Abortion, crocodile tears, sport (!), nominative determinism and kindness

8 May 2022

Taking a life, or saving one.  This seems to be the basic argument over abortion, and which life is being saved and which sacrificed.  Whether to ‘kill’ a foetus or to allow the mother to live as she would wish to have lived.

In America, a federal judgement in 1973, Roe v Wade, established the constitutional right to abortion in American law and a 1992 judgement reinforced it.  Now a leak appears to show that, back in February, the US Supreme Court drafted a new majority opinion that this right should be removed.  However, it is just a draft and the leak is unofficial, it could change and may never become law, so let’s hope. 

I can understand that people have different beliefs about when ‘life’ is deemed to start and believe that, after that point, abortion could be seen as ‘killing’ an unborn child.  One of the criteria seems to be when a foetal heartbeat can be detected, even if the brain is undeveloped and any cognitive powers are extremely limited, with no more ‘consciousness’ than simple reflexes.  (Even plants also have reflex actions …)

At the other end of life, it’s known that consciousness can continue after the heart has stopped beating so taking the appearance of a heartbeat seems over-simplistic.

What I find more difficult to understand is why people believe they have the right to impose their belief systems on others.  There’s a difference between deciding how your god wants you to live and becoming a god yourself and telling others how they should live.

Even setting aside the uncertainty about when life starts, overturning Roe v Wade will effectively impose the personal beliefs of a few on the millions of others whose beliefs are different.  America, land of the free?  Sounds more like a large step towards a narrow-minded dictatorship deciding what everyone else must believe.

If the unofficial draft isn’t changed substantially, it’s thought at least 26 states (more than half the ‘Union’) would probably ban abortion and Louisianan Republicans are already drafting a bill that would treat abortion as murder. 

I wonder how many of those who believe that abortion is murder support the death penalty, which is also murder?  How do they reconcile these two diametrically opposing beliefs?

The whole thing is, of course, 100% anthropocentric and I haven’t yet heard of any moves to ban astrakhan, made from the glossy, curly coats of newborn lambs, or the coats of unborn lambs which are even more prized, having a wavy texture and a luminous sheen, so the unborn lamb is aborted and their coat is removed.

The withdrawal of the right to human abortion also fails to consider the freedom of individuals to correct mistakes.  At one end of the scale, consider a drunken night or faulty or missing contraception that leads to an unplanned pregnancy.  Shouldn’t people have the right to choose to have a child or an abortion?

I know two people who became pregnant by mistake while they were in a relationship and chose to keep the child but not the father.  Life for single parents is tough, but it was what they wanted to do.  I also know somebody else who had a backstreet abortion in the 1960s, before abortion was legal in the UK, and suffered considerable pain while having to carry on as if everything was OK (though she didn’t know who the father was).

At the other end of the scale, what about someone who becomes pregnant after being raped?  I can’t begin to imagine living in the knowledge that you are growing a rapist’s child inside you and, every time you feel it move, it must remind you of when you were raped and the horror you felt at the time and every day since.  Then the child will be born with the rapist’s genes combined with those of the victim.  I wonder how suicide rates will be affected among women who have been made pregnant by a rapist and are denied an abortion.

(Perhaps rapists should be given a total penectomy.  Free.  Much cheaper than sending them to prison.)

Nobody is suggesting that abortion should be mandatory, it’s just that most people want women to be free to choose what’s best for them, whatever the circumstances of the conception.

If abortion is made illegal, the practical implications are frightening and will lead to all sorts of problems in American healthcare, from contraception, obstetrics and abortion care to the dangers of backstreet abortions and self-service attempts.  Abortions can be safely induced by drugs in the early stages of pregnancy or by vacuum aspirators, and both have the advantage that, if they go wrong, the symptoms are indistinguishable from a miscarriage, but this introduces legal difficulties for the medical profession if the patient admits responsibility.

The other option is to travel to a state where abortion is still legal and have it carried out there but this is expensive, time-consuming and potentially life-disrupting if you have other children.  And out of the question for those who can’t afford it.

Most rapists are men and their victims are usually women, and many men think rape is a sex crime rather than a crime of extreme violence.

Now look at who makes the decision about whether abortion should be legal:  they’re mostly men.  

