Posts by B Jones
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to Hilary Stace,
These parents must have some challenges getting a doctor to agree to that, since there are enough ethical issues with selecting for sex, or other traits considered harmless or avoiding harm.
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to Moz,
One logical outcome of the overpopulation therefore abortion should be allowed is that it implies if underpopulation, then abortion should not be allowed. Which is a version of why it was prohibited in the first place: race suicide was a live political concept in the early 20th C driving all sorts of weird policies.
The other problem is that people tend to resent being told there should be fewer of them, and don't vote for you if you say it. Someone's done a parody Russell Norman twitter account saying exactly that, which should give you a sense of its electoral appeal.
A better version might be: people are happier and live longer better lives when they can control their family size.
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Well, now there's this: Sexual violence campaign launched, and it doesn't seem to say anything about carrying a whistle wherever you go, or learning self-defence, or not leaving your drink unattended. Bit bemused about the comment on lyrics about crack, though.
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to Moz,
To me, one argument for absolutely unconditional access to contraception and abortion is that we have rather a surfiet of humans and anything that allows people to choose not to reproduce should be encouraged.
Yes, but that's also an argument for genocide, which makes it a less useful argument for just about anything else.
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Anyway, that's a digression that's uncovered some surprising, to me, points of view. I had thought people react to abortion and disability because abortion. It seems to be bigger than that.
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to Sacha,
We don't like salmonella, and we use controls on the food supply to avoid that. Supplementation with vitamins has a century long history, which is why we don't see a lot of rickets and goitre these days.
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There are some troubling destinations down that particular road of logic, that's for sure.
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Another public health argument is that interventions should even out inequalities rather than entrench them.
Education campaigns imply knowledge gaps; universal provision implies access gaps. See fluoride.
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To throw a counterfactual out there: do the issues raised about disability apply equally to abortion as they do to interventions like folic acid supplements that reduce neural tube problems without terminating pregnancies? If so, it's about how we feel about disability in society; if not, then it's more about how we feel about abortion.
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Word.
There's a long and messy history of women's bodily autonomy being considered less important than some greater good. Once upon a time that greater good was racial hygiene. It was a rubbish tool for achieving eugenics, and it's a rubbish tool for dismantling eugenics as well.