Friday 16 March 2018

Don't Limit Your Thinking

The prosecution of a German gynaecologist for advertising abortion is a reminder that, far from being eccentric, the abortion laws in the two parts of Ireland are well within the European mainstream. It is the American-style free-for-all bequeathed to Great Britain by Margaret Thatcher that is odd. 

Although there is a longstanding policy of turning a blind eye during the first trimester, abortion is illegal in Europe's most populous country and largest economy. After the first trimester, that law is very much enforced. Countries that manage with a 12-week limit include Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France and Italy. Slovenia has a 10-week limit.

The Czech Republic, with a 12-week limit on abortion, is probably the most secular country in the world. Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark and France, also with 12-week limits, are all less religious than the United Kingdom is. As is Slovenia, with a 10-week limit. 

Moreover, most, if not all, of those countries are also rather less belligerent. Abortion more-or-less on demand is a neoliberal concept, so to speak, and it is thus a feature of the American Empire as surely as it was not a feature of the old American Republic. 

That is why we have it here. It is part and parcel of that which is "neo" in everything that neoconservatives seek, not merely to conserve, but to spread across the whole wide earth by the force of arms.

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