Friday, May 16, 2008

ABORTION LIMITS
Next time you agree to promote abortions which are carried out after even 16 weeks of life then please consider the ways and the means that little living "things" are often cut up and sliced and hacked around before "it" all comes out.
After 20 or more weeks the butchering gets worse, if that is possible.
Cut and slice as the blood runs from the sad eyes
As a struggling life tries to stare and get noticed.
Cut and slice
And hack that unwanted baby into pieces for a nice exit......

23 comments:

anticant said...

This is one of the most difficult and distressing of all issues.

I have never been able to understand the twisted morality of those who would piously ban both abortion and contraception.

But easy contraception isn't the answer. I am convinced that while these babies aren't wanted, their conception frequently is, consciously or unconsciously, by one or both partners - maybe as a rite of passage, or a proof of potency?

So what is the answer?

zola a social thing said...

Anticant : you wizard of wide-worlds and intrique.
What you say is indeed an issue even if there is never to be THE answer.
However I firmly believe that a few anchors need to be set ( even if only in moving sands) before we can make any "progress".
For me that anchor is simple BRUTALITY.
I am still old fashioned enough to believe that civilisation ( no matter here all the obvious discontents) does not chop up and slice and hack up small beings.
Abortion, the way it is becoming more and more in the official sense, is brutal and uncivilised.

With that as a starting point ( any agreement?) we may begin again to discuss the hows, the whens and the whys and the ifs.

My first point then concerns the BRUTALITY which, to me, stinks to high heaven!

anticant said...

Yes, of course. The very notion of abortion makes me vomitous. No self-respecting person should wish to perpetrate that upon a living being, even in embryo - least of all the prospective mother. So I don't believe it is a woman's "right to choose", after making the presumably wrong choice to become pregnant [even by accident] in the first place. I know this will earn me the undying hatred of any "feminist" who happens to read it, but so be it: I am inured to being called "racist" and "pseudo-liberal bigot" by the self-styled Left because I criticise the intellectual idiocies of Islam and the barbarically brutal behaviour of some of its adherents.

However, there is another side: I can remember the shameful miseries and risks to health to which hapless women and girls were exposed in the days before abortion was legalised, and would never wish to return to that horrific state of affairs. I knew some of those who worked most strenuously to end it, and they were admirable people.

As you say, the starting point is brutality, but much of the ongoing discussion is enmeshed in religious bigotry, which is no help in reaching a sensible solution. That can only come when we restore the old-fashioned notion of personal responsibility, which has been eroded by the past thirty years of rubbishy education and the imposition of what Furedi calls the "dependecy culture" by the ZanuLab Nanny Knows Best types.

There! That's FAR to serious for your blog and will probably bring a deluge of venomous comment upon my hapless head, but I think you and I are in substantial agreement as to where we start from, even though - as with so many of today's problems - we haven't any clear idea of where we need to go or how to get there.

anticant said...

On a personal note, I am an only child because my Mother "lost" two potential younger brothers on medical advice that she wasn't strong enough to carry them to term. I always believed these had been miscarriages until, not long before she died, in her 80s, she confessed to me that they had been terminations which, though unavoidable, had always left her with feelings of guilt and remorse.

I cannot understand how some women feel able to have abortions and then say - as some of the campaigning "pro-choice" bloggers do - how pleased and relieved they feel about it. I find this inhumane, if not inhuman.

zola a social thing said...

I do take your points Anticant and I hope I take them well.
I have said this before but I was adopted. That means being left on some cold doorstep to be picked up and then sheltered by an organisation before parents were found for me.
I guess this influences my own opinions.

Abortion, when a mother-to-be is in big danger herself is, is, is... a dilemma and I cannot play God with such.
But any decision made thereby is not brutality.

BTW : It is high time that more men tried to find an empathy with this kind of dilemma that usually hits women folk most and hardest.

anticant said...

Dear Zola, It's high time we found more empathy around a whole host of issues! It's an unfashionable trait in this entrenchedly hostile world, where all most people seem to want is to tear each other into bits.

I think I at least partly understand your feelings, as I have had several friends with similiar backgrounds. It always leaves emotional scars - as does being illegitimate.

Continuing with family anecdote, my Mother's Mother tried to abort herself - unsuccessfully, I'm glad to say, or else I wouldn't be here. When she was dying, the old lady - who was being nursed by my Mother - said "Well, you were the one I didn't want, and you've turned out to be the best of the lot!"