One recent appointment is even demonstrably unstable and a nasty piece of work:  in a 40-minute statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2018 when he was auditioning for a place on the bench of the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh had to choke back tears when he got to the bit about how the accusations of sexual assault and misconduct could impact on his interest in teaching and coaching and, much more importantly, his chance of being ‘elected’ to the Bench.  Sod the women he allegedly assaulted.

This in a country that only recently got rid of a president who thought it was OK to grab women’s genitals but was actually just voicing the thoughts of misogynists everywhere.  This obviously disgusts most men but it’s safer to exclude them all to make sure those making the decision cannot be perceived as having a personal conflict of interest.   So only women should be allowed to make the decision whether to criminalise abortion;  and then only women who can set aside their personal political and religious beliefs for long enough to judge what is best for women of all political and religious beliefs?

I’m also worrying about the exclusion of Russian sports people from international tournaments.  Of course ‘the west’ wants Putin to hurt while he’s taking a page from Hitler’s book and occupying a foreign country, massacring its people, including children, and burying them in unmarked mass graves, so they’ve imposed economic and financial sanctions on Russia.  This is, I suppose, fair enough if they want to be able to make concessions by lifting them to negotiate a peaceful independence for Ukraine, leaving Putin with some self-respect.

But not all Russians support Putin’s war and many have abandoned their homeland or are demonstrating against the war.  Banning their sports(wo)men from international sports seems to assume they’re all Putin supporters.  Wouldn’t it be better to assume that they’re just sports(wo)men, some of them extremely talented, who are not necessarily Putin supporters, and let them give enjoyment to people who watch them play?

And let’s remember some of the good news:  a rather fine example of nominative determinism appeared in the latest round of government investments which included supporting a company converting hemp into cannabidiol products, founded by two brothers, Ben and Tom Grass.

But the best news for us followed the recent theft of a Ukrainian flag we’ve had pinned to our fence.   I put up a notice saying it had been stolen and, if the thief was so poor they couldn’t afford £3.99 for a flag of their own, they should call in and I’d give them £4 to buy one of their own.  Then, on Friday, somebody I didn’t know knocked on our door and presented us with a brand-new replacement flag, explaining he wasn’t the thief but he wanted to support our effort.

We now have a new notice up, next to the new flag, explaining what happened and saying thank you, and that the world needs more such acts of kindness.

Tennis, Ig Nobel prizes, sex and snuffles, parrots and kindness

12 September 2021

Emma Raducanu’s victory over Leyla Fernandez at the US Open tennis championship was the highlight of the week even for those of us who aren’t sports fans:  two teenagers playing in New York on the anniversary of 9/11 (which took place before either of them was born) with Raducanu becoming the first British woman in a grand slam singles final since Virginia Wade at Wimbledon in 1977.

I don’t know why we stayed up late to watch the match rooting for Raducanu, who I hadn’t even heard of a week ago.  It’s not because she’s British – the only other player who’s affected us in this way in recent years is Roger Federer, who’s Swiss.  Perhaps it’s because nobody thought she’d even make the semi-finals and we Brits tend to back underdogs, or because she’d assumed she wouldn’t even qualify and had already bought her return ticket, or because she’d fitted all her training round her ‘A’ Level revision, or because they’d both knocked out all the geriatric wrinklies over 20 on their way to the final, or perhaps it was just seeing her play so brilliantly that we could see a future champion in the making.

Good on yer Emma.

The announcement of this year’s Ig Nobel prizes came a close second.  Introduced in 1991 by the ‘Annals of Improbable Research’ magazine, the award aims to celebrate research that “first makes people laugh, and then makes them think”.

A decade after he’d won an Ig Nobel prize for his experiments using electromagnets to levitate amphibians, Sir Andre Geim, a Russian-born Dutch-British physics professor at Manchester University, won a Nobel prize with Sir Konstantin Sergeevich Novoselov in 2010 for his discovery of graphene.  (Graphene is, of course, a sheet of single carbon atoms joined in a hexagonal lattice form that is the strongest material found so far, a 1 square meter sheet of which would support the weight of a 4kg cat while weighing only as much as one of its whiskers.)

This year’s ten prizes were presented at an online ceremony which, for added entertainment, included a premiere of a mini opera that connected angry adults with miniature suspension bridges (don’t ask me, I’m just telling you what it says here).  The economics prize went to Pavlo Blavatskyy, a professor at Montpellier Business School, whose research showed that the higher a politician’s BMI is, the more likely they are to be part of a corrupt system.  (This can be proved by comparing pictures of Boris Johnson with Jacinda Ardern.)  (On the other hand, the same comparison might show that a regime’s corruption is in inverse proportion to the number of teeth its leader has.)

