Misguided Changes to Abortion Advice Services

I am strongly in favour of maintaining legalized abortions in the UK.

There is no doubt in my mind that Government plans to change abortion advice services are the result of lobbying from anti-abortion campaigners. I suspect this stems from the first TV ads by Marie Stopes last year, which received over 1000 complaints to the advertising watchdog. All of the complaints were rejected.

It is completely wrongheaded to imagine that women seek abortion advice because of moral ambiguity. What they want and need is medical information about the procedure and risks, and unbiased counselling about the personal benefits and alternatives. What they do not need is religious doctrine dressed up as personal advice. If I want to know the psychological risks of amputation, then the first person I would ask would be the surgeon and the last person would be the priest. (For that matter the psychiatrist would be pretty far down the list as well.)

Nobody is in any doubt about what happens to a foetus if a woman does or does not terminate a pregnancy. It either dies immediately or will likely be born as a child. This is stark enough not to need dressing up in language purposely designed to stir up even more emotional turmoil than a woman is bound to feel anyway. The mental tricks that anti-abortion fundamentalists try to play on women are little short of psychological abuse.

One aspect of abortion in the UK does concern me. It is the sheer scale of it. When I analysed the figures a few years ago I was astonished, and I have checked and repeated the calculations with the latest information from the Department of Health. They show that abortions are being carried out at the rate of 1.7% of resident women aged 15-44 per year. This is despite the many women who find it difficult to conceive, and the rate is equivalent to an average of 0.5 abortions per woman’s lifetime. Surely that level of unwanted pregnancies must result from poor education, and I certainly would like to see something done to prevent the pregnancies in the first place. Sex education in English state schools is a disgrace. As far as I can tell it barely happens at all and is carried out by the unwilling and untrained. No doubt this stems from prudish attitudes towards sex from centuries of religious Puritanism. I’m sure the irony will not be lost.

Covering Your Router In Aluminium Foil

A friend was given a suggestion by someone from IT to alleviate network connection issues. The suggestion is to wrap their router in "tin foil". When they'd finished laughing, they called me for an opinion. Assuming they meant ordinary aluminium kitchen foil, the suggestion is ludicrous. The best you might hope for is that it doesn't make any difference. If it has any affect it would surely be to act as a Faraday cage, keeping external radiation out and internal radiation in. I decided to test it. I performed six throughput runs alternating between uncovered and loosely covered with a folded sheet of kitchen foil. Each run consisted of three one-minute trials, where TCP upstream and downstream speeds were averaged using TamoSoft Throughput. The server was my development PC upstairs; the client a downstairs laptop two metres from the router. Both were connected on the 5GHz WiFi band. Here are the results. The best you can say for the foil is tha...

BBC Cowering Before Right-Wing Authoritarianism

Gary Lineker is of course right in everything he says about the government's asylum policy. There are two issues. First, should a regular presenter be restricted from political comment outside the confines of their role, in the interests of public broadcast impartiality? The answer is obvious, and you would have thought that the BBC had learnt its lesson when it ended up apologizing for censuring Naga Munchetty for heartfelt comments on Donald Trump's blatant racism, following a public and internal outcry over her treatment. Munchetty's comments were made on a live BBC broadcast. Lineker's comments were off-air on his private social media account. Nobody is in any doubt that the comments are Lineker's rather than the BBC's. Second, how circumspect should anyone be about comparing right wing nationalism with the political ideology of the Nazis? The answer is very. But Lineker has indeed been cautious in his language. I pointed out myself in the lead-up to the...

Boris Johnson is a Pathological Liar

When I was a teenager, our class were caught gambling and the head decided to cane us. He lined us up to ask each child if they were involved. Nobody lied; the idea of dishonesty was much worse than the fear of corporal punishment. Boris Johnson is the exact opposite: a pathological liar; a delinquent who derives psychological satisfaction from the slightest deceit; from getting one over on people. And he covers up any exposed mendacity with further fabrications. He was unanimously found guilty of lying to the Head of State by eleven Supreme Court judges. He was fired from his job as a journalist for a campaign of systematic lies about the EU over a prolonged period and after multiple warnings. He conspired to deceive the nation before the Brexit vote with deliberately misleading financial propaganda, when the Treasury's own forecast for leaving was for significant long-term financial disadvantage. He knowingly lied about the difficulty of getting a Brexit settlement with the EU. W...

Aniseed Balls

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