Jul 23 2007
Author: Graham Joyce
ISBN: 0575072318 DDC: 823.914
See also: LibraryThing ; Agony column ; Joyce discusses his book ;
If I could tell you this in a single sitting then you might believe all of it, even the strangest part.
May 01 2007
You all know that I don’t agree with people who see things in black and white. I’m more of a “but what about that shade of grey” over there. And of course I like taking the opposite side, for no good reason. But in the case of Miss D I’m going to say that this is a black and white issue, and that this teenager should be allowed to travel for her abortion. There is no possible way that anyone can persuade me otherwise.
The girl is in the care of the HSE and is challenging its decision to contact gardaà and not to let her travel for the abortion unless she presented as a suicide risk…
She found out a week ago that her baby has a condition called anencephaly, which means the baby’s brain is not developing properly.The condition means the child will live a very short time, if at all, after it is born.
I’m not pro-abortion. But I’m not anti it either. In general I think it is a hugely grey issue. Which was one of the reasons I started to dislike Michael Moore’s book. He continually seemed to suggest that being anti-abortion was “teh evil” and that annoys my shite. No explanation or development of what he considered abortion to mean. I mean to some people the morning after pill is abortion, to others late term partial birth type things are abortion. It is as far from a black and white issue as it is possible to get.
Cases like this one however are not so complicated. Not if you use sense. Of course, we won’t be using sense to deal with it. We’ll be using the law. Which rarely makes sense.
ETASee also:
And it strikes me that this really does show how the private and the public/politic are not separate.
Tags: abortion, Ireland, Miss DFeb 08 2006
There is currently a debate on abortion doing the rounds of the Irish blogosphere, but I don’t intend to get involved.
Mainly because I’m living up to my nickname and sitting on the fence. I don’t believe either side is right, but then again I don’t believe either side is wrong either. Perhaps in methods though, I’m very much against killing to show how precious life is.
But it strikes me that there are certain issues that simply cannot ever be dealt with. I mean if you see abortion as murder then what on earth would persuade you that murder was right? But then there is the issue of when exactly a foetus becomes a person. 12 weeks? implantation. How about when it is 4 cells? It has the potential to be a person but is it a real person? What about the morning after pill? Or condoms, after all they prevent the potential fertilisation don’t they? Hell, even abstaining from sex[1] could be seen as murder, as you are preventing the possible fertilisation and so the potential human being.
So there are these issues that are so divisive that both sides believe themselves to be totally in the right. And both sides feel so strongly that they must persuade the other side how wrong they are. How exactly does a society deal with a problem like that? I know the Irish solution. Pick one side to support, but make sure that the other side has an option, like going to England for example 
But it isn’t just abortion. Think of religion[2] and how that can split people. I mean if you believe that god wants you to convert others, that it is the only way to ensure your own salvation, and the salvation of all peoples. Well, if you believed that, then it’d be terrible if you didn’t spread the word. So you travel the world, spreading disease and imposing your values on others, simply because you are firmly convinced that what you are doing is the right thing to do, both for your own sake and for the sake of others.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this post. Maybe just to say that compromise isn’t always an option.
And of course there is the problem of the people in the middle, who don’t believe strongly in either option as the one true path. You could say that we are just hedging out bets, but would it be better if people who were in the middle were persuaded, so that all we had were two vast opposing ideologies?
I was going to say something about capitalism vs communism, but that is getting into really dangerous ground so I won’t, apart from the fact that both are evil, if taken to extremes. And neither works, not without somesort of a balance. Actually I don’t know if socialism would ever really work, not on a large scale anyways.
Okay, shutting up now. I’ll distract you all by posting….. PUPPIES:
