EXCL UK could strike back at Trump with taxes on Harleys/Jack Daniel’s
The UK has been wargaming how to respond to potential Trump tariffs on UK goods, with officials briefing ministers they can immediately repurpose former EU measures against the US
What is your point? "The EU once imposed tariffs on Jack Daniels so if we now do the same we would be copying them and proving that we are too stupid to come up with our own ideas"?
It fascinates me how for some people Brexit and their ex post opposition to it is almost the defining moment of their entire lives and feature of their personality. Will 22nd century ramblers wander bemused around the cemeteries of metropolitan London, reading lichen covered stones marked FBPE, in their own little corner opposite the 20th century war graves?
We still talk about the repeal of the Corn Laws - which was for many at the time just such a defining issue. Even if we have little idea of what ignited such passions.
No doubt the historical memory of Brexit will be similar in a century or so.
The Corn Laws was a matter of keeping tariffs or Peelite free trade.
Trump is putting protectionism v free trade back firmly on the agenda again
One of the cool parts of biology is that, even if you think you understand something, you can always go deeper.
Case in point: insulin. It's been studied for over a century, but a paper out today uncovers a major mechanism of how the body manages insulin recycling.
Briefly, inceptor is a protein in beta cells that acts as a lysosomal sorting receptor for insulin and proinsulin. Inceptor binds these molecules and directs them to lysosomes for degradation.
Knockout experiments in cells show that removing inceptor increases insulin stores. And if you treat cells with monoclonal antibodies targeting inceptor proteins, and thus disrupting their ability to bind to proinsulin, the same outcome happens.
The Biology that I was taught at A level in the mid to late 50's seems to have little relationship to that being taught now.
To be fair that was over 70 years ago. In the 1950's we didn't have NMR, X-ray crystallography was in its infancy. Our knowledge of structural biology alone is a 1000 fold greater. We can even use AI to predict how a give amino-acid sequence would fold in 3D.
The thing about biology (and one of the reasons I am a chemist, not a biologist, despite my job in a Life Sciences department) is that its really hard to de-couple the complexity. If I do a chemical reaction I can change one component at a time. Its really, really hard to do the same thing in biology because all the pathways interconnect. This is one of the reasons that I despair of people who think losing weight is as easy as eating less and moving more. The body has evolved over millions of years to react to different conditions, be they feast or famine or the need to run 25 miles a day or not. Biology is NEVER simple and if anyone tells you it is, they are very ignorant.
Mr. Urquhart, in the absence of forethought, planning, and considered policies, Labour's drifted back to the comfort zone of tax and spend.
It's everyone's comfort zone - the Conservatives spent many years there while in Government.
What else could Starmer and Labour have done? Brown basically carried on Clarke's policies until 1999 (which meant the Tories couldn't lay a glove on him). Should Reeves have kept to Hunt's plan, tried something radical like Liz Truss?
I do agree closing down the options to raise income tax and VAT rates was foolish and given everything that has happened Reeves could probably have gone for a 2p rise in basic rate and said it would pay for increase defence spending but as George H W Bush discovered, if you raise taxes when you had previously said you wouldn't, the electorate isn't happy.
I hear a lot of bellyaching from some on here about public spending but nobody has come up with anything remotely coherent (cutting the civil service by 50% isn't coherent) as an alternative.
You might dismiss cutting public spending proposals as incoherent but its obvious there is massive inefficiency in certain public services and bodies (try contacting HMRC for instance) -
Is it not the reduction in staff at HMRC which has led to the difficulties in contact?
Indeed. There may be a difficulty of waste and incompetence, but the degree to which public stuff doesn't work very well suggests that the greater real problem is lack of good people paid properly to work it well.
On the one hand you have the legitimate concerns of biological women to have women-only spaces; while on the other where does a trans woman go if they are being abused by their male partner and other women don't recognise them as women.
I notice that @Cyclefree uses the term "men" to refer to transwomen which illustrates a particular point of view.
The disabled loo.
Basically this is a problem without a solution because while a lot of Trans men are fine the fact is men (of dubious intent) can access women-only spaces by pretending to be trans is problematic given that the reason for women-only spaces is to escape from men
It's quite a thing that some people - parents wanting to look after toddlers for example - get themselves a RADAR key and occupy disabled loos for as long as they want.
That can be a real problem for time critical needs, such as people with IBD needing a loo now.
Particularly an issue in eg rural tourism areas.
The reason why so many people have radar keys is because it’s the only way you can keep 2 toddlers in tow or similar.
We had Radar keys as with twins and a pushchair it was impossible if you were by yourself to take them to the loo.
Reality is we probably just need more disabled loos
Quite.
