A stupid fucking moron
I haven't been writing much recently. There are no big reasons, I just haven't had enough energy to write the long thought out posts I've planned, and no inspiration to write short posts reacting to events. Luckily the lack of inspiration ended when I read the paper today. New Zealand has a public health system, and there's been some controversy recently about waiting lists. Bill Lambert has an interesting solution:
Since 1977, when the current abortion laws were passed, the number of state-funded, certified abortions can be conservatively estimated at more than 400,000, resulting in our negative birth rate. The actual cost to the health system can be estimated at more than $250 million.Ok can anyone pick out the rather
The New Zealand health system pays for abortions, it also pays for all pre-natal care and any costs of child-birth (and education, and health care for children and so on, but we'll leave them for now). If a pregnant woman doesn't have an abortion then she will give birth (a fact I think you could only ever have to point out to a man). Abortion would never cost the state more than bringing the pregnant to term you stupid fucking moron.
To make it worse he voted for the Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion Act, and I have a lifelong vendetta against every single one of the men who did that. When I'm old I'm going to spend summer touring the country dancing on their gravees.
Help out an American reader: what was the Contraception, Sterilisation, and Abortion Act?
ReplyDeleteIt's a law that was written to restrict abortion access to women whose mental health would not permit them to have a child safely. In practice, abortion is freely available, you just need two doctors to say you can have one. (Maia, please smack me down if I'm wrong about this one - I don't have time to check my facts this morning.)
ReplyDeleteI read Mr Lambert's letter to the Dominion Post too, and what pissed me off the most was his assertion that women having abortions was "selfish" because it kept the birthrate down. That made me absolutely furious. You really can't win if you're a woman, can you? "They" don't want you to have an abortion, but "they" don't want you to be a single mother on the DPB either (another action routinely condemned as "selfish" by the likes of Lambert and his friends). You're selfish if you have a baby, you're selfish if you don't - it just indicates how incredibly misogynist our society really is. Everything a woman does is apparently selfish - and there are some blokes out there who think women should shut their mouths and remember their places as baby-making machines - but only when the almighty patriarchy deems it acceptable.
Wellll... it wasn't an ideal Act by any means, but that mental health provision was the way pro-choice medical professionals could 'get around' the restrictions. It's not like it was easy to get an abortion before that Act was passed, was it?
ReplyDeleteIf contraception were free the abortion rate would be cut back drastically, but blokes like this one often have a problem with contraception, as well as abortion. Daft.
ReplyDeleteDanielle - actually it was much easier to get an abortion in the two years before the passage of the CS&A than after. In 1974 the Auckland Medical Aid Centre opened, and they provided abortion pretty much on demand. It's not overstating it to much to say that the point of the CS&A Act was to close that particular clinic (they didn't succeed)
ReplyDeleteMaps I think drastically is overstating it quite a lot. 50% of abortions are from women who were using contraception. There is no reason to believe that price is the main reason for everyone who isn't using contraception, although it's obviously a factor.
Generally I dislike those sorts of arguments, because I think they buy into 'well of course abortion is bad, but it's unavoidable' mentality which pisses me off.
Of course I am completely in favour of abortion being free and legal. I just think it must be a lot easier not to have to have one. Of course, the best-laid plans of mice and men...
ReplyDeleteWhether or not it's much easier to have an abortion than use contraception depends on how easy contraception is to use.
ReplyDeleteThis is true on both a societal level, the development of abortion and contraception hasn't always been parallel. And an individual level - some people have really bad side effects from the pill and I have a friend whose allergic to condoms.
For many women it's easier not to get pregnant than to have an abortion, but it's not a blanket statement.
Heaps of guys are "allergic" to condoms too..
ReplyDeleteBut more seriously - I wonder if she is allergic to the spermacide on them? that seems like the sort of thing people would be prone to being allergic to.
Latex allergies are incredibly common. As for spermicide, a lot of people have bad reactions to nonoxynol-9 (yeast infections, urinary tract infections etc). I think it's probably on the way out -- it used to be touted as this miracle cure for everything and an HIV preventative, but now it's recognized that it can actually put people at higher risk for contracting HIV. People with spermicide allergies should use non-spermicide condoms, which are usually available everywhere.
ReplyDelete*former safe-sex educator hat off*
Maps, it's my understanding that while "prevention first" always sounds like a good strategy, it doesn't solve the abortion rights issue for some women who simply do not have the agency to negotiate condom use with partners, and are now in control of decisions made about their bodies.
Of *course* everyone likes prevention, but it will never replace the need for abortions.
"A bit easier, for some switched-on women, in Auckland, from 1974 to 1976" is not exactly a ringing endorsement. Most doctors wouldn't even prescribe contraception for unmarried women until the early 1970s - there was an underground movement to find the 'right' doctors for the better part of a decade. I very much doubt that there was an early 70s abortion free-for-all throughout a newly feminist-awakened New Zealand and the CSA Act ruined everything. The mental health provision was a nice 'out', particularly as people increasingly paid it lip-service over the following decades. Unintended good consequences for us!
ReplyDeleteIt would be an entirely different kettle of fish if the oh so pure perfect male were to get pregnant now wouldn't it. It's a woman's body and hers to decide what goes in it on it etc, a foetus is a foreign object, its just that we're made to nurture it, but it's our right to reject it, if we so choose, morally or not. Men have no say in this at all, they just try to lord it over women because they haven't got the power to make life grow in their own bodies and give birth to it, that makes a woman far superior to them, so that's why they are under the illusion that they are in charge, so in reality its like having large children around who are jealous of what the kid next doors got and they wont ever get. So they try to tell us what we can and what we can't do with our own bodies, but as we can see it simply isn't working for them, so the dudes that say women are selfish no matter what they do, well you just have to feel sorry for them and their total inadequency. I have much more I could say but it would all mean the same thing, men are inferior whining tantrum throwing morons, who deserve our pity and our patronizing of them, poor didums.
ReplyDeleteNic