Red Rag

Chris Sheil posted this entirely reasonable argument yesterday:

Unless someone can come up with a reason as to why the hell Jack wouldn’t have wanted to reappoint Flinty faster than Dubya wanted to bomb Iraq, I just can’t credit this one to the Parrot, no matter how much he might’ve claimed it. The key, I guess, is that the parliament should demand the release of all official papers associated with the reappointment. Unless the goodies can turn up another candidate who was surprisingly, unaccountably, suddenly shoved aside for Flinty, it’s … just another juicy Sydney story, the likely bottom line to which is that the Parrot is a wanker.

However, an email from a “Liberal insider” that Crikey forwarded to its subscribers today suggests that Howard did indeed impose his personal view over the objections of the (admittedly useless) Minister responsible:

Dear Crikey

Some further information for you on the current imbroglio involving Jones, Flint and Howard. In 2000, the former Communications Minister, Richard Alston, recommended against the re-appointment of the ABA Chairman, Professor David Flint.

Alston never saw eye to eye with Flint and was keen to see him depart from the ABA at the expiry of his first term in 2000. Alston was over-ruled by the Prime Minister who insisted personally that David Flint be reappointed. Wonder why?

It is not known whether Alston was rolled over the appointment by the PM in Cabinet or his arm was twisted before the Cabinet meeting, however it was only as a result of the PM’s intervention that Flint was returned as ABA chairman for a second term.

The Alston Watcher

The plot thickens…

Update: John Howard has now basically admitted that he overruled Alston’s proposal to appoint ABA board member Michael Gordon-Smith.

On re-reading my previous post, I realise it sounds like I believe there’s some kind of formal conspiracy involving David Flint, Alan Jones and John Howard. I don’t: the threesome probably got together casually by mixing socially in an (real) elite clique.

David Flint, arch-monarchist, writes a gushing letter to a pro-monarchist radio host encouraging him to keep up his contribution to the national debate — in the middle of the campaign for a republic.

Alan Jones meets Howard at a dinner at Kirribilli house (he probably did just walk through the gates and knock on the door). He says, “that fellow Flint is a good bloke, it would be nice if he was reappointed.”

Howard says, “I’ve been thinking the same thing, Al, so don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.” Alan then goes out and, driven by his enormous ego, boasts to his friends and enemies that he has the ear of the PM.

All very cosy.

The question now is whether Howard is prepared to jettison the hopeless Flint. Unfortunately, I doubt it.

Nothing has been so entertaining this week as watching David Flint squirm over the latest evidence that he has been an abject failure as the Chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Authority. I don’t have much to say on the topic, but I wanted to catalogue a few of the descriptions of Flint that have been offered in the last couple of days.

David Marr:

…that scourge of the elites…

David Marr also did an excellent impersonation of the toffy-nosed prig on Triple J’s Hack program on Wednesday. You can listen to it online until next week.

John Laws:

The Professor turned bumbling and evasiveness into an art form…

…Now, come on, Professor Flint. I suspect that you do think the common masses are stupid but I do also think the cap of stupidity would sit very comfortably on your head at the moment.

…I made some mildly critical comment of the effete, pretentious, posturing Professor, that being Mr Flint…

Bob Carr:

I’ve just seen these interviews delivered with all the style of someone who seems to be rehearsing a vice-regal role for himself.

A crass inability to understand the statutory obligations that reside with him.

Workers Online:

It remains unclear as to whether Flint also maintains equally credible belief in the Tooth Fairy…

But this is hardly surprising from this stiff lipped son of Empire…

Just because Flint is the sort of congenital moron who populates the conservative end of Australia’s political spectrum doesn’t mean that he can’t have an opinion on the media.

It gets a bit more than dodgy though when he’s left as the regulator – a bit like letting Dracula regulate the Red Cross. Luckily though, he’s decided not to regulate anything.

Which is hardly surprising given that he doesn’t even appear to be able to regulate his own brain. This is the inbred pseudo-aristocrat who was born with an entire silver service shoved in his mouth, who then has the temerity to write a book called The Twilight Of the Elites, where he does a pitiful job trying to savage those he calls The Elite.

The Elite, in Flint’s world, appear to have only one thing in common; they disagree with one, David Flint. He would have been better off calling it The Twilight Of David Flint’s Credibility.

Our Tool Of The Week would do us all a service if he not only resigned from public life, but from Australia as well.