A back-handed compliment, but better than nothing, I suppose.....

anticant said...

My friend the late Dorothy Dallas, who was a brilliant sex educator and trainer of sex educators, used to say that you had to start by clearing morals, like you clear trumps at Bridge. The trouble is that today, a lot of sex "educators" think either that it is solely about morals, or solely about what Dorothy called "plumbing". There isn't a proper balance.

zola a social thing said...

It is always a strange world when one is forced into abstracts but abstracts are usually all we have to centre upon.
The "balance" ( you so rightly bring up ) was lost long long time ago and this Karl Marx, amongst others said).
The "Marxian stance here was this : as nature becomes social nature we need to learn again. We need to learn again the way that our science and technology ( especially under Capitalism) is to be handled for the good of all, or at least for the most that we can reasonably handle.
In short it means, I guess, that we need to deeply learn the "mastery of Nature" and then learn "the mastery of the mastery of Nature" and there the twist begins.

There morality kicks back in.

And still we cannot yet get to the hows, whys and whens of abortion.

anticant said...

What I have learned, during my researches into family history over the past several years, and exchanging information with more or less distant cousins, is that there are secret sexual skeletons in almost everyone's cupboard.

What I find so sad, indeed tragic, about my own Mother is that it took her half a century to feel able to tell me the truth.

Freud said: "People are in general not candid over sexual matters. They do not show their sexuality freely, but to conceal it they wear a heavy overcoat woven of a tissue of lies, as though the weather were bad in the world of sexuality.... "

anticant said...

"The hows, whys and whens of abortion." As I was writing my previous messages, someone known to you rang up and I told her about this thread. Without a moment's hesitation - or even thought - she said: "abortion should be available on demand".

That is a viewpoint I can never agree with, and a main reason why I am reluctant to discuss the issue publicly as so many people take that nowadays commonplace line.

It raises another question which a campaigning friend from the 1970s and '80s put to me the other day:
"We are in the strange position in the West with the radical and civil libertarians being the older people, not the younger as in the 60s. Look at the opposition to the Iraq war and who have been the popular musicians speaking out......Willie Nelson, Patti Smith, Neil Young, Pete Seeger.... different branches of music but all in their 60s 70s or 80s."

A fruitful topic for a new thread?

anticant said...

Perhaps one small anchor to start with might be for society to cease tut-tutting about, deterring, and sometimes punishing young people for discovering, experimenting with and enjoying [consenting] sex, but to set a firm face of disapproval against the thoughtless conception of unwanted babies.

Abortion should be available as a last resort, but certainly not on demand, or seen as being desirable or a natural right.

zola a social thing said...

Abortion on demand is inevitable just as suicide is an absurd crime.

However and again this discussion needs better anchors if agreements are to be forthcoming.

For me I see the human Being as a social being and a nature being and also a rather abstracted psycho-self-being.
This wonderful "trinity" is one of my starting points.
That is Being with and for the world which is always much more than we may think it is.

Therefore a person who refuses to breast feed because she does not want to be seen as a farmyard animal is an alienated iget.

Therefore a person that feels he or she OWNS a baby is alienated. Sorry to any me,me.me self-esteemed igets.

So the small living being is WITH US. ( women used to say that they were WITH BABY and only recently say that they HAVE baby).

I may not be popular.

Anonymous said...

The answer?
Three steps to reason :-
1. Snip the working classes while allowing fornication ( busty wenches of all classes like a bit of rough)
2. Castrate the already effeminate Middle classes and allow their inherent delicacies to blossom.
3. Let women folk equate science and technology with their morality.

Then all problems solved.

zola a social thing said...

Dam it I was just getting into this debate.
Then along comes Lady Chaterly who did, if I remember well enough, demand that all donkey-rigged Scots and Welshmen were to be circumcised.
The plot thickens.

zola a social thing said...

Due to a couple of nasty e-mails I will end my piece by saying this :-
The abortion limit should be cut to 12 weeks in all cases apart from the obvious health of the "bearer" case which needs to be decided on other grounds than brutality.

anticant said...

Sorry but not surprised about the e-mails. It seems that a lot of people on both sides of this 'debate' are nasty. Little room for civilised agreement to differ these days.

zola a social thing said...

