Could we make murder legal too?

This morning's paper has an article calling for the legalisation of prostitution. "We will never eradicate prostitution," says the quote on the front page, "so let's make it legal."

According to this logic, I expect all crimes to be made legal - after all, we're not going to eradicate any of them, are we?

By the way, as far as I understand the laws in the UK do not criminalise prostitutes, they treat as a crime certain actions on the part of their clients (e.g. kerb crawling) and the people who live off their earnings. Which is as it should be - women who sell their bodies are harming no one but themselves, so I see no point in punishing them for it.

This article also seems to suggest that there's nothing wrong with paying for sex, that it doesn't do anybody any harm.

That would be true if we were animals, and sex for us was merely a physical act that has no emotional consequences.

A bunch of cells?

We had someone come to talk to us about abortions in church last night. He didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, although I'm sure many others hadn't been aware of a lot of the facts. He showed us a video clip of the developing baby in the womb at around 6-10 weeks (that's the time that most abortions, at least here in the UK, are done) but that was not new to me, in fact I had seen a better video clip once, probably when I was on the pregnancy counselling course - it was beautiful, I really felt like I was watching what it says in Psalm 139, "you knit me together in my mother's womb."

But this guy showed us another video clip, which I couldn't bear to watch for more than a few seconds. It was a clip showing what actually happens in an abortion.

It wasn't the sight of all that blood that did it for me. It was the sight of these tiny little limbs being scraped away, as though they're rubbish. Bits of human body being scraped out. And why? Unwanted pregnancy - that's what they call it. Unwanted. Inconvenient. Extremely and highly inconvenient sometimes. Having a baby just now would mess up my plans, it would mess up my education, my career, my plans for the future. Or: I can't afford to have a baby just now, I have no way of supporting it. There are lots of reasons, and they all seem like very valid reasons at the time. I know. I've made that decision twice, and I know how unbelievably sensible it seemed at the time. (Of course with all such reasons of "inconvenience", giving birth and having the baby adopted would work perfectly well - for every unwanted baby there are so many couples going through the agony of not being able to have children.)

I also know now what I didn't know at the time: that it wasn't "just a bunch of cells" - well, no more than I am just a bunch of cells, which I suppose in terms of my biological makeup yes, that's what I am.

The doctors use these euphemisms to try and make it all more palatable - for the woman having the abortion, and also for themselves, as they also have to live with what they do. I've heard that some doctors and nurses who perform abortions report nightmares - having seen just a few seconds of that video clip I'm not surprised! When a woman has an abortion she doesn't see what's going on, they protect us from the awfulness of it. Just as they protect us through the language they use - talking about "termination of pregnancy" rather than describe the violent removal of a baby from the womb, bits of its body being scraped out as though it wasn't a fellow human being.

But that's what they need to keep telling themselves - if they are to be able to keep doing what they do, they need to believe that it's not a human being. The use of terms like foetus and embryo helps them to believe that - let's not call it a baby just yet, so we can pretend it isn't. Because we all know that killing babies is wrong.

That's why the doctor didn't say to me: ok, let's arrange a date to have your baby killed.

But leaving aside for the moment the horrendous fate of the baby, the other thing they don't tell you about when you're considering having an abortion, is what it will do to you. They don't tell you that women who have had an abortion tend to develop a version of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which can only be healed through some really good and deep counselling.

Because despite all the euphemisms, deep down you actually know what happened, you know there was a baby inside you and that you acted totally against the role of mother - instead of protecting and nurturing, you destroyed and killed. The guilt is huge. The grief and loss feel unbearable, especially as you have no outlet for them - you feel you're not entitled to grieve, because you brought it on yourself; and society around you tells you that you have nothing to grieve for, it was "just a bunch of cells". So you bury the grief as deep as you can. You find all sorts of ways of numbing the pain - it could be stuff like alcohol or drugs, it could just be keeping very very busy. I found that seven gin and tonics every Friday night did the trick for a while. So you go through life, sometimes for years and years, not realising why you are living the way you are living, not realising why you need these pain-numbing mechanisms, not realising why at a particular time of the year you get especially sad (it's often the anniversary of when the baby would have been born), not realising that the pain is still there and is never going to go away until you bring it out and deal with it.

I am so grateful to have received God's forgiveness and healing. "Come now, let us reason together," says the LORD. "Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow." (Isaiah 1:18)

Let us reason together, God says. We know when we've done wrong. All we have to do is repent, turn back to him and he will forgive us and give us a clean slate. But carrying on as though it wasn't wrong - that is the way to constant grief and never-ending pain.

P.S. If you have had an abortion, don't suffer in silence. There is hope, there is help available. This is one place I can highly recommend.

Sorry it hurts, but it's for your own good, honest...

