Pro-life, pro-death, pro-poverty

“This is a Catholic country” doesn’t seem like a good reason to kill someone, but then if you’re pro-life perhaps you will disagree.

Savita Halappanavar (31), a dentist, presented with back pain at the hospital on October 21st, was found to be miscarrying, and died of septicaemia a week later.

Her husband, Praveen Halappanavar… asked for a medical termination.

This was refused, he says, because the foetal heartbeat was still present and they were told, “this is a Catholic country”.

She spent a further 2½ days “in agony” until the foetal heartbeat stopped.

In perhaps related news that pro-life people are only pro-life until you are born:

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco launched a Global Turnaway Study this year to explore the potential social and economic implications of denying women access to legal abortion. And after documenting the experiences of the women who seek to terminate a pregnancy but are turned away from abortion services, the UCSF researchers found that those women were three times more likely than the women who successfully obtained abortions to fall below the poverty line within the subsequent two years.

Perhaps I’m being unfair about the pro-life movement, but I doubt it. If this sort of thing worries you that is good. The pro-life movement are adopting tactic used in the US to intimidate people, for example protesting outside abortion clinics. Their success would mean the exportation of this suffering. The stakes are high, be worried.

(Via, and via, and others too)

Filed under: Politics, Society, Abortion, Pro-life, Savita Halappanavar

You can think a foetus is a person and still think abortion is okay

On abortion, no, just no:

On the one side, it’s not a human, just a blob, entirely up to the woman what she wants to do with it.

On the other it’s one of God’s chosen creatures and so deserving of the same protections the rest of us get.

You can think a foetus is a person and that a woman is allowed to abort it.

If a woman’s body is her own – and it is – then even if someone is reliant on her for life she has the right to refuse that support. A foetus’s right to life does not involve the right to use someone else’s body…

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.

So the argument should not be sidetracked by debates on whether a foetus is alive or not. The real crux of the matter is whether a woman’s body is her own or that of society.

You could say that the woman chose to have sex and that implies an obligation to the consequence of that. But that just underlines the real reason most religious people are against abortion; babies are punishment sluts for having sex.

Consider for example, if you really, actually, honestly thought life began at conception then you would be in constant mourning. At least half of all fertilised eggs fail to implant. That means that for every person born at least one has already died, the attrition rate makes abortion seem trivial. There is basically no better way to spend money to save lives than working to improve that statistic. Yet anti-choicers spend money punishing sluts campaigning to lower the termination limit on abortions.

Call it revealed preferences, anti-choicers like punishing women, but not working to improve embryonic implantation rates. Makes you question their motivations, no?

Filed under: Society, A Defense of Abortion, Abortion, Tim Worstall