Choose Life Australia

 
Filed on 05 July 2013 in Food For Thought category. Print This Page

Challenging and confronting the evil, application 1:
For anyone involved in, or concerned with, health.

Just as there has been an effective voice in public health concerning smoking, alcohol, and addictive drugs so also should we have a public health voice concerning sexual behaviour and its consequences and abortion.

The smoking campaign started by doctors has been extremely effective and has changed our culture.

It has taken a long while to get medical agreement on the dangers of even small amounts of alcohol e.g. in pregnancy, and we have only partly dealt with the problems with drink driving and the disastrous effects of alcohol in families. We need to change our culture, particularly in young people, recognising and educating re the effects on the immature brain. Increasing the purchasing age would be a good move in this direction.

Yes, and despite the gains we have made there are still some who want to legalise the use of various dangerous, destructive and addictive drugs.

When it comes to indiscriminate sexual behaviour we are bewilderingly permissive even to the extent of a public health slogan some years ago “when you travel overseas take condoms” (yeah, great for family holidays) and concentrating on the consequences of such behaviour rather than preventing it.

And when it comes to homosexual sex we are silent. Let’s tell the truth: penis-in-rectum sex is dangerous and should never be made “acceptable” as an alternative sexual behaviour (nor should it be offered in sex education as a “contraceptive” alternative to heterosexual sex!).

And with abortion we deny the humanity of the unborn child, we gloss over the fact that it might (just possibly) feel pain as it is pulled apart in mid-pregnancy or as its brain is sucked out in late pregnancy (as rare as that may now be), and we still try to deny the reality of post-abortion syndrome and we gloss over the possible one-third increase in breast cancer and the higher incidence of a subsequent pre-term delivery with all the possible consequences to the baby including cerebral palsy.

These are matters of great public health importance. As a culture we have glossed over these critical issues for too long and we have been hindered in our message by those who demand the freedom to damage their own health and encourage others to follow their own destructive lifestyle – and sometimes to protect big business e.g. smoking. And now we are being silenced by the homosexual lobby with the threat of vilification, “hate speech” and discrimination. We need to tell it like it is and preserve that freedom. We need to be able to speak truth. We cannot, we must not, be silent.

Lachlan Dunjey. July 2013.