We tried to watch a bit of "Sex and the City" last night, just to see why it's talked about. This episode was "Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda". The friends were, by turns, lying and boasting about their abortions. Apparently a baby wasn't in someone's "plan"; it's not as though these nitwits had any plans worth considering - for example, evidently they didn't plan to have a condom in their handbag. I've never seen a programme so louche and vapid. What can its makers think of us all?
I pass over the religious objections to abortion, and the arguments (to my mind, wholly specious and self-serving) about the humanity of the unborn. Do please spare me the hate mail.
But why is the political class so keen on it? And on the experimentation that continually encroaches on the right of human beings to live? (Don't tell me it will cure cancer and all the other things that make us mortal.)
Is it a financially-motivated plan to murder the poor, the deformed and the sick in their mother's wombs, so that they will not live to become benefit dependant and/or petty criminals? Is it about money? Has money become more real, more valid, than the people who earn and spend it?
Don't think it'll work anyway. A while back, I saw an interview with some serial shagger who didn't give a fig for any of his girlfriends, but there's one instinct he still retained. Remarking on his last, he said, "At least I got a kid out of her."
Abortion is a bloody and chaotic approach to sexuality and relationships. This study aims to correct some of the misunderstandings on the subject by both "conservative" and "liberals", and tends to support the greater use of contraception.
Will that work?
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The people most against abortion (right-wing evangelicals) are the most pro-war and have no problem dropping bombs on fully-formed, happy, healthy children when it suits their policy objectives so that leads me to conclude that the leaders of the anti-abortion movement's objections to it have nothing to do with the sanctity of life. The sheep must be forced to raise a new crop of lambs to be shorn. I read an article in Mother Jones a few years ago (about Bush campaign supporters) where one operative at the buffet table was overheard complaining that because of abortion it was hard to find good domestic maids and cooks.
Hi, Yoyomo.
I think that in most cases abortion is wrong, and I'm also against war (like most soldiers, I believe) and especially against weapons of mass destruction (I'm probably on some Ministry of Defence file for my letters to them protesting against nuclear weapons in the 70s). I don't think it's fair to suggest that the two are necessarily linked. And I think you'd find plenty on the further end of the Left (especially in Communist countries) who would be in favour of both abortion and war, though of course always in the name of some higher cause. Maybe the real distinction is between fanatical types and non-fanatics.
I'm no fan of abortion but many of these anti-abortionists are against the pill which is ridiculous especially if you can't support a child. Also, many of these types (at least in the US) are against public assistence to help children living in poverty. If they don't care about the child after it's born, I question their concern for it before it's born. I still think that the need to feed your children is the weapon of choice the rich use against the less well off to get them to work for any pittance the rich deign to pay them. And as tragic as an abortion is, it is still preferable to starvation which, in some parts of the world, is a daily reality.
Isn't much of the starvation down to the disruptions of civil war?
That sounds like a terrible show. It's one thing to be pro-abortion. It's another thing entirely to brag about having an abortion. Most people on both sides of the issue would at least agree that abortion is not a choice one makes lightly. And to come from the protaganists of the show--how odious.
This is why I won't part with the money to buy a television.
Most violence in places like Africa (Darfur) are fights over inadequate resources (water, arable land, grazing). The more mouths to feed the less to go around. When the war drums start beating then society fractures along ethnic/tribal lines as everybody seeks the protection of his group. The other major cause of violence is outside agitation; I'm sure you're familiar with the long history of colonial/imperial powers pitting one group of subjects against the other. Rawanda was mostly the US and France vying for influence because the US wanted to consolidate its base of operations to the south of Sudan. As long as Rawanda was under Hutu rule Uganda was vulnerable to destabilization and unavilable for operations against Sudan. Once the Tustis took over and secured Uganda's southern border the war against Sudan was ramped up from bases in northern Uganda. The Tutsi takeover was the tipping point in the decades-long destabilization (and the eventual, long-planned partition) of Sudan.
Yoyomo: sickening.
Matt: I don't know if it was bragging as such, but the casualness semed to me about tantamount to the same thing. Utter callousness.
For what it's worth, much of the trouble in Rwanda was started by Benedictine missionaries, who saw the lighter-skinned tribes as 'closer to God'.
Bloody bad theology, if so.
The topic is somewhat stale by now but two points: A) there are no light skinned tribes, they're all very dark; B) just heard on the news today that the (Tutsi) govt has just officially displaced French as the official language with English in higher education. Rawanda was all about US/French rivalry in central Africa and destabilization campaigns in the region.
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