h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Are you sure NZ would welcome one such as me, Vicky?.....

I'm sure you'd be more than welcome. The Atheist-equivalent-of-a-godfather* to my children visits every couple of years with his husband.



*Since he lives in Germany - his husband is Puerto Rican-German, we've sttled on 'Dingsbumsvater': thingummybob father.

<<*However*...I don't think 'Hitlerian' tag applies to parents who *do* ask for terminations on medical grounds, either. The decision to terminate is a difficult one. You talk about the *potential* for disability. Sure, tests have margins of errors. The level of disability (and the child's resultant quality of life) may be uncertain. >>

Disclaimer... All my life I've known I was born with a more-or-less serious blood disorder. I then developed an auto-immune disease (and I've no idea if there's any connection.) Then, recently, I've discovered that a spinal deformity I'd always perceived as minor is actually quite major and more deletrerious as I get older... If these problems could have been discovered before I was born, my mother would have been offered a "therapeutic abortion" beyond any doubt, even back before NZ's abortion law was in effect, totally liberalised. She was 36 years old, and an "elderly primagravida", which was almost unheard of in the 1960s... (Whether she'd have accepted the offer, I don't know, in fact she probably would have. It's onl;y today that people think (wrongly) that women of her generation could not get and didn't have abortions - it all depended on their social class, and by birth my mother was from the upper echelons.
But until quite recently, (that spinal deformity) my quality of life has been excellent!

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Sorry, simplistic propagandistic tosh, gets my vote. I think at ther very least, that fathers should get a say... (Although studies show that men support abortion more than men do - I can't say for sure as they've both been dead more than 27 years, but I think things would have been reversed - my mother would have wanted an abortion, my father not.)

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Of course, disagreement with opinions is what we do here!

However, I have to say Edward, that you come across as being awfully patronising...

Oh come on Vicky, you've misread Ed's good intentions. i certainly didn't read it like that; I wouldn't have said, I concur if I did. He was being completely genuine and fair to you.

<<IMO, only a few Christians in the USA ever supported the invasion of Iraq<

How have you arrived at that opinion? >>

That could probably have been phrased better... I know that in NZ, only one or two (literally!) Christians here supported it. They're journalists, heavy influenced by Americans, all the sources of any articles in their magazine are American. (And even they are seeing the truth now.)

I honestly don't know about Christians in Britain, but on the Christian discussion board I used to frequent
http//www.sparrows.org.uk support for the invasion of Iraq, was at the time, nil.

So what I meant was, of Christians who supported the war, they comprise AFAIK, a minority of USAsians... I linked once to an indignant article from American Christians who *didn't and don't* support American empire building. It's a great pity the linked article was ignored by almost everyone, except for one person, who said she simply thought I'd invented it (which would have been quite an acheivement on my part, had I managed that trick, I'd have been justly proud!)

It's just the way Ed talks,; he can't help himself. Please see the good intention, and put up with Ed's mode of expression.

I have no figures. As usual i get my impressions from the vast amount of news documentary and associated programmes here. Christians seemed all for the war as far as I could tell, and many of the big US military bases are in very Christian areas of the US.

But I'm not bothered about any sort of argument about it with you. I know what i think but don't care enough to do a boring web search on it.

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The back-alley coathanger myth... Oh dear, I am not surprised you believe it, just sad... My mother worked at Rotorua Hospital for decades in the 1940s, and 1950s, and she informed us, that getting an abortion was absolutely simple... Just like getting the pill was for girls I was at school with in the 1950s. All you had to do was get your GP to swear blind it was simple to deal with painful periods. My mother's anecdotal evidence is worth exactly as much as your horror story about the hospitals feeding full fat cows milk to disabled children to kill them. (In fact your horror story sounds completely laughably unlikely. It's only nowadays that every screams in horror at full-fat milk, butter and the like, shouting "oh no, obesity and ugliness! :shock: So, what was the supposed mechanism?)

Yup. If there was any patronisation there, it was strictly self-knowing. But don't you worry your pretty little head about it. Seriously, though...people *aren't* always attacking. It isn't always necessary to look at others through shite-tinted glasses and jump to the least favourable of all possible interpretations.