Not to worry Anticant : I and many others, like you, have steered a course through much worse.
I rarely reply to e-mails anyway. Also nastiness on e-mails is cowardly and I take little heed of cowards.

Yet this debate is so central to the so called UK today based as it is upon their versions of "ethics" and ethical codes.
Problem? When you ask them about these ethical codes and the relationship to morality they close down and run away or get abusive.
Fact? These types are egets, igets and prats and that is all I have to say to them or about them.

But do not worry Anticant : I can fend my corner of resitence and will.

anticant said...

They don't know what 'ethics' means. They're all "Me, Me, Me."

zola a social thing said...

Yes Anticant I agree.
However there are many who refuse this "education, education, education" version of ethics.
There are many who refuse to accept the market-value of life itself.
Trouble is most of thse are without a voice.

Just a rape is brutal and any woman raped deserves all the means at her disposal to get back her "own" sense of being-with-the-world - so too, the lack of voice is terrible.

Does any recall "The Voice of the Shuttle"?
I support the voices of the Shuttle.
I support the tapestry woven by folk that have their tongues cut away when trying to tell the truth.

zola a social thing said...

BTW : I also support those women that have spoken out, in private but rarely in public, about the awful realisation of "late" terminations.

This is especially true when the facts of the matter get into focus. Like I said cut and slice and chop around for an easy exit.

Yet, in my time inside "education" I also had a few young women asking for advice. Asking for advice ( FROM ME?) on abortion.

I could not play God but I could ask those young women to consider and consider again as best they could.
You see it was not my decision and not my call.

My responsibility, however, was to try and say something reasonable.

In my mind, during such times, was a Tom Waits song where the train moves away and the saint is not a good thing to be.

I guess this deabte needs the real actions of folk that have feeling for others ( I do not mean Princess Di feelings here).
I think many of these feelings are already "out there".

Problem ? UK politicians do not live in a world where everyday feelings are respected.

Science? It has little to do with morality even if it borders it all the time.

Technology ? Have gun will kill? Have sucker will kill?
Have sucker must kill......
You can ask yourself the rest.

anticant said...

We are living in a world where fewer and fewer people take responsibility for their choices and actions. Most don't wish to. Nor does the Nanny State wish them to, because its strident bossy apparatchiks know what's best for the rest of us. [After ten years, people are fed up with this - the reason, I think, why ZanuLab will lose at Crewe and Nantwich this week.]

The first choice for which responsibility must be accepted is the choice to get pregnant. OK, sometimes it happens unintentionally or by accident, but who's fault is that?

The next choice is whether or not to carry the baby to term, if it is healthy, and there is no risk to the life or health of the mother.

Each case is individual and unique; and as you say, Zola, we cannot play God. But we can at least ask those concerned to consider all the options - including adoption - before demanding abortion as their first choice.

Do I sound like the Pope? I hope not - I was appalled by his putrid Polish predecessor's unctuous exhortation to raped Bosnian women to accept the unwanted fruit of their wombs as a 'gift from Christ'. The garbage religious folk - especially Catholics - talk about abortion [and contraception] sickens me as much as the prattle of the "chuck it away like an unwanted plastic bag" abortion-on-demand brigade.

As you say, it is a moral issue - not just a scientific or technical one.

zola a social thing said...

Again I agree with so much that you say and I am glad that two men can try to talk together in such a way.

So much of this nastiness concerns men.
But on the other hand there is no such thing as "men" or "water" or even "women".
Here is the abstract problem I think.

My main point was always the BRUTALITY.
The cut up and slice AND THE HACKING AWAY OF A human being.
For those that disagree I can only ask for the response after "being-there" as witness.

Why should we ask good doctors to kill?
Why do vets commit suicide more than social scientists?

Before we may really agree on these matters a whole lot of rocking needs to go on.

For those that disagree with me I can only ask them to do this job themselves. The technology is there and you only need to follow orders to do the job.
Just follow orders.

Strange that this does not sound good?
But the technology is there, science is there and you have a job now.
Smile you are on Candid Camera?

zola a social thing said...

To choose to get pregi is usual but not often in the sense of choice.

In this debate there really needs to be women, old and young involved.

I know not what I do !

Home/Join | List | Next | Previous | Random

The Awkward Squad are powered by alt-webring.com