There was quite a bit in the Times on Friday about the latest figures for teenage abortions in Britain. One item was about a gynaecologist in London who clearly believes he is providing an important public service in providing abortions for young girls. "The girls I worry about," he says, "are the ones who don't come to us, and go on to have the baby. It is not in the interests of any child to have a 16-year-old mother."

Sorry it hurts, baby, but don't you see it makes sense?
You wouldn't want that sort of life
You're much better off if I get them to kill you now

You see, once you're out of my womb
it becomes illegal to kill you.

Jokes - a dilemma

I'm not one of those PC fanatics - just a person with a conscience which annoyingly comes into play at some of the most inconvenient moments, such as when I feel like repeating a joke I've heard but then I realise that actually this joke gets a laugh at the expense of a whole load of people who have done nothing to deserve it. For instance a friend recently texted me a very funny joke about Mick and Paddy - well, it is funny, but it perpetuates the lie that Irish people are stupid, and do I really want to do that? Same goes for blondes, etc.

I found myself thinking about Jewish humour and how back home we used to tell jokes about people being stupid and of course they weren't racist, were they, we just told jokes about the people of Chelm, which was a mythical place where stupid people lived, right?

Wrong. I've just looked it up on Wikipedia and it turns out that Chelm was a real town in eastern Poland which in Jewish humour became the legendary capital of foolishness.

So what do we do? Can we invent a fictional place with some fictional characters so that we can tell jokes about foolishness without perpetuating stupid prejudice? Perhaps we could invent a land called Foolland, where the Foolish live?

Here's my feeble attempt at telling a joke without treading on anyone's toes. Let's see if it works.

Daft and Brush are walking home after a night out and pass the bus garage. 'Let's just steal a bus,' says Daft, not wanting to walk, and offers to keep watch. Twenty minutes later he looks in to find Brush in a flap, 'I can't find a number 7!

''You idiot,' says Daft, 'just take a number 9 and we'll walk from the roundabout.'

All this packaging!!!

I got a package delivered this morning. I still can't believe the size of the box. 38cmx30cmx19cm - I've just measured it. It looks big enough to hold several cats, or a few dictionaries. Do you know what it was that I ordered online and received in this box today?

Go on, have a guess...

Think of something really small...

No, really really small...

No, you'll never guess. We're talking about two ink cartridges for my printer. Two ink cartridges! Delivered in a massive cardboard box, with bubble wrap inside, and a huge amount of air.

It's not that I'm a manic green fanatic, don't get me wrong, I do lots of things that would get the green police on my case if they only knew... but you'd just think that companies would have twigged by now about the question of trees being chopped down to make cardboard, and about the need for minimal packaging, and that they would make sure they have different size boxes available for the packaging of different size orders, wouldn't you?

I must say though, today's example isn't the worst I've seen. At least they didn't fill the box with unnecessary padding. I once ordered a calendar online and it arrived at the bottom of a massive box, underneath a mountain of those poly-something wormlike things... what do you call them? I'm sure you know what I mean. It's that stuff that is used for protecting delicate electrical equipment in shipping. If you know what it's called, post a comment here and enlighten me.

So, here's a little ethical dilemma to make the day more interesting: is it better to shop online, thus saving on car use (not to mention the attractive low prices); or to go to the shop, not forgetting to take your reusable bags, thus avoiding excess packaging and also supporting the real (as opposed to virtual) shops, which if we all shop online are going to gradually go out of business?

Happy ending?

Have just finished reading a really nice novel (The Peacock Emporium by Jojo Moyes) and I find myself thinking:

When did this happen?

At what point in the history of modern fiction did leaving your husband for someone else become a nice happy ending for a novel?

I feel like going in search of the main character, Suzannah, and saying: Excuse me, but what exactly did you think when you said all that stuff about "till death do us part"? Did you have your fingers crossed behind your back as you stood there in your beautiful wedding dress, thinking, "Yes well... of course what I really mean is until I have some sort of midlife identity crisis and ditch you for someone with more fire in his blood"?

How annoying that not one of the characters voices the view - is it really considered so outdated?! - that following your emotions is not necessarily the best course of action, that marriage is something to work at! Sorry, no, I now realise that there was one person who voiced that opinion - her poor husband when she told him she was leaving him. I wouldn't be so annoyed if he had been an awful husband, but his only fault seems to be his ability to remain content in the face of all the turbulence that life and his wife were dishing out to him. So he puts up with his wife binge-shopping them into debt, he puts up with his wife being moody and impossible when she's setting up in business, he puts up with her changing her mind about having children with him, he puts up with her general spoilt brat mentality throughout, all because presumably he actually took seriously those vows they made when they got married, but then his wife just suddenly says she's leaving, and that's that. End of marriage.

Okay, I've got that off my chest now.