As for inherited blood disorders...

I'm afraid we can all play the genetic trump card. I myself - as you already know - have a potentially disabling medical condition with a 30% mortality rate. There's a damned good chance that I will have passed this on to my children. So I'm afraid that our genetic credentials cancel each others' out on this issue.

I also have a spinal deformity that's given me intermittent gyp since childhood, rare early-onset glaucoma, all my family on one side died early of hypertensive diseases...do you really want to play this game? You *might* win, but I'm sure other pro-Choice people will give you a run for your money,

>>The back-alley coathanger myth... Oh dear, I am not surprised you believe it, just sad...

Well...it's no myth. and I have good reason to believe it. Another family member (by marriage) was imprisoned for illegal abortion. I *hope* NZ was more civilised, as you claim, but I refer to UK experience.

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A few years ago, there was a case of a woman here, who murdered her adolescent autistic daughter - it was terribly sad...

She was having huge difficulty accessing the support services she was entitled to as her daughter got larger and stroppier.

On the other side of it, a friend of mine, Jane, managed her son Ben, until he died at the age of 10, and she was a solo mother. I honestly don't know how on earth she did it. (There was no hint whatever that he'd have disabilities before he was born, and even up until he was a year old, no one suspected. )

*IMO, only a few Christians in the USA ever supported the invasion of Iraq.*

You are entirely entitled to your opinion. I agree that probably the majority of US Christians never supported the invasion of Iraq, but unfortunately those that did tended to be Evangelicals and many had the ear of the presidency and his advisors.

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/188/story_18823_1.html

http://www.christianpost.com/article/20080212/31154_Most_Evangelical_Leaders_Still_Support_Iraq_War.htm

http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/transcripts/2003/feb/030226.hagerty.html


The first two are Christian faith-based sites and the third is the US National Public Radio site.

On top of that, Evangelical Christians proselytizing to the active duty troops:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Straight_Up

http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/articleid/8578

... and the Iraqis themselves:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0417/p14s01-lire.html

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,443800,00.html

(Wiki, veterans site, Christian Science Monitor and Time Magazine online respectively)

The Time article even links Evangelizing with aid, something we've talked about here before. Does anyone else here whiff the smell of Crusade 3.0??

>>In fact your horror [cow's milk infanticide] story sounds completely laughably unlikely.

Source: My mother's funeral. Her former colleague, herself an anti-abortion Catholic, told me that while she disagreed with my mother, from her own experience she could see her point and admired her principles.

Imply that I'm lying/ gullible if you wish (is the new decorum rejecting you?), but please do not impugn the good name of a family friend.

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Snap! My brother and sister had and have had hypertension at dangerous levels since they were in their teens! It's not a contest or a game, really... I cited my issues purely as a disclaimer, to show I am not entirely unbiased...

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that should have been "at school with in the 1960s" of course, as the pill didn't even exist in the 1950s... NZ was like, South America, one of the laboratory countries the American pharmaceutical companies used to test the pill.

I have it too. High blood pressure. Last time it was checked it was highish, but not quite needing meds. So I've stopped going to have it tested now. I don't want to know. See there's madness and irrationality for you........

Well, obviously. We wouldn't want Kiwis to breed.

I note, though, that neither NZ nor South America are particularly noted for their sexual licentiousness, despite having had the pill for longer than anyone - thus putting to bed another myth.

I had high blood pressure two months ago. So I started exercising. Now it's fine.

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Lying, no, gullible yes, as your family friend may have been - I am reminded of my mother telling us as girls not to study too hard, or we'd "get brain fever and die" as had a boy she was at school with... The boy had simply got meningitis, and it had nothing to do with studying too hard, and in later years she learned that, but that didn't stop her telling us, believing it completely herself, that was a complete myth - that studying too hard can give you "brain fever" = meningitis.

What is the mechanism? HOw can full fat milk kill anyone? When I was a child, it was all there was! All children, disabled or not drank full fat milk. Kids died (in my circle mostly from quite horrible accidents, which we used to relish, with the delight children take in grue...) but not from full fat milk!