(There is an excellent demolition of Flint’s “new class” elitism theory in the latest issue of Overland, if you’re interested.)

It does very much appear that David Flint, Alan Jones and John Howard have been caught in a tawdry threesome. Flint gets a plum job as a media regulator (which seems to involve writing streams of fan mail but not a lot of actual regulation), Jones gets a massive income through a cash-for-comment deal with Telstra, and Howard gets even more favourable media coverage.

I’m just waiting for the usual suspects to weigh in, telling us that Media Watch should be focussed on more important issues — like Michael Moore fat jokes and turkey props.

Update: This doesn’t sound good:

Communications Minister Daryl Williams told Media the Government continued to have confidence in the ABA Board. He did not take up an opportunity to also express confidence in Flint.

He confirms the Government is looking at a proposal to merge the functions of the ABA with the Australian Communications Authority, but will not say when a decision will be made.

Some observers see this possibility as a way Flint, whose term expires on October 4, could continue in his ABA role. A merged body need not be subject to the rules that say an ABA member may be re-appointed once only. (Emphasis added.)

Oh, yippee.

I missed Anzac Day, but I’ll link to it again anyway: my honours thesis. It deals with some of the WWI debates that never seem to get a guernsey when we look back on the war each year: the peace movement, imperialism, anti-German racism (and the persecution of other “enemy aliens”), and the conscription debates.

Dan Stapleton’s complaints about The L Word don’t ring true:

I am hard pressed to think of a gay female acquaintance who has quite the preoccupation with artificial insemination as the L Word girls. Not many of my lesbian friends are as shallow and promiscuous as them, either. They’re certainly not driven solely by their libidos and visits to the local tanning salon. And, occasionally, one of the lesbians I know is actually interested in gay rights.

I’ve watched a few episodes now, and I don’t think we’re watching the same show.

Two of the characters are trying to get pregnant. That doesn’t make them “obsessed” with artificial insemination, but it probably means the subject is going to come up. (Once she gets pregnant, though, I imagine they’ll move on.)

I don’t think they’re any more “driven by their libidos” than the women of Sex and the City, and they’re certainly less concerned with visiting the local tanning salon. Perhaps I missed it, but I don’t think any of them has actually even visited a tanning salon yet. In fact, the cast is far paler than that of most other shows.

As for the claim that the characters are “shallow and promiscuous”, that doesn’t hold water either. Alice has a crackpot “six degrees of separation” theory, but the rest of the group try to convince her it’s not a healthy way to look at life. Most of the others are in (reasonably) stable relationships, and even Alice breaks up with her girlfriend when she finds out she (the girlfriend) has been cheating. At the end of the day, though, it’s a show about sexual politics — sex is going to come into it.

Stapleton’s last claim, that none of the characters in the show are “actually interested in gay rights”, is directly contradicted by his prior assertion that one couple is “obsessed” with artificial insemination: if a lesbian couple trying to get pregnant isn’t sticking up for gay rights, I don’t know what is.

This column is the product of an L word: laziness. It’s the same rant we get every time a new TV show with gay characters hits the airwaves — but this time (unlike with Will & Grace and to a certain extent Queer Eye for the Straight Guy) it is not based on a valid complaint.

(By the way, when I tried to visit the official L Word site, I got this ridiculous message:

Sorry

We at Showtime Online express our apologies; however, these pages are intended for access only from within the United States.

What’s up with that?)

I’ve been meaning to add this wallpaper to the collection for a while now.

The picture is stolen from The Spin Starts Here, where you can also find out what it’s all about if you don’t already know.

Lath’ Daddy for PM

Size: 640×480 | 800×600 | 1024×768

Update: I should add that I don’t mean to endorse Latham’s performance on Nova. It was patronising. On the other hand, he was just going along with the joke the inane hosts came up with, and I’m not sure how he could have avoided going along with it. So chalk that up as another reason not to listen to that crap.

Ironically, Latham’s “bling bling” policy announcement was made on the same day this Simon Castles piece appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Of course political leaders can’t please – or address – all of the people all of the time. But can’t they at least try to please some of the young people some of the time? And this means more than appearing on FM breakfast radio … and joking about pop culture ephemera. (My emphasis.)

Sigh.

Perth readers will no doubt be aware that the West Australian has undergone a makeover. It reminds me of a cross between the Financial Review and the Guardian — but with the same old West content.

