Sim-O

Nadine Dorries:

I am not a religious fundamentalist !!!!

I’ve heard something like that before. Now, where was it…?

Oh yes, here.

I’m not a Nazi sympathising anti-semite…
…but everyone I read and take as an ‘authority’ on Auschwitz is.

*clarification: I am not calling Nadine a holocaust denier or anything like that, but look at who supported her campaign and who wrote the amendments…

Jenny Percival, The Guardian:

After an impassioned and heated debate, MPs are voting on Edward Leigh’s amendment for a reduction in the abortion time limit to 12 weeks of pregnancy.

As with the other votes, it is a free vote – MPs can vote according to their conscience.

12 weeks: MPs voted resoundingly against Leigh’s amendment by 393 votes to 71, a majority of 322.

16 weeks: Now MPs are voting on Mark Pritchard’s move to cut the 24-week limit to 16 weeks.
Another defeat for the anti-abortion lobby. MPs voted against Pritchard’s amendment by 387 votes to 84, a majority of 303.

20 weeks: MPs are now voting on whether to reduce the limit to 20 weeks, Nadine Dorries’s amendment.
Again rejected, a third defeat for the anti-abortion lobby – this time by 332 votes to 190, a majority of 142.

Disabilities:MPs are now voting on Nick Palmer’s move to force doctors to provide women seeking late abortions with up-to-date information about any disabilities their child may face.
It seems even Palmer’s amendment was unacceptable to the pro-choice lobby. His amendment was rejected by 309 votes to 173, a majority of 136.

22 weeks: The fifth and final abortion amendment is Richard Ottaway’s attempt to reduce the abortion time limit to 22 weeks. MPs are going through the lobbies now.
That’s it. MPs have rejected Ottaway’s amendment by 304 votes to 233, a majority of 71.

The first major Commons debate on abortion in almost 20 years has ended with the status quo.

The anti-abortion lobby has failed to change the law. The abortion time limit remains at 24 weeks.

So, after seven hours of debate, the only substantial changes to the law are new rights for single women and lesbians seeking to have a child through IVF.[my emphasis]

An excellent result I think.

I’m not going to to be able to keep up with the debate whilst blogging it, so I’m just going to pull out various quotes I hear and see from others blogging it.
(Don’t expect anything good, it’s more of an exercise for myself that anything else)

2033: Dawn Primarolo says stick to facts and not anecdotes

2035: Widdecombe asks what is the point of the lethal injection?
[What a fucking stupid question! It’s to kill the fucking feotus! The baby is being aborted, it is alive in the womb.]

2040: Primarolo states many of the reasons and figures i’ve read at MoT with regards to the survivability of the 20/21/22 week feotii(?)

2042: Phil Willis makes the point that the women having an abortion @ 23 weeks are actually showing themselves as many as 2 weeks earlier

2045: Mark Durkan – why the viability limit goes out of window when it comes to feotal defects?
Part of Dawns response is about forcing a woman to carry a baby until it dies in her womb. [Which must be pretty psychologically shitty?]

2108: Widdecombe – figures say backstreet abortions were dropping in the 10 years before the 67 act and carried on dropping at tthe same rate after the act because of education.
[So Annie, what does that tell you…?]

2115: Judy Mallaber brings the idea that dropping time limit may result in more abortions as woman will be panicked into having an abortion

2120: [ooh fuck! I gotta hang the washing out.]

2126: just got back in from putting the washing out and got Evan Harris explaining to Nadine why a baby is killed before it is expelled. [which is pretty obvious to everyone but Nadine].

2129: Nadine – Dr Anand blah Trent study blah bewtween 2002/2005 50% of 22/23 week babies survived. [really?]
“Mary Stopes, their study of GPs, I imagine it’s all GPs” [I bet it’s not]

2138: Dorries on public opinion, public wants 20 weeks.
asserts that Primarolo has been picking and choosing about which lives she wants to save

2140: Primarolo responds with an assertion that Nads argument is selective and and not evidence born.
And now Nads closes by quoting her chum Dr Anand.

2153: Sorry Nick Palmer but I sort of tuned out then.
Richard Ottoway sounds full of sense. For a woman to decide, and doesn’t want the woman condemned to bringing up an unwanted child and doesn’t want the child to be brought up being unwanted.

2203: speakers are repeating themselves and rushing now. The chamber is filling ready for the votes.

2205: Julie Morgan – if you don’t want an abortion, don’t have one.

2207: Oh shut up A N Widdecombe.

I’m signing off to watch it on the news now.

Just because your son lived for 36 hours unaided before the hospital decided to provide support when he was born at 22 weeks, doesn’t mean that every other child born at that age will. He is the exception. There will always be exceptions, but we mustn’t work to them. Take them into account, yes, but not make them the yardstick.

There is another thing to take into account.

You wanted your child. For whatever reason, the people having abortions after 20 weeks, don’t.

A couple of thoughts.

Nadine keeps banging on about when she assisted in an abortion that didn’t go well, twenty or so years ago, the latest retelling in the Telegraph:

as a result of botched abortions such as the one I assisted with, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) issued guidelines to ensure that an abortion never again becomes a live birth.

To avoid this happening, a lethal injection is placed into the baby’s heart through the mother’s abdominal wall via a cannula… [and it’s ‘babys’ ‘ and ‘mothers’ ‘, the apostrophy goes after the s to denote possession, before for abreviation]

Now, for someone so concerned, surely that would be a good thing. You see, all babies that are to be aborted are by definition, live. If they are not it isn’t an abortion it’s a miscarriage.
What would be the better way to go about killing a baby? We stun animals before we kill them to make sure they don’t feel anything, so why not kill the baby quickly?
I’d put money on the amount of live-born abortions (failed abortions?) dropped rapidly after the introduction of the potassium injection.