I've never understood the howling by some against disabled adaptations - the war on woke before wokefinding was invented. Ramps make life so much easier for so many people, for instance - parents with prams, deliveries, and so on.
And part of the problem is ****ing architects too often design standard loos for 15" high elves on a diet. When I knackered my shoulder I was really glad to be able to use a disabled loo just for the extra space to deal with my coat etc.
Indeed. I can't manage in a toilet anymore without the help of a carer; normally Mrs C. of course.
On topic, I'm beyond amazed at the mess the Courts seem about to get us into.. I can well understand, and sympathise with, a woman's desire for 'exclusive' space. I can equally understand that a GENUINE trans, either way, wants, or at least prefers, to be able to use the toilet space aimed at their deeply felt gender. I can see, of course, that the sort of evil b*****d who claims to be trans to prey on women would abuse that. Perhaps the solution is to have a fourth toilet; men's, women's, disabled and trans.
And Good Morning to one and all; straight, gay, and unsure.
Arguably loos should simply be private booths - male public latrines are nearly always seedy, and seem rare in new buildings. If they were private, then the issue largely goes away - who cares who is in a booth behind a closed door? I appreciate that this doesn't provide the "refuge" which some women see as an essential element, but perhaps that issue needs to be addressed separately, by having a non-latrinal room where women can chill out?
The difference between UK cubicle loos and Usonian cubicle loos is interesting.
On the one hand you have the legitimate concerns of biological women to have women-only spaces; while on the other where does a trans woman go if they are being abused by their male partner and other women don't recognise them as women.
I notice that @Cyclefree uses the term "men" to refer to transwomen which illustrates a particular point of view.
The disabled loo.
Basically this is a problem without a solution because while a lot of Trans men are fine the fact is men (of dubious intent) can access women-only spaces by pretending to be trans is problematic given that the reason for women-only spaces is to escape from men
It's quite a thing that some people - parents wanting to look after toddlers for example - get themselves a RADAR key and occupy disabled loos for as long as they want.
That can be a real problem for time critical needs, such as people with IBD needing a loo now.
Particularly an issue in eg rural tourism areas.
The reason why so many people have radar keys is because it’s the only way you can keep 2 toddlers in tow or similar.
We had Radar keys as with twins and a pushchair it was impossible if you were by yourself to take them to the loo.
Reality is we probably just need more disabled loos
Quite.
I've never understood the howling by some against disabled adaptations - the war on woke before wokefinding was invented. Ramps make life so much easier for so many people, for instance - parents with prams, deliveries, and so on.
And part of the problem is ****ing architects too often design standard loos for 15" high elves on a diet. When I knackered my shoulder I was really glad to be able to use a disabled loo just for the extra space to deal with my coat etc.
Indeed. I can't manage in a toilet anymore without the help of a carer; normally Mrs C. of course.
On topic, I'm beyond amazed at the mess the Courts seem about to get us into.. I can well understand, and sympathise with, a woman's desire for 'exclusive' space. I can equally understand that a GENUINE trans, either way, wants, or at least prefers, to be able to use the toilet space aimed at their deeply felt gender. I can see, of course, that the sort of evil b*****d who claims to be trans to prey on women would abuse that. Perhaps the solution is to have a fourth toilet; men's, women's, disabled and trans.
And Good Morning to one and all; straight, gay, and unsure.
Arguably loos should simply be private booths - male public latrines are nearly always seedy, and seem rare in new buildings. If they were private, then the issue largely goes away - who cares who is in a booth behind a closed door? I appreciate that this doesn't provide the "refuge" which some women see as an essential element, but perhaps that issue needs to be addressed separately, by having a non-latrinal room where women can chill out?
Our office building has a bit of everything. On our floor, separate men's and women's facilities (with urinals in the men's). Accessible with key cards only by our staff and visitors.
On the ground floor, individual unisex cubicles, accessible to all in the building.
In contrast, in our Manchester office, there are only cubicles in the men's.
Both offices only a few years old.
What they do have in common is hand driers only, no paper towels. Which I find a bit of an annoyance.
Sadiq Khan’s rent-controlled homes to be available to solicitors and barristers
London Mayor unveils plans for at least 6,000 new properties which he claims could save key workers up to £600 a month on rent
Sadiq Khan’s rent-controlled homes in London will be available to barristers and solicitors, it has emerged.
The London Mayor has unveiled plans for at least 6,000 new rent–controlled properties, known as Key Worker Living Rent (KWLR) homes, in the city by 2030.
But the list of eligible professionals also includes solicitors and barristers, actors, vets, psychologists and the clergy, as long as their household income is less than £67,000 a year.
