Hello chickens. I've been a bit absent recently, but here is a little hello. I should currently be teaching in Pov. Bys, but yesterday being a public holiday, there was nobody to pick me up, so instead I am making good use of mild grammatical mistakes to make this interview look more authentic.
Absence has been mostly due to my upcoming presentation at this conference. I am quite excited, not least by going to the Palace des Nations, built for the League of Nations. (No spurious conclusions need be drawn, thanks.) But also nervous - first real presentation ever, of the UNFPA youth policy review process which took me all over Europe last year. But seven minutes is quite a comfy time, and I have a couple of supportive colleagues. Needless to say, I'll be sitting at the 'experts' table.
Apart from ours, the rest of the presentations are from Generations and Gender Project researchers, presenting research from that project. Ours is a 'policy statement' by UNFPA, whatever that means - I think the ultimate purpose is to tell the government people that they don't have to wait for the results of longitudinal studies in order to start responding to their worries.
So if anyone fancies a glass of Swiss milk lemonade next wekk, I'll be around.
This is the report everyone's talking about*
* in Turkey
Good luck to Evan Harris and crew. How's it looking? Question: would it be a good compromise to accept a reduction to 22 weeks of the on-demand limit in return for making abortion properly available on demand and get rid of the doctor-permission nonsense? Early abortion is after all the best way of reducing late...
That's all. That and the observation that in/prior to homo sapiens hardwiring phase, surely individual volition against the group interests was punished by natural selection? From where do we get this imaginative love of freedom?
6 comments:
enuf people in the world perhaps?
Quite possibly, although I don't think abortion is a matter of population policy, rather of personal choice. You may be referring to our efforts to make young people better situated to have children across Europe, to which my response is a bit more lengthy and will have to wait! Do remind me though : )
I just simply do not understand why the lives of people who don't exist are consistantly put before, or attempted to be put before, the lives of people who do. A potentual person, a collection of cells if you like, is not an actual person whatever way you look at it, even if this thing has reflex responses such as "pain". Yeah, people can be sad at lost posibility, they can grieve for the person who might have been. And its true that a lot of women feel/are preasured into abortion and many regret it and are sad. But these are (most often) adults and are allowed to make choices like any other adult, and like any choices they are not simple.
I'm inclined to agree with you Chris, a compromise of that kind would be fine. And anyway my policy on abortion is I don't really get an oppinion since I would never be in a situation where I could under-go an abortion. Any woman I am with who I happen to impregnate gets to make the choice and I support them and deal with the consequences of that when it is made. I have never had to put this theory to the test yet, lets hope I never do, it would be horrifying if I suddenly found I was putting preasure on one side or the other.
But that said my actual view is: all women should have access to abortion, all the moral issues need to be removed from the dabate, and abortions should be available until the point that performing them is a serious danger to the woman or all doctors refuse for understandable squemish reasons. I actually have no problem with abortions right up to term. I believe life begins at birth, whatever form that birth takes...
Anyway thats enough of that, I'm clearly trying to distract myself from the tasks I must do, good luck in your presentation.
No, the compromise is the thin end of the wedge. If you allow the limit to be pushed down, you are losing ground in the debate and it makes it easier for the antis to argue for a lower limit next time, ultimately to nothing. Stick at what you have worked hard to achieve.
That said, I also think that later abortions are not a good idea, I think that putative fathers have rights, and I think the squeamishness issue is actually quite important.
My presentation is going fine, so I can take a break. Although even properly delivered, it will be a minute (15%) too long. But I'll wow them with being under 40 (merit-based system, anyone?) and it'll all be good. And goodness knows people always go over.
I agree that there should be no compromise in the upper limit. To those seeking a lower limit, I will listen once they have demonstrated that they have made other efforts to reduce the (already very low) levels of late abortion, namely by making early abortion easier. Same with people who want to reduce the number of abortions (not something I think is per se good) - once you are campaigning for sex education and contraceptive availability, you might at least have some credibility. But they aren't doing that - instead, amazingly, focused on preventing those things, because it's all part of their desire to control people's bodies and lives.
I think my inability to be pregnant stops me being able to make a decision over any particular abortion (which is quite a stupid idea, I couldn't Make the decision in any case), but being a man doesn't stop me having a view on the policy question.
It is humanly nice to think that these questions would be discussed, if only for having all the information necessary for the decision (will he be there to support me, will he resent the child etc), but I disagree that putative fathers have rights - if they have legal rights, the only meaning I can see is that they could stop a woman from aborting a child they fathered, which is totally wrong.
I think my view on the viability question is this: nobody should be forced to remain pregnant, but once the baby is viable (at which point an abortion is a surgical procedure anyway) there may be a case for not aborting but rather delivering and taking into care.
Of course, in a post with several aspects, abortion is the one that is most attractive, as I suppose with the HFE Bill next week...
I seem to have started a massive abortion thread when I was really referring to the generations & gender conf. you are speaking at - so, as you suggest, I will wait for your lengthy response...
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