The physics and kinetics prizes went to complementary projects, the first showing why pedestrians in crowded areas aren’t constantly bumping into each other, the second showing why they sometimes do.  However, the most fascinating prize, for medicine, found that an orgasm is as good as commercial decongestants at clearing the nasal passages.  (If anybody finds themselves annoyed by a persistent sniffle, it might be worth a try.)

In the Willowbank Wildlife Sanctuary in Christchurch, New Zealand, there’s a disabled alpine parrot called Bruce (do you think this is a racist joke and his partner is called Sheila?) who’s lost the top part of his beak, which makes it difficult for him to eat and preen himself.  Luckily, parrots are intelligent and he’s taught himself to choose exactly the right stone to help him dislodge dirt and mites from his plumage. He also scrapes pieces of carrot against a hard surface to reduce them to an edible size.

Birds’ use of tools is not uncommon – corvids are particularly skilled tool-users – but this is apparently the first recorded instance of a bird selecting the right tool from a selection to groom itself, though Hamlet wouldn’t have been surprised.

Back on one of my hobby-horses, a new book on child-rearing has been published:  ‘How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes’ by Melinda Wenner Moyer.  It aims to supplement books like ‘How to Get Kids to Like Kale’ and ‘How to Raise Einstein 1.2’ and ‘How to Get the Little Bugger to Sleep’ by concentrating on how to create a kind, compassionate person.

In researching for the book, Moyer discovered that one particular study had shown that kind people tend to be more successful and that boys (sic) who were the most helpful and generous in kindergarten were earning the most when they were 25 and were least likely to be in prison.  (Do you think the people who were least helpful and generous in kindergarten are most likely to go into politics?)

In some interviews, famous people are sometimes asked what superpower they would like to possess;  I haven’t yet seen anybody say “kindness”. 

Let’s all buy into it and think what might improve somebody else’s life, even by a fraction.  Smile at strangers (but not in big cities where you’ll probably get arrested), send a message to somebody you haven’t contacted for some time and ask how they are, have a chat with a ‘Big Issue’ seller before giving them more than the price of the magazine, give money to charity, avoid Amazon and use local shops, give someone a flower, whatever you think might brighten somebody’s day. And say thank you for the kindnesses that people show you.

So, if you’ve read this far, thank you.

Kindness, thanking people, seeing things, the unlockdown, NHS GC and swimming

11 July 2021

A welcome act of kindness made the news this week, the sort that makes the world go round.  I mentioned Emma Raducanu here last week who, sadly, had to retire from her fourth round match at Wimbledon last week on medical grounds with what appeared to be an anxiety attack, apologising to her opponent as she did so.

When he heard about this, Marcus Rashford, the England and Manchester United forward who’s also been mentioned here before, tweeted her to admit it had happened to him when he was playing in England’s under-16s match against Wales.  He said “There was no explanation for it and it never happened again.  You should be very proud of yourself.  The country is proud of you.  Glad to read your [sic] feeling better. Onwards and upwards.”

Being an inveterate complainer myself when things go wrong, I’ve always thought it’s only fair also to write (or, now, email or use social media) to people who have made my life a little better, by inspiring me or others, or being kind, or thoughtful or just making me laugh, to tell them how much their work has brightened my life.

I haven’t written to nearly as many as I should but I’m trying to work through the list. 

One of the earliest was after I’d been reading one of Jan Mark’s books on a crowded platform at Victoria tube station and one of her inimitable phrases took me by surprise and I laughed out loud.  Isn’t it strange how, when you do something like this, however crowded the platform, you find yourself in the middle of a circle of people backing away from you?

So I wrote to tell her what had happened and to thank her and I got a lovely reply saying my letter had arrived in the same post as one from the VAT office and had cheered her up again.

I also wrote to Spike Milligan and, since I’d once heard him say that people would write to him and expect a reply but wouldn’t even enclose a stamp, I sent him a book of 2^nd class stamps.  Once again, a charming reply, probably written by Norma Farnes, his manager, but signed with a genuine “Spike”.

