It is reported that Nadine Dorries MP has tabled an amendment to the Health and Social Care Bill, which will reach report stage in the Commons on 6 September, that would make mandatory the offer of “independent” counselling for women seeking an abortion. If enacted, the result would be that funds earmarked for counselling would be removed from the Marie Stopes clinics and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service to set up a new counselling service, albeit optional. These organisations already provide counselling to the women who come to them, also optional. The argument for changing the system is that the existing clinics have a conflict of interest in offering counselling. What this means in plain language is that Ms Dorries thinks that the clinics make a lot of money from carrying out abortions and it is therefore in their interests to ensure that when counselling is offered to potential clients it will encourage them to go ahead. One can readily see that each step of this argument is illogical.
Ms Dorries has a parliamentary history of trying to limit the availability of abortion by lowering the upper limit, and also of trying to legislate to ensure that schools promote abstinence in sex education offered to teenage girls. One might well surmise that the real aim behind the counselling amendment is therefore to limit access to abortion by delaying its provision. In such a situation, women are more likely to feel that their privacy is being invaded and that they are being scolded for seeking their right to abortion, where the existing legal requirements are fulfilled.
It is quite unacceptable to try to limit access to a serious, legal and well run service in this way. Women are quite capable of making up their own minds on their own or with the counselling offered by the existing clinics, of which there has been no substantiated criticism. Who are the trained counsellors who would staff the new service, but are unwilling to work in the existing ones? Might they be selected, or think that they would be selected, if they hold anti-abortion views? There are many serious events in life where counselling might come in handy -giving birth, taking drugs whether medicinal or recreational, getting married or moving in with someone – are we going to have independent counselling for them too, with a view to deterrence?
The abortion battle, so vital to women, was won a long time ago, and there should be no going back on it (as in the US). The decision to have, or not have a baby is, in law, the woman’s alone. If MPs want to enforce closer consideration of “morality”, they might choose instead to focus on the men who abandon their responsibilities either to pregnant women or the mothers of their babies. Now that’s where something even sterner than counselling might come in handy!
The decision to have, or not have a baby is, in law, the woman’s alone.
Ah yes. The man as sperm donor and cash machine to be milked argument.
“Now there’s where something even sterner than counselling might come in handy”
Get the “indoctrination-drilling-training-education” ‘pyramid’ positively modeled and Holisticly balancing, and the excessive costliness and ineffectivess still overly plagueing not only human-health & wellbeing but human-procreation, recreation, relation-ing, individual-human-development and collective-human-development in the Lifeplace, will no longer befuddle The Establishment and waste Governance time.
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Clue: “Education takes place not just in school but on the way home from school, at home, in other interim-timeframes, and to school again”.
(My “take” based on Moshe Feldenkrais’s Preface to “Awareness Through Movement” ISBN9780062503220.
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are we going to have independent counselling for them too, with a view to deterrence?
Weird!
One thing I do know, is that it is far more difficult for a girl of 38, who can not count, to conceive, than it is for a girl of 18, who, equally, can not count. The girl of 38 has counted the months, and suddenly confronted with counting temperatures, ovulation, tabulating them, and other things besides, she is just not capable of doing it.
What is beginning to seem a very youthful population of these islands, due to immigrant
families breeding fast, was not so long ago
a population of early middle aged ethnic British people agonising over whether to have children or not.
Whilst the likes of Nadine Dorries have been squabbling over, negatives, and fetal destruction, some young people have been getting on, in time honoured way, I shan’t be explicit, and having kids; a burgeoning population of babbys, leaving the agony aunts high and dry with pill induced infertility.
Let’s start a children’s charity or get the water clean for villages in Uganda.
It makes perfect sense to have a different centre of advice from those who perform the task.
It’s similar to not taking your car to the repair garage to get an MOT. You know they will find a fault that has to be fixed at enormous cost or ‘you cannot pass the test.’ How many times have we been caught out by that story.
This, of course, is far more serious. However, trust is something we no longer have the luxury of here in this country. No more faith in those who once were considered ‘professionals’ who did not, out of principle, tell us a lie or set us up to take our money by performing surgery without need.
It is important to women, that in the matter of abortion, they are given a full and rounded ‘truthful’ story on the pros and cons of such a decision.
One of the most important messages being, if this is your choice to do this, have the event take place before the thirteenth week, both for physical and spiritual health. It should be illegal to abort after the thirteenth week. Unless it is absolutely in the interests of mother or child to do so.
And women should be warned, very openly and without pressure, to the risks they take of being unable to conceive again should they have a termination that is not carried out well or an infection results.