Elsewhere, The Age has implemented a new, standards-compliant design. Joseph tells us it’s the work of Peter Ottery and Andrew Coffey.

If only the West Australian would engage them to fix up its website, which is one of the worst news sites I’ve ever had the misfortune to visit.

I’ve just been flicking through the latest issue of The Journal, and I thought this extract from Danny Cusack’s article on p70 was worth reproducing. It’s about the irreverent nicknames given to public monuments in Dublin:

The tart with the cart: The statue of Molly Malone at the top of Grafton Street, near Trinity College.

The hags with the bags: The statue of two women sitting and resting their shopping bags at the bottom of Liffey Street just near the quays.

The scut under the Butt: The memorial to James Connolly unveiled in 1994 and lovated under Butt Bridge, opposite Liberty Hall.

The chime in the slime: The underwater digital clock installed in the Liffey near O’Connell Bridge to count down the minutes and seconds to the new millenium (2000). It had to be taken up again because its presence constantly interfered with rowing crews trying to use the river.

The floozy in the jacouzzi/the hoor in the sewer: The statue of Anna Livia Plurabelle in her fountain in the middle of O’Connell Street. She has now gone to make way for the Spike.

The spire in the mire/the pin in the bin: A reference to the Millenium Spike and the litter-ridden state of O’Connell Street. The Spike is the tall metal tower about three-and-a-half times the height of the GPO and located in the middle of O’Connell Street on the site of Nelson’s Pillar which was blown up by the IRA around the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising in 1966.

Does anybody have some Australian examples? The closest I can think of is the nickname “Polly pipe” for the tunnel on Perth’s Graham “Polly” Farmer freeway, but it doesn’t have the same ring to it as the Dubliners’.

Via Jill Walker, I came across this article about blogging and advertising. I found it interesting because while I’ve read about surveys of bloggers, I haven’t before come across any such study of blog readers:

[A] Pew study, fielded a year ago, found that 11 percent of respondents read Weblogs with some regularity. Last summer, I conducted a survey for the email services agency Quris, in which we included a question about blog readership, which similarly found 10 percent of the 1,691 respondents regularly read Weblogs. Bearing in mind that those numbers have doubtless grown in the year since those two surveys, that is still 13 to 14 million Weblog readers. Furthermore, I would venture a lot more people are reading Weblogs without realizing those sites are called Weblogs.

[...]

The Quris research shows that blog readers skew somewhat younger than average Web surfers, are power-users of the Net and media junkies in general, spend more money online, and consume a disproportionate amount of literature, pop culture and electronics.

There’s an interesting table at the bottom of the article that gives comparisons between blog readers and the general population.

The downside of this research is that it was conducted to help spammers. So I guess we need to be extra careful about how commenters’ email addresses might be displayed: preferably, not at all.

If you’re using Movable Type to power your blog, that’s relatively simple. In every template that displays comments — probably just the “Individual Entry Archive” and the “Comment Listing Template”, but you might have others — you’ll need to check every reference to <$MTCommentAuthorLink$> and make sure its default setting has been overridden. Here’s what the manual says:

You can override these rules by using the show_email and show_url attributes to the tag. For example, if you use

<$MTCommentAuthorLink show_email=”0″$>

then the email address of the author will never be displayed. The logic then becomes: if the author has entered a URL, the author name will be a link to that URL; if no URL, display the author name without a link.

This is useful when you want to force your visitors to leave their email addresses — that is, you have not checked the Allow anonymous comments checkbox in your weblog configuration — but you do not want to display these email addresses on your weblog.

Spammers want to flog things to your readers: make sure they’re protected.

You might have heard that the Senate is currently holding an inquiry into the prospect of an Australian republic. The committee is currently touring the country, asking people to speak at public hearings.

I doubt they’re going to hear Deborah Foster’s testimony. That’s unfortunate, because her written submission is very interesting (pdf):

I submit that Head of State is not a legal nor a constitutional term…

I submit that the only way to a republic is by revolution.

I submit that there is no need to proceed further with this inquiry. As an elector, I expect it to be terminated.

(Mrs) D. M. Foster.

Short and sweet.

Update: Mrs Foster also made a submission (pdf) to the Joint Committee on Electoral Matters’ Inquiry into the 2001 Election.

Update: A belated hat-tip to the lovely Manas for showing me the revolutionary republican submission.

