Best Of

on the abortion vote, I'm surprised all Reform UK MPs opposed the amendment. Shows them to be conservative more than libertarian, at least on this issue.

I missed the chat on here yesterday; I would have voted in favour.

I don't think it's necessarily inconsistent to be libertarian and anti-abortion.

I'm generally pretty libertarian - do what you like, how you like, with whoever you like - it's your moral problem, not the government's - but I'm quite strongly anti-abortion, particularly late abortion.

Abortion is different, because it's all about the question of "is an unborn child a person". If they are, then it's murder, and you have to be quite an extreme libertarian to be OK with that. I can see how one can argue that a 6 week fetus isn't a person (I'm not sure I agree, but I understand the case being made). I can't see how you can make that argument at 39 weeks, which is what we've just semi-legalised.

I usually agree with you on everything so I was a little surprised to read your post yesterday.

I take the view, expressed by very few on here yesterday, I admit, that it is birth that is key and up to then it is all about the rights of the pregnant woman. There seems to me to be a religious component, which I don't hold, that is at the root of ascribing rights to the unborn (which is why many conservatives separate from libertarians on this issue I think).

I think your position is very hard to sustain logically.

Take the extreme end of this (and that's what this change in the law partially enables). A baby in the womb at 39 weeks. If you deliver it, it will live a normal life with no special intervention.
Are you really OK with permitting a woman to destroy that baby, because she doesn't want it?

Ignore the edge cases about it being found to suffer some dread illness. Ignore arguments about "she shouldn't be made to continue the pregnancy" - assume she'd otherwise go into labour that afternoon. Is it really OK to kill that baby before delivery (as that's about the only difference with an abortion that late)?

Is this a real problem? Are there any cases of something like this happening?

Canada has more liberal abortion laws than the new law (if/once passed) in the UK. Is Canada deluged by incidents of this nature? No.

We have had real problems, and those were the inappropriate investigations and prosecutions of women in the UK.

on the abortion vote, I'm surprised all Reform UK MPs opposed the amendment. Shows them to be conservative more than libertarian, at least on this issue.

I missed the chat on here yesterday; I would have voted in favour.

I don't think it's necessarily inconsistent to be libertarian and anti-abortion.

I'm generally pretty libertarian - do what you like, how you like, with whoever you like - it's your moral problem, not the government's - but I'm quite strongly anti-abortion, particularly late abortion.

Abortion is different, because it's all about the question of "is an unborn child a person". If they are, then it's murder, and you have to be quite an extreme libertarian to be OK with that. I can see how one can argue that a 6 week fetus isn't a person (I'm not sure I agree, but I understand the case being made). I can't see how you can make that argument at 39 weeks, which is what we've just semi-legalised.

I usually agree with you on everything so I was a little surprised to read your post yesterday.

I take the view, expressed by very few on here yesterday, I admit, that it is birth that is key and up to then it is all about the rights of the pregnant woman. There seems to me to be a religious component, which I don't hold, that is at the root of ascribing rights to the unborn (which is why many conservatives separate from libertarians on this issue I think).

I also draw the line at birth, but I recognise that any line is going to be a bit arbitrary, so I can understand why other people would draw it elsewhere.

Even apparently intransigent and inflexible people and institutions can draw the line at different times on this. I believe that church doctrine used to draw the line at the quickening - roughly the end of the first trimester - and that the current "life begins at conception" doctrine is relatively modern.

But this law change doesn't change where society has drawn the line. It only recognises that someone so desperate as to desire an abortion at such a late stage is someone who needs help, and that criminal conviction doesn't do anything to help society or create deterrence.

I'm not sure why we should spend time and money protecting Israel. What's in it for us? I also don't think that Israel being immune to such attacks is a good thing. Such immunity leads to profoundly immoral results. Look at Gaza. It is probably good that, unlike the last time, the Iron Dome has proven to have a few cracks in it and there are consequences for Israel's actions.

The leadership of Iran are appalling, particularly for Iranians, and I would welcome them gone but I think its generally a matter we should stay out of. There's a lot of things like this. We are not a great power any longer. We need to protect our interests but be much more focused on what those interests are.

There's neither a moral nor a realpolitik reason to support Israel. Israel isn't the good guy requiring protection. It's less important in the region than the collective Arab or Islamic states.

One argument is that demonstrating the ability to defend against ballistic weapons is part of *our* defence posture.

Life testing is expensive - the Iranians are providing targets for free.

Iran is certainly more hostile to us than Isreal is.

As I explained to some of the more fun chaps at UCL*, if you shout “Death To The West” all the time, some Westerners are going to get the impression you are not their best friends.

*Friends of Capn’ Hookhand

It is not difficult to tell the difference between an Iranian with a grudge and a ray of sunshine.

These chaps weren’t (mostly) Iranians. Who, if they came from Iran and were going back, tended to quietly study engineering and physics.

No, this clown show was mostly homegrown. Angry young men who’d rediscovered God. As an angry young man (who’d discovered heavy metal, instead) I kinda related. I was one of the few people who actually talked to them as people. Rather than just shouting them down or trying to ally with them in the style of the Stupid Wankers Party.

Are we all in awe of the major event that we would be talking about for centuries that Iran promised yesterday?
It appears to have been a few wind up drones and a couple of missiles. There is no way these jokers have WMDs of any type

The best time to go to war is BEFORE a country has WMDs but when they are working towards it.

That is the case with Iran.

They don't have them yet, let's keep it that way!

So, you're saying we should have attacked Israel in 1965?

Considering Israel is our ally, no.

It would have been a better time for their enemies to attack them than afterwards though. Oh wait, they already did . . . and they lost. Oh well, how sad, nevermind.

Do you think all of our allies should have nuclear weapons? Germany? The Netherlands? Japan? South Korea? Saudi Arabia?

That's up to them, I don't think we should go to war to stop our allies building their defences.

I do think we should go to war to stop our enemies from getting them though.

I would be most uncomfortable from your list with Saudi Arabia, who are not a democracy, having them. I don't feel that we should be allies with the Saudis though that's another question - if Iran were neutered there'd be less reason for us to side with the House of Saud.

on the abortion vote, I'm surprised all Reform UK MPs opposed the amendment. Shows them to be conservative more than libertarian, at least on this issue.

I missed the chat on here yesterday; I would have voted in favour.

Voting for murder of a viable foetus until birth with no consequence is nothing to be proud of.

Reform were quite right to vote against as were most Conservatives and Unionists.

Its not murder and voting for women to be human incubators of pregnancies they don't want is nothing to be proud of either.

The deadline for when abortion should be an option should be when delivery becomes an alternative option, that's not 24 weeks, the NHS won't give voluntary deliveries (as opposed to medically required ones) at 24 weeks as its premature and not safe.

Nobody should be compelled by law to carry on with a pregnancy they don't want. If you wish to insist on delivery as an alternative to abortion then I'm OK with that, the pregnancy is still ended at that point so that's reasonable, but to pretend that "viability" means that abortion isn't OK, but delivery isn't OK either at that stage, is not consistent.

I'd have a lot more sympathy with voluntarily early delivery that than what the law has just become. If Carla Foster's baby (who triggered all this) had been induced, it would almost certainly have survived with little more intervention than feeding. As it was, she deliberately killed it. Not of course because she didn't like being pregnant (she'd left it six months after discovering she was pregnant!), but because she didn't want the child, and was too selfish to deliver it alive and give it up for adoption.

The law hasn’t “just become” anything different to what it was yesterday. Another one who doesn’t understand parliamentary procedure!