And at Lord Blagger: Men are well aware of the risks they take when they have unprotected sex. And if they are willing to take the chance regardless, without a care to the responsibility, they know they will have to foot the bill for and have obligation to, the child they may produce. No matter who the mother may be.
It comes down to, be careful where you dip your wick. Women do not find themselves pregnant by wishing for it. There has only been one virgin birth to date. And even that child had to have a human father to feed him.
And at Lord Blagger: Men are well aware of the risks they take when they have unprotected sex. And if they are willing to take the chance regardless, without a care to the responsibility, they know they will have to foot the bill for and have obligation to, the child they may produce. No matter who the mother may be.
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I’m quite aware of that argument.
However the quote was, the decision was and should be the women’s and the woman alone.
If she is going to take responsibility, then perhaps she should take responsibility for the entire offspring (baring cases of rape).
What Deech is arguing is in reality that she doesn’t have to take responsibility. Men can be used as sperm donors and cash donors, and failing that, Deech will force other people to do likewise. [Benefits]
So what would the consequences be of unmarried women bearing the costs of children?
As I see it there would be a very rapid volte face. Get pregnant to get a council house? Won’t work.
@Lord Blagger:
Termination of pregnancy can only be the decision of the mother. Otherwise you get the horror of the situation I wrote of to Gareth.
Now I am sure you would not feel it should be left to a man to decide on the right of a woman to be a mother or not. Can you just see where that would take us.
But, it is the duty of a man who has found himself father, to support that child in whatever way he has to.
And I am not a rabid feminist. For I don’t believe feminism is feminine.
Re-read what Deech wrote.
I’ll quote it for you
The decision to have, or not have a baby is, in law, the woman’s alone
There is no decision for the man. It’s all the women’s choice.
No role for the man. No decision for the man.
Therefore, no need for the man to pay money.
That’s the consequences of Deech’s feminist argument.
Except that’s not what they want. They want the decisions all to themselves and to exclude the man, bar the deposit, and all the money.
@LB:
Get pregnant for council accommodation?
Okay, if a woman gets pregnant and is denied accommodation because society doesn’t like what they see as undeserved privileges to women, on the grounds of her ability to bring to term a whole new person. A task once honoured. So, what would you prefer? The child taken into care? The cost then is out of sight, and the horror to the infant despicable. There is no ‘care’ being ‘in car’. It is officiated over by Dickens Beadles. Or, are you suggesting the child should be left in the gutter? After all, isn’t that where they belong?
What you will be promoting is far harder for men than a woman being housed by the state and paid for collectively. The women will be forced to reveal the names of all sexual partners she had contact with who could be the rightful parent. Each of them then tested by DNA to see who has the same genetic code as the offspring. The state will then contact the man and expose the situation to all and sundry.. Including any wife and family he may have. Then, he will be compelled to pay for the ‘full’ upkeep of his children or go to jail…Now how many men do you feel will be looking forward to that?
We will need a prison island the size of Australia to house them all. And what of the children and the sense of self esteem it destroys when he/she knows their biological parent doesn’t want to acknowledge them?
Men who play around, willy nilly, will then be sent to a psychiatrist, who decides that he must be forced to accept a vasectomy or castration, as he is of unsound mind to be left whole any longer. After all, he had a couple of children prior to this and it is simply foolish to consider leaving him in a physical position to have more.
How about those onions LB? For that is the fate of women. And equality is the name of the game here, isn’t it?
However, I do agree that women have been persuaded that men are the enemy and should be outlawed from their life. And this has to change drastically in order to create an environment of understanding and acceptance, by both sexes, to the gifts they give to each other by simply being the interlock that forms a natural arch in the life they have.
I’m afraid my solution to the minority who get pregnant in order to qualify for a council flat and so jump the queue, is to put them all in a dormitory somewhere so they can provide each other mutual support and babysitting facilities. A communal kitchen, lounge area and a row of beds, similar to a self-catering hospital ward if there is such a thing. It would certainly act as a deterrent to some, although sadly, there are probably some to whom even that is an improvement.
However, I’ve never seen hard figures as to how many there are, merely anecdotes probably deriving from the Daily Mail as to how they’re all scrounging benefits.
I doubt this amendment will get anywhere, but you might want to write to your MP and let thjemknow what you think –
http://t.co/wXJKvWb
I agree that the service should be available but not compulsory, as with all services offered by the state. There should also be no negative inferences drawn when someone refuses the offer of a state-provided service either, unlike now, where turning down state help is often a reason for the state to increase pressure to agree to interference.
Six men and one woman replying to this, but no matter. I have met so many women over the years
who were unable to bear a child because they had had an earlier abortion, that those Good people who urge pregnant women onwards and outwards, have surely got the good interests of advice seekers in mind.
