(Ed: These are basically the same arguments put forward by the eugenicists a hundred years ago - improve society by 'birth control' which will decrease the number of the feckless.)
[...] There was the 27-year-old who arrived at just over 22 weeks' gestation. She already had a 10-month-old, a five-year-old and a six-year-old, all of them in foster care. She said the next baby would go straight into care, because she was a drug user. In a chaotic daze, she had left the abortion to the last minute. Then there was the woman who arrived at 22 weeks and four days, who had been drinking heavily and taking large doses of cocaine, unaware she was pregnant. The one rational choice these addicted women were fit to make was to know they were not fit to be mothers.
So any MPs who think it would do no harm to cut the legal limit by a week or two, should ask if those women would make good mothers. Many would soon be the same mothers vilified as useless scroungers and no-hopers in the very same newspapers that sentimentalise thumb-sucking foetuses. When these unwanted foetuses grow up into hoodie delinquents, the same newspapers are first to demand severe punishments, warning that the world's going to hell in a handcart. The Mail should look at the figures in Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics suggesting that crime fell when the number of unwanted babies reaching their teens fell after abortion in the US was made legal. Read more
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Friday 9 May 2008
Polly Toynbee: Resist the medievalists. Women's right to abortion is a private matter
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I wonder whether Polly Toynbee supports the selective abortion of female foetuses? Logically, if a woman's right to choose is THE most important thing, then there can be no objection to a woman aborting for any reason - a girl-child, a red-haired baby, a kid with big ears and so on. Given this, why does Toynbee bother to dredge up the stories of hapless and helpless methadone addicts condemned to a life of parenting because they couldn't get an abortion when they were 6 months' pregnant? She can't like where the logic leads, me thinks.
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