Rampant Anomie

I don't believe in posting idle chit-chat of no substance, even though you might fairly observe that this is a good description of most of my output to date. In the interests of accuracy then, I'll just say that I don't believe in posting unless I can paint my subjective witterings with a sheen of structure and an impression of importance.

This is a brief apology to my regular readers for my meagre output of late, particularly Mark who likes the sci-fi. I've been busy, sore, lazy and evasive, in that order.

I've also been tempted by the Dark Side in the form of Helium.com. This US website publishes adequately written articles on various subjects or debates, involves contributors in a peer rating system and pays out if you do well. I've submitted nine pieces over the last fortnight, all of which have been rated #1 at some point, and my earnings just exceeded $0.20. I've worked out that if I can pump out 500 decent articles (about 300,000 well chosen words) per day indefinitely, I could make a living from this.

Helium must be the most pious and self-satisfied blog site out there, so much so that it denies even being a blog site. Still, it gives me an excuse to snipe at American cultural hubris. I only hope I haven't made it onto an NSA database as that could put a crimp in our trip to California next month.

I wanted to get back into fiction today, but my new drug regime made this challenging. I've been combining declufenac and cocodamol for 16 months; my body's so used to them that I'm getting all of the side effects and not much benefit. My new plan is to take a hefty muscle-relaxant at night to ensure a proper rest and then get by on paracetamol and machismo during the day.

My new pill, Amitriptyline, does make you comfortably numb but isn't to be recommended if you want to function well enough to drive a car, write a story or speak to anyone before 5pm the next day. I could however manage a splenetic rant of middling quality as a probable farewell to Helium. I also managed a very groggy pilates session before lunch, after which I was lulled into a long doze by the soothing tones of the Antiques Roadshow team. I was hoping my GP would prescribe me Vicodin so that I could model myself on Dr House, but sadly I don't get on very well with opiates; hospital morphine just made me paranoid, sweaty and loud (even more so than usual).

Sorry, this was supposed to be a short note. Thanks for tuning in and normal service will be resumed. Eventually.

A society in which a woman has no right to choose abortion would be a morally stunted one, fit to take its place with those patriarchal, medievalist theocracies where women remain the chattels of men and bigotry is law.

As a devoutly secular Brit, I resent and reject the assumption that faith and morality are synonymous. I therefore believe that the pro-choice position is not a loosening of morals; it is rather a moral position founded in human reality rather than unthinking religious dogma.

Human fertility is a gift, a gift that by fluke of biology some decent people of my acquaintance were denied. Yet my day job has brought me into contact with the worst society has to offer, third generation drunks, thieves, robbers and junkies, most of whom are amazingly fertile. Conceived with all the care and thought that would go into a sneeze, I met many screaming infants who, to paraphrase Dickens, would have screamed all the louder had they known what life had in store for them. Most of these tots were doomed to follow their parents into lives of misery, crime, social alienation and early deaths. Mysterious ways indeed.

I’m not for a second suggesting termination on the basis of a parent’s social status. I do however believe that quality of life matters more than life alone. If a young woman without the means or desire to raise a child sought an abortion at an early stage, which is better for the woman and her society? An unwanted child that might have a miserable life while ruining hers and making both a burden to society; or the termination of a being that is certainly alive but a long way from being a sentient human.

The debate on how and where human life begins is a tangled one, and even within the pro-life movement there are those who favour early term abortions. Yet organised religion has always found it easy to sand the rough edges off difficult moral questions and the view that a human life is created at the point of conception still holds sway for millions.

Unflinching devotion to dogma so often leads to great cruelty. The Catholic Church hasn’t been persuaded to deviate from its pro-life prohibition of contraception by the deaths of tens of millions of Africans from HIV. Can it really be the case that those who fail to practice abstinence deserve agonising death? Does a 21st century pontiff really still believe that we should be controlled by our fertility and not vice versa, however appalling the cost? Would those sufficiently devoted to this principle to target abortion clinics accept that they’re placing more value on the life of a Western foetus than on an adult HIV-sufferer in South Africa?

Curtailing the right to abortion wouldn’t prevent unwanted pregnancies and enforce sexual abstinence any more than prohibition slaked the USA’s thirst for liquor. A society can’t be that easily reshaped by a minority whose views are so at odds with the views and inclinations of the majority. Yet this minority would doubtless be happy to see young women bear the burden of their principles, either by gambling with their lives in backstreet clinics, languishing in jails for the sin of being human, or giving up their aspirations for an unwanted child, regardless of whether the child is severely disabled or the product of rape.

Why does the pro-life cause entail such tunnel-vision? Artificial termination is not without a natural precedent: Miscarriages occur when the body makes its own brutal decision that a foetus isn’t viable. Is that life more or less sacred for the lack of human choice? Should it be seen as God’s will and therefore beyond question? If human life is so sacred, what of pro-lifers who serve in the armed forces, own guns or drive cars? They are after all gambling with their own lives and the lives of others.

Shouldn’t pro-lifers spend a bit more time protesting outside army bases, munitions factories or the Vatican? It is telling that their supposed concern for human life doesn’t extend beyond spitting biblical venom at desperate young women and the medical practitioners who brave harassment and violence to help them.