| Stupidity incarnate. |
A West Yorkshire hospital has banned visitors from cooing at new-born babies over fears their human rights are being breached and to reduce infection. A statement from Calderdale Royal Hospital in Halifax said staff had held an advice session to highlight the need for respect and dignity for patients. On one ward there is a doll featuring the message: "What makes you think I want to be looked at?" Idiots. There is plenty of research showing that infants respond to faces and soft voices by increasing their neural connections ... i.e. it's how they learn to see and eventually to talk.
But Labour MP Linda Riordan said the measures were "bureaucracy gone mad". She told the Halifax Courier: "All mothers want people to admire their babies because all babies are beautiful. But in a case where a mother did not want to answer questions it should be up to that individual to say so."
Some new mothers have already said they are astonished by the rules which stop people asking questions about their babies or looking at them in maternity wards. Debbie Lawson, neo-natal manager at the hospital's special care baby unit, said: "Cooing should be a thing of the past because these are little people with the same rights as you or me.
'Infection control'
"We often get visitors wandering over to peer into cots but people sometimes touch or talk about the baby like they would if they were examining tins in a supermarket and that should not happen."
A spokeswoman for Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Trust said the advice was as much to do with reducing infection as it was upholding "rights". In a statement she said: "Staff were wishing to highlight issues of potential confidentiality, especially for young babies and their parents in what can be emotional times. Infection control was also a key part of the message as the unit deals with very small babies with very vulnerable immune systems."
| I agree with MP Linda. I'd suggest the people promulgating pieces of gross stupidity like this should be taken out and shot, but that'd probably be a violation of their human rights. The human rights nonsense, if I recall correctly, started back in the Carter administration. Like most people at the time, I thought it was a good idea, never dreaming that the definition of "human rights" would turn out to be greasier than a bucket of lard. I think the original intent — I could be wrong, since Carter was involved — was to mount international pressure against totalitarian regimes that had no regard for human life, commies of most varieties being the primary offenders at that time, but also a host of lesser dictators and oligarchies. Here were are 30 or so years later and Human Rights™ has become an establishment. We're not allowed to ooh and aaah and coo over the miracle of life, but we still have people in large numbers being murdered, raped, despoiled, marched off to camps, mutilated, disfigured, robbed, and ground into the dust. Good job, Jimmy. |