In which Logan rants about Americans
Public
Not all of them, I hasten to add! Just a particular group of Americans, in particular politicians, as I shall explain.
Although I make political posts quite a bit, I very rarely comment on the issue of abortion. Reasons? Well, first and foremost, as a man, I'll never have to take that decision myself. I can't feel it in the intensely personal way a woman can. Secondarily, here in Great Britain,1 abortion is not a particularly politicised issue most of the time. Abortion is available on the NHS, the public broadly supports its legality (by 57:19 among women in the most recent poll I can find, from 2009) and we don't, thank Frith, have people killed for going to abortion clinics.
But... into the US Congress has been introduced H.R. 3: No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act. This contains, among more conventional idiocies, section 309 (1), which is an exemption allowing taxpayer funding:
if the pregnancy occurred because the pregnant female was the subject of an act of forcible rape or, if a minor, an act of incest
Every so often, you read something and want to write about it, and your brain simply refuses to work. It can't cope with what it's seeing. This is one of those times. "If a minor" for one thing, and then there's "forcible rape". You can almost see the "traditional values" bit hanging in the air there. You know, that happy time when girls (never women, of course) were "asking for it", when saying no was "just playing hard to get", when society's moral fibre was enriched by desperate women bleeding to death in agony in filthy back streets. (Hence the term "pro-life". Obvious, surely.)
I'm a British man. And I am, as my mood setting says, enraged. Frith knows what I'd be feeling right now were I an American woman.
1A surprising number of people in Great Britain don't realise this, but the Abortion Act 1967 does not apply to Northern Ireland. Women there have to travel to GB to get a legal abortion. It's just typical that one of the few things most Unionist and Republican politicians in NI agree on is not to bring the law there in line with England, Wales and Scotland.
Not all of them, I hasten to add! Just a particular group of Americans, in particular politicians, as I shall explain.
Although I make political posts quite a bit, I very rarely comment on the issue of abortion. Reasons? Well, first and foremost, as a man, I'll never have to take that decision myself. I can't feel it in the intensely personal way a woman can. Secondarily, here in Great Britain,1 abortion is not a particularly politicised issue most of the time. Abortion is available on the NHS, the public broadly supports its legality (by 57:19 among women in the most recent poll I can find, from 2009) and we don't, thank Frith, have people killed for going to abortion clinics.
But... into the US Congress has been introduced H.R. 3: No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act. This contains, among more conventional idiocies, section 309 (1), which is an exemption allowing taxpayer funding:
if the pregnancy occurred because the pregnant female was the subject of an act of forcible rape or, if a minor, an act of incest
Every so often, you read something and want to write about it, and your brain simply refuses to work. It can't cope with what it's seeing. This is one of those times. "If a minor" for one thing, and then there's "forcible rape". You can almost see the "traditional values" bit hanging in the air there. You know, that happy time when girls (never women, of course) were "asking for it", when saying no was "just playing hard to get", when society's moral fibre was enriched by desperate women bleeding to death in agony in filthy back streets. (Hence the term "pro-life". Obvious, surely.)
I'm a British man. And I am, as my mood setting says, enraged. Frith knows what I'd be feeling right now were I an American woman.
1A surprising number of people in Great Britain don't realise this, but the Abortion Act 1967 does not apply to Northern Ireland. Women there have to travel to GB to get a legal abortion. It's just typical that one of the few things most Unionist and Republican politicians in NI agree on is not to bring the law there in line with England, Wales and Scotland.