Tim Worstall

Over at LibCon.
The second Abortion Support Network ‘Pro Choice Happy Hour’ will be:
Monday 1 March
7-10 pm
Yes, I know, they’re having a booze up to raise money for Irish women who come over to have abortions.
Yes, I know, I’m very out of step on this subject.
But really, “happy” and “abortion” are simply two words that don’t [...]

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If proof were needed that there is something seriously wrong with both our moral values and sex education system, it comes with the new that of the 195,000 abortions performed in this country last year, more than one third were repeats.
No, not even our beloved NHS is that bad and incompetent at hoicking babies out [...]

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Anti-abortion activists were reinvigorated ahead of the opening of the healthcare legislation debate in the Senate today by their success in garnering support in the House of Representatives over an issue that was widely regarded as having lost its political potency with the election of a pro-choice president.
At the core of the strategy by the [...]

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Some 12,000 abortions a year were performed legally, to prevent the woman from ‘being a mental and physical wreck’.
But the great majority were not, leading each year to some 70 or more registered deaths from criminal-abortions.
That’s from David Kynaston’s latest book from the Mass Observation archives…..a pretty reliable source.

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Guardian headline:
Unsafe abortions kill 70,000 a year
And in the article:
There were 41.6m terminations worldwide in 2003
The facts we might take away from this being that unsafe abortions kill 70,000 a year and safe abortions kill 41,600,000 a year.
Update: thinking a little more about this. The unsafe abortions will of course have killed 140,000, the safe [...]

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Fascinating numbers here.
Proof yet again of the economist’s saw that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.
The subject here is the always contentious one of abortion…..and Down’s and testing for it. The tests themselves, specifically amniocentesis to confirm the diagnosis, carries a risk of causing miscarriage.

A total of 366,000 women in England had one of the [...]

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A chance gathering in my kitchen: three people. My wife, who has some gypsy blood. Eddie. A friend who is Jewish. And the realisation that, under Hitler, all three would have been bound for the ovens. Down’s syndrome, any more than Jewishness or gipsyhood, is not something that needs to be wiped out for the [...]

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You know, I’m pretty sure this story is wrong for two reasons:

While abortion is only legal in the first 24 weeks of pregnancy if carried out on social grounds, "Ground E" of the 1967 Abortion Act makes it legal to abort a foetus which has a serious risk of physical or mental abnormality, right up [...]

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Scary scary cloning:

It’s easy to say that this represents the commoditisation of human life. That’s true. But there’s something both more sinister and more simple that’s emerging. We’re so accustomed to being consumers in every other area of our lives that we’re becoming consumers of human life itself, looking for ways in which we can [...]

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This really only confirms something that was less widely known already.

Two healthy babies are miscarried for every three Down’s Syndrome babies that are detected and prevented from being born, research has suggested.

The tests themselves carry a risk of causing a miscarriage. But given that the vast majority of those having the tests are not carrying [...]

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The sub heading:

Abortions do not harm the mental health of women, an authoritative study has found.

That’s not actually what was found. There were some rather important caveats.
The American Psychological Association (APA), said it had uncovered no evidence that the majority of terminations caused psychiatric problems.
"The majority" is of course not all.

Brenda Major, who chaired the [...]

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Mary Warnock:
If we agree that abortion after 22 weeks must now be regarded as infanticide, then the answer must be ‘yes’. It must be in the public interest to prevent the killing of babies. A society which permitted it would simply be inhumane and uncivilised, not a society in which we would choose to [...]

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Department of Health figures uncovered by this newspaper show that during 2006 more than 3,800 women underwent at least their fourth abortion, including more than 1,300 who were on their fifth or more. Of more than 60,000 women who underwent a "repeat" abortion, almost 15,000 were [...]

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Last time there was a move in the Commons to make abortion law more restrictive, it actually become looser. Yes, the limit was lowered from 28 weeks to 24 weeks, but an exception was made for either deformity to the child of danger to the mother. In those cases abortion could happen up to full [...]

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As ever when the subject is abortion. Polly:

Never mind that the whole notion of viability has no rational connection to any limit on the date for abortions: from the moment of conception every zygote is potentially viable.

Quite, therefore it’s wrong to stop it moving from potentially viable to it being viable.

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Yes, I know my views on this matter (explained often enough passim) are well out of step with most other peoples’ but if viability is the guide, if someone is not human if they cannot live outside the womb and is if they can, well, this seems a pretty strong argument:

The data, for births in [...]

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It is surely no coincidence that these films are emerging from a country that has had eight years of ultra-conservative Republican rule. A report last week showed that abortions in the US have fallen by 25% since 1990, and 2006 saw the largest number of children born for 45 years – but the teenage birth [...]

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Women who have had an abortion or miscarriage are more likely to give birth to premature or underweight babies, according to research.

I know it’s only the newspaper report, not the paper, but I wonder whether they controlled for social class (or wealth if you prefer). Way back when (this is 50s and 60s information being [...]

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Quite:

In so far as ethics should determine a time limit on abortion, the relevant question is at what stage, if at all, a foetus should be regarded as a person,

At what point does a person, a person whose right to life should be protected, created? That is, absolutely, the nub of the entire argument. Until [...]

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Talking about abortion:

Mammaries are the favourite target of all religions, not mammon.

?? What do tits have to do with it? Ovaries, gonads, uteri, perhaps, but mammaries?
As to the larger debate going on over abortion I think she doth protest too much. Much too much. For we can see what’s going to happen here, as in [...]

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