So there's actually a debate now in Great Britain about abortion. It's not the same debate as in the States, about its fundamental legality or illegality, but I suppose touches on the same emotional question of its murderousness or non-murderousness. 194,000 in a year, if you ignore the 6,000 from Ireland. That does seem like rather a lot and much of the debate seems to centre around whether women are using it as a form of birth control rather than as . . . well . . . birth control. I mean, what else is abortion? It's a considered decision that one doesn't want to give birth. You can hardly blame women for using it as birth control considering it's fucking birth control.
What takes me back about the numbers, though, is if there are 194,ooo unwanted pregnancies there's probably exponentially more than 194,ooo instances of unprotected sex with people who you don't want to make a baby with, which I must say doesn't go far towards rectifying the image of the British as reckless drunkard aidoiomaniacs whose vies intimes are based on some sort of dare. Most of the ladies I work with are English, and many of them complain about how the Continentals perceive them as tipsy floozies who might give it up on the hood of a car, no strings attached, if you tell them they have nice eyes. I figure figures about 200,000 abortions a year aren't likely to help them out of that perception; I've been through my own tipsy floozy years, and it's not that hard to insist on the contraception string.
Especially in the face of the fact emergency contraception is available there. I mean, are there seriously 194,000 women a year there who can't get it together during the three days after unprotected sex to get to a doctor or pharmacist? Or are there almost 2 million women who do, and the 194,000 just represents the 10% failure rate? It's rather nasty the pharmacists are allowed to choose whether or not they hand it out to women in need - I mean, come on buddy, if you wanted to indulge a God complex at work, you should have sprung for the eight years of extra education to become a surgeon. But are so many indulging that women can't get the pill over a three day span?
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Abortion is such a horrible action that I couldn't imagine a whole nation is taking it so lightly.
I had a conversation with my mother the other day about abortion and it was surprising. She told me a young nurse at her work got pregnant and only told her (and the father) to whom she is engaged. She told my mother that she is horrified. She is disgusted that there is a parasite living inside of her and she is going to get an abortion. I reacted without thinking. I said, "Good for her." and my mother just looked at me with a shocked expression on her face. I said, "Good for her for knowing herself well enough to know that she shouldn't go through with this pregnancy. Sounds like she made the right decision to me." My mother said, maybe she should give the baby up for adoption rather than taking the child's life (my mom is prolife obviously). I said that that child wouldn't have a very good life if her mother hated children and only had her out of feelings of obligation.
What surprised me about this conversation is that my mother didn't yell at me or insist that this girl was making a horrible decision. If the most conservative woman in the world is capable of having a normal conversation about abortion then I think we've made progress as a nation when it comes to a woman's right to choose.
Having said that, I don't think that having the right to choose abortion should make people feel any differently about the amount of protection they use when out on the town. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. I think there are a lot of emotional consequences to making that decision whether you believe the fetus is a baby or think of it as a thing until it breathes its first breath.
There's a lot of abortion in Japan as well, I was told. But no one keeps count so no one knows just how much abortion there is. This tells me that there probably is no social net to council women who have made that decision.
And, uh, exactly where can one find these woman with the, uh, nice eyes?
er, aidoiomaniacs?
Forget on the town; how'd she get knocked up by her future husband if she thought fetuses were parasites? Mind you, I hate the pill and that will lead to a conception one day probably, but I'd probably grin and bear the pill if I thought of fetuses as horrifying parasites.
I'm all for the right to choose and I'd fight people who tried to take it away, but surely the right to choose doesn't take away a notion of responsibility for the consequences of our consensual sexual actions. We can think ahead and spare ourselves as much as possible the moral question of whether killing the thing inside us is profoundly selfish or the best thing for all, including it, concerned.
That sort of forethought is what seperates humans from animals, not to mention women from men. And I don't trust people who don't seek to spare themselves that moral question because I don't think it can be answered to anyone's satisfaction, except a bigot's.
Hilts, they're mainly a continental legend. Although one of the English girls at work probably fits the bill.
People with a mania for sexual activity, Baywatch.
I am absolutely pro-choice, but wow, it's really hard for me to know that there are women out there who think that a human baby inside of them is anything but a human baby. It's hard for me to talk about this since it's clear how I feel about babies!
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