Anthony Georgeff is a Perth blogger who likes his food. In fact, that’s what his blog’s about: recipes, restaurant reviews, that sort of thing. As he so eloquently puts it, “There is food in Western Australia and I’m trying to engage with it.”

Oh, and he takes requests — the chick pea curry I asked for sounds delicious!

I mentioned in my previous post on abortion that while I considered two weeks an absolute minimum time in which abortion is moral, I was open to evidence that showed that a longer period could be allowed. My position was not a rock solid one — I had been convinced by Dr Carnley that the prospect of “twinning” rendered personhood an impossibility, but hadn’t looked at the arguments about the later development of the prenate.

I support the right of families to withdraw life support from loved ones, and I don’t believe it is murder. I think they are withdrawing artificial support from a person who is already dead. On that basis, I set out to read about when doctors consider death to occur, and to apply that definition to the other end of a person’s life.

It’s bloody hard to find good information about the medical evidence that underpins either pro-choice or anti-abortion arguments. The former camp’s websites tend to ignore the foetus and concentrate on the mother, while the latter camp tries to pass off photos of human-looking prenates as evidence of their personhood.

Eventually I came across religioustolerance.org’s When does human personhood begin?, which canvasses various different arguments on the issue. From there, I found another page about an abortion rationale based on the definition of death — exactly what I was after, but hardly enough detail to form a real basis for judgment. It seems to follow Richard Carrier, and a bit of hunting uncovered a debate he participated in, “On the Issue of Abortion”. It is a debate between Carrier and Jen Roth, who are both secularists — which means it doesn’t just descend into biblical nonsense, and is worth reading no matter what you think about abortion.

The crux of Carrier’s argument is that personality relies on complex cerebral function. Interestingly, he discusses “twinning” in this context, and takes it much further than Carnley:

[T]he fetus does not become truly neurologically active until the fifth month (an event we call “quickening”). This activity might only be a generative one, i.e. the spontaneous nerve pulses could merely be autonomous or spontaneous reflexes aimed at stimulating and developing muscle and organ tissue. Nevertheless, it is in this month that a complex cerebral cortex, the one unique feature of human — in contrast with animal — brains, begins to develop, and is typically complete, though still growing, by the sixth month. What is actually going on mentally at that point is unknown, but the hardware is in place for a human mind to exist in at least a primitive state.

[...]

Until the 20th week … there is no complex cerebral cortex and no major central nervous activity. That is a condition universally regarded as a state of death in adults. An adult human being in such a state cannot really be “killed,” just unplugged. And such an act would not be disrespectful of their individual existence because that existence has already ceased, and only a body remains. Even if we were able to regenerate a brain-dead patient’s cerebral cortex, using the genetic blueprint in her cells, we would still fail to resurrect her. We would instead merely create an identical twin inside a used body, with an infantile mind and no memories, no complex personality traits, and no intellectual skills. Although this fresh brain would be ready to learn and develop anew, it would be a different person. None of the unique features of the deceased would exist any more — the only mental features that would survive are the very same features that would be shared by any natural identical twins.

The fetus before quickening is in the very same state as this hypothetical regenerated person. And the analogy of identical twins is a crucial one. Twins share the exact same blueprint for brain and body, and there is nothing “individual” about a blueprint that can be shared by more than one individual person — their individuality does not derive from their blueprint, but from their unique personal development, which begins almost certainly before birth, but without any doubt upon birth, when there can be no mistake that novel sensory data has begun transforming the brain and educating it in unique ways. None of this individualization can occur before the existence of a complex cortex that can be individualized (pre-fifth-month) — certainly none before there is a central nerve organ of any kind (pre-third-month).

As the debate continues, it is clear that Roth does not share Carrier’s view as to what constitutes an “individual human person”. Unfortunately, she doesn’t go into a great amount of detail as to what she believes that term means, and as a result, I did not find her version very convincing.

For example, she claims that the process of twinning is “not particularly relevant to the public policy debate” about abortion; I obviously disagree. She also states that “it is not true that the body is merely an empty shell before the 20th week, passively awaiting the addition of an individual personality. The body has been directing the development of the brain all along, according to the instructions encoded in its DNA — and with modifying influences from the external environment.” True, but until the cerebral cortex is formed and firing, the foetus has many but not all of the conditions required to be a human person.