Of course not everyone replies but it’s enough to hope that they got to see my letter and hope it made life a little sunnier for them for a moment or two.  And, of course, I feel better for having written.

I wrote last week that “The human mind has a need to see patterns where there aren’t any” and, on Thursday, some new research by the University of Sydney* has found that seeing faces in unrelated things and shadows (“face pareidolia”) is not only common but necessary.  The lead researcher, Professor David Alais said “We are such [sic] a sophisticated social species and face recognition is very important” in helping us recognise friend or foe.

The brain can therefore ‘recognise’ a door with two glazed panels over a central knocker above the letterbox as a facial image, and ‘see’ an image of the Virgin Mary in a slice of toast.  It’s not magic, it developed from primitive survival mechanisms.

How I wish Boris Johnson had more highly-developed survival mechanisms.  As the markedly more transmissible Covid-10 Delta variant infections continue to increase, he’s confirmed tomorrow is “freedom day” when we can all start to mix without worrying about giving our asymptomatic Covid to other people by whatever method we’ve been missing most.  Even the exquisitely tactful Chris Whitty could only think of saying it might be better to increase the load on the NHS now, rather than in the autumn when they also have to deal with flu, bronchitis and other seasonal infections, which struck me as a very polite way of saying he actually thinks it’s still too risky to relax restrictions.

Perhaps he was influenced by the new health secretary, Sajid Javid, who bounced into power after Matt Hancock’s embarrassingly delayed ‘resignation’ and immediately announced, in defiance of scientists who understand how coronaviruses actually work, that all lockdown limitations would be scrapped on 17 July.  I don’t think he actually used the words “dates not data” but he did say England was entering “uncharted territory” and that infections could increase to 50,000 a day next week and exceed 100,000 a day within the next few weeks, compared with 81,000 a day at the height of last December’s peak.

In other, non-political words, WTF – say goodbye to your friends and get under a table with a paper bag over your head.  (Well, it’s what we were supposed to do back in the 1960s when we were expecting Russia to drop a nuclear bomb on our house.)

Meanwhile, the backlog of ‘routine’ non-Covid-related operations, which now stands at more than five million, will increase even further and the two I’m waiting for may need to be done posthumously.  Mind you, only one of those might possibly involve a risk of my death since I haven’t yet heard of anybody dying from increasing deafness, except when crossing roads.

We’re going to carry on wearing masks in public places because it somehow just seems polite.  It also seems we won’t be alone:  an Opinium poll has shown that 73% believe passengers on public transport should continue to wear them while only 31% believe the release should go ahead as planned.  The World Health Organisation is becoming more critical of releasing people too early and has said that allowing the disease to spread is “immoral, unethical and non-scientific”.

Although Johnson is unlikely to understand the meaning of any of the WHO’s words (which weren’t aimed at him by name), it seems possible as I write that he may pull back a little and leave some restrictions in place but it’s obvious that the unlockdown is actually motivated by politics not epidemiology.

So let’s remember that Johnson gave NHS workers a whole extra 1% pay rise in what he probably felt was a gesture of admirable generosity;  the rest of us saw it as insulting.  Even the Queen, who never gets involved in politics, appears to have been so shocked that she’s awarded the NHS the George Cross, the highest non-military award for courage.   Unless its timing is just coincidental …

Introduced by her father during the blitz in 1940 for civilians showing sustained bravery that’s not in the face of an enemy, this will only be the third time in its history the GC has not been awarded to an individual.  It was awarded to Malta in 1942 in recognition of “the fortitude displayed by islanders during sustained and devastating enemy bombardments” in the second world war and, in 1999, it was awarded to the Royal Ulster Constabulary for “the collective and sustained bravery of the force, including families of those serving”.

Until we moved down to the south west, I used to try to get to Cambridge each summer and punt up to Grantchester Meadows where I’d have a swim but King’s College, which apparently owns the land, announced recently that swimming there was now banned.  This caused such outrage and ridicule that the college has promised to review the decision and not to prosecute anyone who swims there “responsibly” (i.e.  they don’t drown or get caught up in the weeds or disappeared by the ghosties that live in the roots of the tree that used to stand by the deep water on Dead Man’s Corner).

*          published in the peer-reviewed journal ‘Proceedings of the Royal Society B’ (B for Biological Sciences) (A is for mathematical, physical and engineering sciences)