I've no idea who the people behind the initiative to get the morning-after pill legalised are. I can't, then, comment on whether this is just another strangely-hued herring chucked into the pond to divert us from the real problems of corruption and sleaze facing the country.

You know, just like the way the debate about gay marriage was, unsuccessfully, rekindled when Premier Joe's motley crew started feeling the heat from Panama.  

Anyway, they're going to have nice bit of bling to parade before us, the Great Unwashed, when the largesse made available by the hocking of our passports to assorted criminals and other undesirables becomes available for distribution to "deserving" causes. No prizes for guessing how Premier Joe's strategists are going to play that one.

Back to the MAP, not the Road Map, that's fallen by the wayside, still neatly folded, years ago.  The debate about it has given a great reason for the Intolerant Liberals (capital "I" and "L" deliberate) to drag their banners and slogans out of the closet and start waving them around threateningly in the general direction of the PN.  

The PN has to admit it, they have something of a legacy problem when it comes to taking any position that doesn't pander to the Moralistic Rightists

They're intolerant, incidentally, because they brook no argument except insofar as it agrees with them, which is hardly liberal but not the subject of this discourse today. It's not as if they don't have pretty good reason to be annoyed with the PN for the way it tackled a number of social issues in the past. The inept way the divorce debate was approached, for instance, is a case in point.  

In fact, the world didn't end, as we can see, these many years later.

The PN has to admit it, they have something of a legacy problem when it comes to taking any position that doesn't pander to the Moralistic Rightists, and a number of its exponents don't help by pontificating on social issues at the drop of a biretta.

They need to grasp, and they're getting there, that the only acceptable way to reach and take a position is to do so by respecting the science, the real science, be it social, medical or any other, and by eschew the temptation to impose one's own morality on the rest of us.

The PN is on record as being anti-abortion: fine, so am I, though I draw the line at criminalising it. I don't subscribe to the view that it's OK to kill an unborn child, and you can pillory me for that all you like.    

I'm firm in my mind that your right to do what you like stops at the point where you impose the exercise of that right on a more fundamental right of someone else, in this case, to live.

But is the MAP an abortifacient or is it more akin to contraception?  

At the point where it is taken, the woman cannot even know she is pregnant, and my admittedly limited knowledge indicates to me that what it does is stop the process of conception from proceeding, not extinguish a life that has started and needs no further "evolution" to proceed to birth.  

Clearly, the question is a complex one but it is not by politicians adopting moralistic tones and postures that we will address it properly.  

It is the government, with its educational and technical resources, that must drive the debate properly and furnish the facts. It is the government, for that matter, that must take the decisions, because they are technical not moral, given that we don't have any debate, any more, about contraception.

Letting this turn into yet round of increasingly ridiculous charge and counter-charge based on increasingly ridiculous assertions would be a dereliction of the government's duty to govern and the politicians, as opposed to the technocrats, need to butt out.

Otherwise, the debate will be driven by fools telling us that the morning-after pill will increase the incidence of rape, one of the most ludicrous arguments I've ever heard, and I've heard a few.  

Read my lips: men refrain from rape not because they're worried about making a baby. Or to put it differently, the fact that the woman might become pregnant weighs not one jot on the mind of a man who intends to violate her.

Spare us the rubbish, why don't you?

 

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