When she tries to find a clearer formulation, Roth ties herself in knots, first saying that “reason and moral choice are less arbitrary criteria on which to base personhood” and then admitting “the prenate is not yet able to exercise reason or moral choice”. She then falls back on the idea that “[t]he organism is identical (in the mathematical sense) over the course of his/her entire lifetime” from conception to death. However, it is not clear why a dead body, especially one that is being sustained by a life support machine, would not be considered identical in the mathematical sense — it has the same cells, the same DNA. The only difference is the lack of cerebral function, which the early prenate also lacks.

Roth’s weakness on this point is demonstrated in her final rebuttal:

My third point is that the personality is not a separate entity, existing independently of the human organism. To say, as Mr. Carrier has, that an individual does not exist prior to the 20th week is to say that the personality is the individual. (Ironically, the idea that the personality is an entity unto itself is one I would expect to hear from a believer in the supernatural. I am currently unaware of any atheistic philosophers who embrace mind/body dualism.) It is, instead, a property of the individual. The human organism itself builds the brain structures necessary for the formation of the personality, and thus can hardly be said to come into existence only after those brain structures have been built.

She’s correct to say that personality is a property of an individual person, but she doesn’t seem to understand that it is a necessary property. Before the brain is sufficiently developed, personality does not exist and the foetus is a human organism. Afterwards, all of the necessary properties are present and the foetus becomes a human person. When Carrier continues to challenge her definition, Roth asserts that “[t]he size and strength of the pro-life movement attest” to her correctness. Wowee. I’m convinced.

Okay, so by now I’m thoroughly convinced that the human person is formed at the point when cerebral function is acheived. But when does that occur? Carrier claims that it is during the fifth month, which seems to be generally accepted.

So, I’m going to modify my position. Take my previous entry on this issue and change the time limit to twenty weeks.

(Interestingly, “quickening” used to mean the point at which the mother could feel the foetus kicking. As Norman pointed out, the Church used to accept abortions up to that point, as it was the earliest point at which one could prove that the foetus was alive. It’s amazing how the scientific evidence can come full circle… if only the Church would follow.)

The Shadow Minister for Happiness and Hugs has announced that Labor will hold a summit on poverty if elected. It sounds like the first step towards implementing the recommendations of the Senate Community Affairs Committee’s Report on Poverty and Financial Hardship, including the establishment of an independent measure of poverty.

The debate about poverty and financial hardship has essentially been about how it should be measured. Don Arthur — whose blog I have refused to remove from my favourites despite its long and continuing hibernation — cast this as a debate between Good Peter Saunders (of the Social Policy Research Centre) and Evil Peter Saunders (of the Centre for Independent Studies). This paragraph gets to the heart of the matter:

If he’s asked directly Evil Peter Saunders will say that measuring poverty is a good idea and that it probably exists to some extent. But this will tend to be packaged up something like this: “I don’t want to claim that there’s no problem with poverty and deprivation, there obviously is, but it’s important not to exaggerate it…” It’s a safe bet that whatever anybody claims it is, Evil Peter Saunders will say that it’s an overestimate, not really poverty, or not society/the government’s problem.

Good Peter Saunders reckons we need an officially sanctioned measure of poverty because all the bickering about how we should measure it distracts us from solving the problem:

The great advantage of a poverty measure that is officially endorsed by government is that it prevents those in positions of power from criticising the methods used to measure poverty in order to escape the policy implications of rising poverty. As United States poverty expert Robert Haveman has argued, one of the most significant contributions of the 1960s War on Poverty in the United States was the establishment of an official national poverty line. Despite the many problems with the United States poverty line, its use in countless poverty studies has focused attention on trends in poverty and their policy implications. The United States poor have in general been well served by their poverty line — if not always by the policies designed to assist them!

There is an urgent need to develop a consensus on the concept and measurement of poverty that is relevant to the conditions prevailing in contemporary Australia.

(The Ends and Means of Welfare, p144.)

We’re never going to get everyone to agree on a universal measure of financial hardship, but if the government can broker and endorse a compromise position (heck, they could usefully endorse several different poverty measures), the debate can move on to something more important — how to solve the problem.

Ms Lauren has asked for people’s views about the abortion debate. I was going to post my answers in her comments thread, but decided that I’ve neglected this blog for a while and this quiz will provide instant content and instant controversy.

1. Where do you fall under the pro-abortion rights and anti-abortion rights continuum?

I’m in the pro-abortion rights camp, but not at the extreme of the spectrum.

