchill authorised the use of gas on the Kurds in 1920, it was, in fact, not used as it was considered less effective than conventional methods of warfare under the circumstances.

According to a Postnote published by the British Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology in December 2001, the only occasion on which chemical weapons (CW) have been employed by British armed forces was in September 1915 when they used chlorine (presumably in WWI).

Here is the link :

http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/POST-PN-167/POST-PN-167.pdf
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I see that the UK was one of the 140 signatories (including Australia) to the Geneva Gas Protocol in 1925 prohibiting the use (but not the stockpiling) of CW, subject to the following conditions :

(I) The said Protocol is only binding on His Britannic Majesty as regards those Powers and States which have both signed and ratified the Protocol or have finally acceded thereto.

(2) The said Protocol shall cease to be binding on His Britannic Majesty towards any Power at enmity with Him whose armed forces, or the armed forces of whose allies, fail to respect the prohibitions laid down in the Protocol.

See page 67 of the League of Nations Treaty document : No. 2138. - PROTOCOL FOR THE PROHIBITION OF WAR OF ASPHYXIATING, POISONOUS OR OTHER GASES, AND OF BACTERIOLOGICAL METHODS OF WARFARE. SIGNED AT GENEVA, JUNE 17, 1925.

Here is the link :

http://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/LON/Volume%2094/v94.pdf
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I note that following the disaster of the Gallipoli Campaign in the Dardanelles, Churchill was demoted to an obscure cabinet post in May 1915.

It is reported :

« He resigned from the government, picked up a gun and headed to the front lines in France as an infantry officer with the Royal Scots Fusiliers. After several brushes with death, he returned to politics in 1917 as the munitions minister in a new coalition government headed by Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George » :

http://www.history.com/news/winston-churchills-world-war-disaster
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He was obviously not responsible for the use of chlorine in September 2015.

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Posted by Banjo Paterson, Wednesday, 1 August 2018 1:44:25 AM
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