I did see the Panorama programme on “catch up” last night (bbc iplayer), and had a sense of cynicism about the independence being proclaimed. The state monopoly in health services is such that I had serious doubts that the government minster was not talking deeply in cheek, when he urged independent advice.
Most people think that you can get a second opinion from another state health functionary. It is impossible to do so.
a second opinion has to be obtained from the private sector, which ever hospital group that may be.
The LCD (Lowest common denominator)always applies to state provision of any service, and abortion services are no exception.
In much the same way that “Cosmetic surgery” on the NHS means deliberate “Disfigurement”,
“abortion”, on the same basis, means certain “sterilisation”, which for a girl in her teens or 20s is an awful tragedy, provided by the state.
@Gareth Howell:
Yes, it is very frustrating that women don’t use this forum more avidly to put forward feelings they have on these so important matters.
It is horrendous that women are pushed into not only abortion, as a form of birth control, but, also forced sterilization at any age.
My mother told me that in the sixties for a women to obtain what was essentially an abortion, the procedure was torturous. She knew a women in 1962 who had four children and was pregnant again. She had used what she thought was adequate birth control but it didn’t perform as expected. She was not in a financial position to take care of another child. The partner and father of her children had left for another woman.
However, this person went to her doctor and explained right away. He sent her to be assessed by a psychiatrist, which took two months. It was felt in those times, that a woman had to be of unsound mind not to want another mouth to feed and be a single parent.
They waited until she was in her fifth month with a live baby moving and now part of her. Don’t forget she had approached her GP as soon as she was aware of her condition. The psychiatrist decided, well maybe they would consent to a termination, but first she had to get the father of the child, by now her ex partner, he was fully established in the new relationship with a younger woman, to sign to say he consented to her having surgery to remove the child.
Once she had that consent, she was well into her fifth month and very weak, both mentally and physically. Regardless, she was then told to get this ‘termination’ she would have to consent to sterilization, of which a signature from the ex was also required. This man paid not a cent for the maintenance of their children and did not partake in any contact as the new lady in his life didn’t like him to remain involved.
By this time she had to have full abdominal surgery removing her fallopian tubes, which left her ill for months. He made no attempt to see her or to assist with the four children needing care whilst she was in hospital, or later, once she was out.
It is indeed a difficult situation having to set regulation for such an intimate matter. Who has a right to do that? I don’t know?
Nevertheless, I do know that it is far worse for a woman to wait into 20 or even 24 weeks to take this drastic step. It turns the abortionist’s into monsters as they find it difficult to sleep once they have committed what could be considered murder. It takes a hard heart to do this.
The important part here is, this must not be used as a form of birth control. It is inhuman and uncivilised. The women suffer horribly after it. And often, for the rest of their lives. And often, when they are later found to be barren as a result, the grief is insurmountable for many.
Women must take more responsibility to make sure they take the step to abort before their hormones are fully ready for a full term child, and before the child is more than a mass.
This can be done, and if women were put in a position of having to speed up their decision, it would save them a great deal of heartache. Even if they don’t realise it at the time.
Men, of course, are not ever put in the position of mother, so they will never be able to understand the torture of such a life changing decision. However, they must be ready to accept they too are party to the act of conception. And that they must accept equal responsibility toward the offspring they helped to produce.
Now, if men were to refuse sex when they are not fully sure they are well covered and unable to be fathers, at the time they are in heat, all would change, wouldn’t it?
It all plummets down into
“Men
(except utterly-proven violent-rapists of fecund women)
are not responsible for the human-over-population of planet Earth;
and therefore are not responsible for the over-destruction and extinction of Earth’s Lifesupports’
and therefore no man (except a proven violent-rapist) should be allowed to hold any constitutional or governance power or ‘seat’… ”
(go for your life)
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Baroness Deech,
We will not resolve our differences but since you brought up the US (hard to say we have moved in any particular direction in my view — but set that aside) I will attempt a comment. It is difficult to say women have won this battle. Some women may experience it as an asset to achieving their goals whether it is right or not. Others possibly experience state sponsored abortion services as part of a general going to hell in a hand basket and a nightmare of collapsing civilization.
Lack of preservation of indigenous European populations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility
Destruction of remainder of civilized family life:
http://www.prb.org/Articles/2010/birthsoutsidemarriage.aspx
Health clinics tend to presume consensual sex when it is not the case.
http://www.pathfind.org/pf/pubs/focus/IN%20FOCUS/sexabuseinfocus.html
Decline in basic sensitivity to bodily integrity among those charged with care for the young:
http://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/usermanuals/sexabuse/sexabusec.cfm
The sites I have chosen are “values neutral” but not necessarily more objective than others with more panic in their views…