2. Do you object to terms like “pro-life” and “pro-choice” or are they largely semantic?

I don’t like the term “pro-life”; it’s misleading. The implication is that those who support abortion rights are “anti-life” or “pro-death”, which is just not true. On the other hand, “pro-choice” is reasonably accurate.

3. Why do you support or not support abortion rights? Be honest, please.

I’m trying to negotiate between two contradictory principles:

• Women should have control over their reproductive processes (in consultation with the prospective father).

• Human life should not be destroyed.

As far as I’m concerned, the latter must take precedence over pretty much everything else. That means my views on abortion are almost entirely framed by the scientific and moral debate about what constitutes a human life, and at what stage in foetal development the human life appears.

Before that point, abortion is essentially cosmetic surgery.

After that point, abortion is murder.

I’m still not sure at what point the foetus becomes a human life. I certainly disagree with the Catholic proposition that human life begins when the sperm meets the egg. The Anglican Primate of Australia, Dr Peter Carnley, argued that the human individual emerged at about 14 days after fertilisation. He was writing in the context of stem cell research, but the moral question is essentially the same:

Since 1970, moral theologians have had their attention drawn to the fact that the fertilisation of an ovum, and the conception of a human individual, are in scientific terms identifiably different processes. The fertilisation of an ovum may happen in a moment of time, as the sperm “docks” with an ovum. But conception is now known to be not a moment but a process that takes 14 days. Only at the end of that process is it possible to say that “a human individual has been conceived”.

During this 14-day process of great cellular fluidity, which ends with implantation and segmentation, twinning may occur. Alternatively, divided cells may recombine. It is only at the end of the 14-day process, once implantation has occurred and there is no further possibility of twinning, that we can logically say that a human individual has been conceived. In terms of simple logic it is not possible to make that assertion until the process of conception is complete.

Accordingly, I think abortion is certainly acceptable in the first two weeks after fertilisation. It might also be acceptable for some later period, but I haven’t read enough about it to make any further judgment. So for now, I’m pro-choice up to 14 days and anti-choice after that.

If anyone wants to explain why I should be pro-choice for a longer period, feel free.

4. Are there instances in which abortion should be legal/not legal? Why?

Up to 14 days, anything goes.

After 14 days, abortion should be illegal — no exceptions.

I realise that rape victims might suffer serious emotional trauma bringing a child to full term, but having accepted the humanity of the foetus, I find it impossible to justify murder as a pre-emptive solution to possible future problems.

I also realise that there’s a bit of a grey area when the life of the mother is threatened. However, I don’t believe that I, or a mother, or a doctor, or anyone else is in a position to decide that one life is worth more than the other.

Even when there is an overwhelming risk that both mother and child will die, I have difficulty saying that murdering one to save the other is justifiable. This is not like killing an attacker in order to save the victim. Neither the mother nor the child has committed any wrong, so what right do we have to murder one of them?

The best analogy I can come up with is this: Two people are hanging for dear life from a branch on the edge of the cliff. Their combined weight will break the branch and they will both fall to their certain death. However, if one of them was to fall, the branch would remain intact and the other person would be saved. Does that give me the right to shoot one person to save the other? I don’t believe that it does.

I’m definitely opposed to abortion after 14 days for genetic engineering purposes.

5. How did you come to these conclusions?

Hmm. I think I’ve covered that pretty well in my answers above, but if you want clarification, let me know in the comments.

A few other points…

I strongly support the right of all women — regardless of their age — to access the morning-after pill.

I agree with Tony Abbott that there are too many abortions in Australia. There is no reason for people in our society not to have access to contraception — I just wish Abbott and his mates would stop restricting people’s access to it.

I don’t buy the argument that men should stay out of the abortion debate. It’s an issue that should be based on science and morality, not gender. (That’s a point about the debate about the existence of abortion rights, not about the decision to exercise them. Ultimately that’s a matter for the pregnant woman, though I hope the prospective father’s opinion would be considered.)

I should also stress that although I’ve used the term “murder” for abortions after 14 days, I don’t mean to imply that I think women who take that option are immoral or criminal. I don’t know what I’d do if I was facing the prospect of carrying an unwanted child, and thankfully I’ll never have to deal with it, but I certainly don’t think we should attack people for making what must be a very, very difficult decision.

Sam Ward supports peace activists.

Tim Blair jokes about raping peace activists.

Although they come from similar ideological positions, Sam and Tim are poles apart.