Your letters: On lookout for kids left in hot cars

Never leave a young child in a hot car.

Take your child with you

While the hot weather continues, I'm looking out for young children left in hot cars. You could say it's become a bit of an obsession for me, or just another community service.

However, I know I'm not alone in wanting people to take their littlies with them, especially on hot days, even if they think they'll only be gone a couple of minutes.

It's been more than two months since the incident at the Whanganui Resource Recovery Centre when a four-and-a-half-month-old baby was rescued from a hot car. Mothers doing their recycling have been seen taking their babies with them, strapped into front packs, and at least one man has done his recycling one-handed with his baby on the other hip.

Ka pai.

The Safety and Wellbeing Reference Group, one of seven groups in Safer Whanganui, is supporting my campaign to prevent vehicular heatstroke in the district. The group includes Community Patrol, Maori Wardens, Plunket, Horizons Road Safety, Community House, Fire Emergency NZ and the police.

Resources are being gathered to tackle the problem at Trafalgar Square car park, which is known to be a hot spot for babies and dogs left alone in cars.

SafeKids Aotearoa has also lent its support to the campaign.

The key message is that vehicular heatstroke is 100 per cent preventable by simply taking the child with you.

Winding the windows down a few centimetres does nothing to reduce the temperature inside a car on a hot day. If it's hot outside, it will be hot inside too, and there is no guarantee of air flow.

MARGI KEYS
Whanganui

Facism and the soul

I respond to K A Benfell's letter of March 16:

In 1929 the Vatican made official treaty with Mussolini — the Lateran Pact, which made Catholicism the only recognised religion in Italy, gave the church monopoly powers over birth to death and education and in return urged Catholics to vote for Mussolini's Fascist party.

Similarly, the church was linked with fascist parties and regimes across southern Europe under Pope Pius XI, who died in 1939, to be followed by Pope Pius XII who, within four days of his election, wrote in the following terms:

"To the Illustrious Herr Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer and Chancellor of the German Reich! . . . During the many years We spent in Germany, We did all in Our power to establish harmonious relations between Church and State. Now that the the responsibilities of Our pastoral function have increased Our opportunities, how much more ardently do We pray to reach that goal ..."

The collusion implicit therein continued post-1945 in protecting Nazi war criminals via the "rat line" to South America, where pro-fascist/anti-democratic governments still maintained symbiotic relations with the Catholic Church.

Some still do.

Mr Benfell's contention that "modern science tells us the baby is a human life from the moment of conception" is used as a semantic springboard for justifying the doctrinal fairy story of the "soul's creation at the selfsame moment".

In fact, "the baby", at the "moment of conception" is an egg being penetrated by a sperm to turn it into a blastula — a hollow ball of of cells dividing to become a zygote, which then ... and so on.

This is NOT a baby in common parlance; It is, of course, going to become one, all going according to nature's development for all mammals, but it seems that nature terminates more than 40 per cent of all pregnancies in, or close to, the first trimester.

Another query raised by such wastage is: What, exactly, is this much-talked-about but never-defined "soul"? It seems to be a non-material concept forced upon the
small material cluster of the emerging blastula.

Nobody has ever seen one, measured one, touched or felt one. Logical, Mr Benfell? A product of groundless belief based on an ancient recognition of the brain's ability to convert some elements of human experience into a heightened response involving emotion. Thus, from the senses>brain>mind> feeling.

The complicated development of the mammalian brain with its electro-chemical pathways is now under very intense investigation — quite recent and reliant on continuing new technologies but already aware that the neo-nate brain still lacked the completion of important synaptic junctions, eg for language development well into the first post-natal year, and into the mid-20s for completion.

With modern and very sophisticated technologies, some very early deliveries can survive, but such rarities are not evidence to weigh against the standard generalisations of when certain brain functions signal the "earliest signs of consciousness", which was quoted by me as scientific evidence, not suggested as opinion.

The nonsense of Mr Benfell's anti-abortion arguments is stark when he writes, "If the pregnancy is not viable, it ends in a miscarriage".

In fact, many genetic diseases and some disastrously famous chemical treatments, such as thalidomide, do NOT trigger miscarriage, but WILL signal for intervention via amniotic testing.

RUSS HAY
Whanganui

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