This debate started with the conversation centreing around when a baby becomes a baby proper, rather than a collection of cells that look like they might turn into a baby. The first I remember of it was when Nadine accused Ben Goldacre of leaking confidential information from the government somehow.

All the talk was when the feotus began to feel pain or show a response to external stimuli, with the flagrant Nadine quoting and arselicking her new best friend, Prof Sunny Anand.
Now it has been diverted to the more emotive area of viability of the baby if it was to have been born, with examples of 22 and 20 week old babies surviving.
This I think is misleading. These babies are the exception, not the rule. They are either incredibly strong or are given the very best care available. Just because it looks like a little person, doesn’t mean it will be able to live outside of the womb.
There are many more babies that are born at that age that die, than survive. The date limit for the abortion should be the worked from the national average, not the figure plucked from the Guiness Book of Records, which is what it looks like Nadine and her gang are trying to do.

Extracts from an interview in the Guardian with Nadine Dorries MP that help to show her attitudes and the way she has approached this whole abortion debate:

When I ask what result she is expecting, she forcefully replies: “a win. Well over 200 MPs are supporting it.” Most significantly, David Cameron is among them.

Because Dave is such an expert on all things feotus.

» Read the rest of this entry «

Either it’s market rate or it’s not. If it’s reduced, then it’s not market rate, otherwise it’d just be market rate.
The market rate is a range, so shouldn’t it be ‘lower end of the market rate’.

Politicians, eh? Don’t know their arse from their elbow.

ei:

It has been a week of adulation from world leaders, ostentatious displays of military prowess, and street parties. Heads of state have rubbed shoulders with celebrities to pay homage to the Jewish state on its 60th birthday, while a million Israelis reportedly headed off to the country’s forests to enjoy the national pastime: a barbecue.

But this year’s Independence Day festivities have concealed as much as they have revealed. The images of joy and celebration seen by the world have failed to acknowledge the reality of a deeply divided Israel, shared by two peoples with conflicting memories and claims to the land.

They have also served to shield from view the fact that the Palestinians’ dispossession is continuing in both the occupied territories and inside Israel itself. Far from being a historical event, Israel’s “independence” — and the ever greater toll it is inflicting on the Palestinian people — is very much a live issue.

Away from the cameras, a fifth of the Israeli population — more than one million Palestinian citizens — remembered the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948 that befell the Palestinian people as the Jewish state was built on the ruins of their society.

As it has been doing for the past decade, Israel’s Palestinian minority staged an alternative act of commemoration: a procession of families, many of them refugees from the 1948 war, to one of more than 400 Palestinian villages erased by Israel in a monumental act of state vandalism after the fighting. The villages were destroyed to ensure that the 750,000 Palestinians expelled from the state under the cover of war never return.

But in a sign of how far Israel still is from coming to terms with the circumstances of its birth, this year’s march was forcibly broken up by the Israeli police. They clubbed unarmed demonstrators with batons and fired tear gas and stun grenades into crowds of families that included young children.

Read the rest

Not sure why the UK libel law needs changing? Well, it’s not just about bloggers.
This article may be a good place to start you off:

Arnold Schwarzenegger started the trend in [libel tourism in] 1990 flying in from Los Angeles to sue Wendy Leigh, a Florida-based American author, for an unauthorised biography to which he took exeption. A stream of celebrities followed, suing for slights that are not actionable in the US.

The low point came when Roman Polanki, the Polish film director, sued the US magazine Vanity Fair. To their undying shame the courts in London bent to accommodate this fugitive from US justice and allowed him to give evidence by video link from Paris — there being no extradition treaty with the US.

After the celebrities came a slew of Russian oligarchs followed, after 9/11, by a camel train of Gulf billionaires.
…
by accepting jurisdiction to hear the cases of libel tourists, we have to accept that the courts of other jurisdictions from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe will want to follow suit and accept jurisdiction on libel claims in relation to matters where there is little or no circulation or connection to the jurisdiction.

Those countries will judge our journalists according to their own standards. We have seen the internet availability of articles drag The Guardian to Zimbabwe, other English newspapers have seen their journalists criminalised for their writings in countries with criminal libel laws; Tesco is suing three individuals in Thailand for £17 million. And that in a country, with a touch of Dickens, which still has debtors’ jail. The courts of Indonesia have recently fined Time magazine £50 million, provoking widespread outrage at the amount of the award. We have a cap on damages of £200,000 and they must be proportionate to the means of the defendant.

Books are already being cancelled by publishers because the economics of publishing are such that they cannot sustain the costs of a libel action. Cambridge University Press recently pulped a book on the mere threat of suit.

Most worrying of all is the latest trend for foreigners to drag NGOs into our libel courts over their reports. Typically an NGO will publish as responsibly as it can a detailed piece of research on an area of controversy or difficulty. Foreign politicians, businessmen and companies now seek to drag foreign NGOs to our courts to try to gain a victory against an indigent opponent. NGOs reporting abuses of the environment, human rights, corruption, torture and so forth are forced to dissipate their resources defending claims brought by the rich and powerful.

Chicken Yoghurt:

Blogger Guido Fawkes was sentenced to a three month curfew order this afternoon. Appearing at Tower Bridge Magistrates Court the blogger, real name Paul Staines, was told the curfew would operate between the hours of 9pm and 6am. Staines, 41, will also have to wear an electronic tag.

The judge also handed down an 18-month supervision order and a three year driving ban. Staines will be required to retake his driving test when the driving ban has elapsed. He was also order to pay the prosecution’s £60 costs

(additional reporting by Tim Ireland)

Heh.