This is going to be a helluva can of worms. God botherers will be out in force.
“Private clinics that charge for pregnancy services including abortions will be able to advertise on television and radio under new rules,” says the BBC.
The new law takes effect in April.
One comment beneath the BBC story says, “Abortion is always a terrible thing whatever your ethical and moral beliefs on the issue.”
And that’s true. I’m not sure about advertising abortion clinics when, say, murderous tobacco can’t be advertised. I’m not comfortable about abortion on demand as a form of contraception. I don’t feel qualified to state an opinion, although such a lack of qualification won’t stop what I expect will be a deluge of protest.
I do believe, however, that abortion should be available on demand when a mother’s life or wellbeing is at stake, where there’s been a rape, even when the baby might suffer a shitty life because of a known serious problem with its brain or limbs. And I believe the Catholic Church should be put publicly in its place when it gets on its high horse about abortion.
I recall one story from Brazil in which anyone who helped a young, frail girl to have an abortion – a young, frail girl who’d been raped by her stepfather and was expecting twins – would be excommunicated, and that meant doctors and her mother. Whatever you think of the damnably silly business of excommunication, it’s a serious thing to devout believers and can ruin their lives.
This little girl might not have survived the birth. Fortunately, the abortion went ahead.
We reported on that in 2009 – rather angrily, as I recall.
But abortion nonetheless is not something that should be taken lightly. And the reason I mention the ads story at all is that it will be the religious element that will bleat the most, as if no one else could put forward a moral case for or against advertising abortion clinics. My reference above shows that religion can’t take the moral high ground in such matters.
Decisions should be taken on medical and social grounds, not because an imagined deity might not like the idea – a deity, it has to be said, that sanctions genocide and other horrors in the Old Testament.
