May 19 2008
Slap in the face
Whenever I get the chance to read a newspaper I end up really angry. The Observer on 18 May had several columns about abortion and very few of them were sensible. There were contradictions, unverified claims and outrageous lies throughout the whole thing.
I really wished that the reporters would make some attempt to verify the statements made by the interviewees. Do good journalists verify the statements they print? For instance, this opinion of Sister Andrea Fraile in Glasgow is just worthless scaremongering:
‘[Abortion] can be very detrimental to their mental state. Physically it could mean that in future if she wants to have a baby she will have difficulty conceiving. And she may have difficulty sustaining relationships and may turn to drink or drug abuse to help her cope.’
There is no good link between past abortion and future ability to have a baby. Neither will getting an abortion mean you can’t sustain relationships or become a junkie. It’s just all complete nonsense. In place of calling these people out for their repeated nonsense, I would like to suggest a new form of punctuation which I will call “the slap”. It looks like ❢ (that’s HTML entity ❢ or heavy exclamation mark ornament if you want to use it) and should be used like a more flexible version of Wikipedia’s [citation needed].
‘[Abortion] can be very detrimental to their mental state. ❢ Physically it could mean that in future if she wants to have a baby she will have difficulty conceiving. ❢ And she may have difficulty sustaining relationships ❢ and may turn to drink or drug abuse to help her cope. ❢’
It means something like:
- No,just stop it
- You made that up didn’t you?
- This is fraudulent nonsense
- You’ve been rebuked for telling this lie before
…and so on. It’s not a very subtle tool but it’s immensely satisfying. I’m beginning to feel that such people deserve only ridicule.
I think the line “[Abortion] can be very detrimental to their mental state” is true; it most definitely can, but that’s not to say that it always is. It’s misleading rather than outright false or unverified, which is what the others are…
I think it’s more the fact that some people seem to spend an awful lot of their energy convincing women that it’s a shameful, horrible, sinful thing to do — and that they should feel guilty whether they really want an abortion or not. That can’t do much for a stressed person’s state of mind.