Moral crusaders

The missus has been invited on to Seoige today to debate with David Quinn of The Iona Institute about FertilityCare, a fertility clinic in Galway, who only treat married couples.

Only in Ireland can you get away with religious morals to discriminate against people with physical impairments.

No doubt they’ll crank out some statistics about the kind of home married couples provide for children. Like this one:

“He highlighted the recent British Millennium Cohort study which found that children born to an unmarried couple have a 25 per cent chance of seeing their parents separate by the age of five. By comparison, only one in ten children born to married children saw their parents separate at the same age.”

I’m so sick of idiots cranking out statistics while completely missing how irrelevant they can be. You can not take a statistic based on the general population and compare it to people in a very specific situation. A couple putting themselves through the pain, anguish, disappointment, crippling costs, and physical and mental intrusion of fertility treatment, make a far bigger commitment to a child than the ideal of marriage. People who are willing to go through this ordeal to have a child can in no way compared to a general populace who for whatever reason aren’t married and may or may not even wanted to conceive.

Argh. Effing Moral crusaders. Why can’t you just let people live their own lives?

7 Comments
  • Reply Xbox4NappyRash

    November 19, 2008, 4:56 pm

    Agggh.

    I look forward to hearing how this goes.

    ET and myself are legally married, but not in the church, where would that leave us?

    Frankly, if we were unmarried and if that clinic were our only option we’d probably go and get married just to have a chance.

    Is THAT the kind of marriage they want to promote?

    The clinic’s policy also “serves the best interests of fathers who have limited parental rights and privileges if they are not in a married relationship”.
    Don’t jump on that as justification, unmarried father’s best interests would be serves by shoring up those arcaic parental rights laws, but that’s for another day.

  • Reply John Braine

    November 19, 2008, 9:29 pm

    It really well I thought. Yer man just kept repeating statistics about marriage which like I said are complete nonsense when you’re not comparing like with like.

    You might be able to watch on the archive tomorrow: http://www.rte.ie/tv/seoige/watch.html

    Archaic. Yep that’s the main word to spring to mind.

  • Reply Xbox4NappyRash

    November 19, 2008, 9:39 pm

    Well, I find that often, these kind of arguments get lost by those rattling off the same old rhetoric, without any need for common sense to get involved.

    Good stuff, hope I can get a look at that, although I probably won’t be able to from outside RoI as usual.

    Archaic indeed, except you spelled it correctly.

  • Reply Xbox4NappyRash

    November 20, 2008, 5:06 pm

    And bugger it anyway, it can only be watched on the ‘island of Ireland’.

    Hmmmm.

  • Reply Anonymous

    December 3, 2008, 12:24 pm

    Dear Sir
    I think it’s only right and proper that this service should be confined to people who have been concecrated in holy matrimony by a properly ordained male virgin. People who are not married should not be doing, (the thing we don’t talk about), in Holy Catholic Ireland. Doing the (thing we don’t talk about)by unmarried people is the number one cause of murder, drug taking, rape, war, climate change, higer prices than the North, people not opening doors for old ladies, passing wind on buses, urinating in public and Gerry Ryan.

    Ms. M Kenny
    Chairwoman: Irish Crawthumpers Assoc.

  • Reply Red Mum

    December 5, 2008, 10:27 pm

    I suppose its only right after all David Quinn was on Q&A recently with the lovely Ed Walsh who pointed out that us single parents are responsible for crime in Limerick.

    Its strange though I have never been to Limerick. Oh except for that time years ago when I was outside the city for a conference, obviously my influence is potent 😉

    Right I'm off to watch the RTE archive. Go Missus.

  • Reply John Braine

    December 8, 2008, 12:20 am

    Dear Mr’s M Kenny, thanks for the most entertaining comment on this blog.

    RM. Yep I have it on good authority that it was single parent who fed all those pigs recently too. Terrible bunch of people.

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