Mr Khan, a former solicitor himself, has claimed that the homes could save key workers up to £600 a month on rent compared with accommodation from private landlords.
I'm not sure what the Telegrunt's problem is here. It's not really much different from key worker or affordable rent schemes run under the previous Government.
For some reason they are going on about "rent controls", which it is not. It is far more like a version of 'affordable housing'.
Whether lawyers should be key workers is a different matter.
On the one hand you have the legitimate concerns of biological women to have women-only spaces; while on the other where does a trans woman go if they are being abused by their male partner and other women don't recognise them as women.
I notice that @Cyclefree uses the term "men" to refer to transwomen which illustrates a particular point of view.
The disabled loo.
Basically this is a problem without a solution because while a lot of Trans men are fine the fact is men (of dubious intent) can access women-only spaces by pretending to be trans is problematic given that the reason for women-only spaces is to escape from men
It's quite a thing that some people - parents wanting to look after toddlers for example - get themselves a RADAR key and occupy disabled loos for as long as they want.
That can be a real problem for time critical needs, such as people with IBD needing a loo now.
Particularly an issue in eg rural tourism areas.
The reason why so many people have radar keys is because it’s the only way you can keep 2 toddlers in tow or similar.
We had Radar keys as with twins and a pushchair it was impossible if you were by yourself to take them to the loo.
Reality is we probably just need more disabled loos
Quite.
I've never understood the howling by some against disabled adaptations - the war on woke before wokefinding was invented. Ramps make life so much easier for so many people, for instance - parents with prams, deliveries, and so on.
And part of the problem is ****ing architects too often design standard loos for 15" high elves on a diet. When I knackered my shoulder I was really glad to be able to use a disabled loo just for the extra space to deal with my coat etc.
Indeed. I can't manage in a toilet anymore without the help of a carer; normally Mrs C. of course.
On topic, I'm beyond amazed at the mess the Courts seem about to get us into.. I can well understand, and sympathise with, a woman's desire for 'exclusive' space. I can equally understand that a GENUINE trans, either way, wants, or at least prefers, to be able to use the toilet space aimed at their deeply felt gender. I can see, of course, that the sort of evil b*****d who claims to be trans to prey on women would abuse that. Perhaps the solution is to have a fourth toilet; men's, women's, disabled and trans.
And Good Morning to one and all; straight, gay, and unsure.
Arguably loos should simply be private booths - male public latrines are nearly always seedy, and seem rare in new buildings. If they were private, then the issue largely goes away - who cares who is in a booth behind a closed door? I appreciate that this doesn't provide the "refuge" which some women see as an essential element, but perhaps that issue needs to be addressed separately, by having a non-latrinal room where women can chill out?
Our office building has a bit of everything. On our floor, separate men's and women's facilities (with urinals in the men's). Accessible with key cards only by our staff and visitors.
On the ground floor, individual unisex cubicles, accessible to all in the building.
In contrast, in our Manchester office, there are only cubicles in the men's.
Both offices only a few years old.
What they do have in common is hand driers only, no paper towels. Which I find a bit of an annoyance.
Loos in Auckland Uni in 1998 were unisex - simply cubicles, not gender separation.
At big venues you generally do want urinals for speed, but in most situations cubicles is enough.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
Given the significant public support for the principle (setting aside for now the complexities), killing the bill is likely to be pretty unpopular.
Especially, as seems likely, if the government fails to come up with a replacement on their own time.
If the government wished to provide time for a more detailed assessment, and opportunities for detailed amendment, they could already have made that clear. They haven't.
If this is how it ends, then it's another failure on the part of Parliament to adequately represent its electorate.
Royal Commission is the answer here. Too divisive and strongly held views for a government to support despite a clear public majority in favour. Parliament won't allocate sufficient time and attention to the detail and drafting of laws from a private members bill.
Another decade and a few tens of millions for the lawyers, then.
"The long grass is the answer here."
I'm not convinced it is.
Why on earth a decade?
The last two we started were Long Term Care for the Elderly which ran from 1997-1999 and House of Lords Reform 1999-2000 which was done in 11 months.
I don't see why it should it take more than a year.
Should the country pay £100m to lawyers to get this law 10% better? Absolutely.
The Long Term Care one was thrown in the bin on delivery. I assume Lords one was too as nothing much has happened in decades.
Royal Commission is can kicking of the highest order.
Incidentally, businesses can help to. Remember the old meme about builders wolf-whistling at women? It, and similar acts, did happen frequently.
Nearly thirty years ago, the construction industry came up with the Considerate Contractors Scheme. A small part of this was to agree that such behaviour was unacceptable - and for some firms, meant dismissal. From what I've read, not only has this pretty much stopped such behaviour on building sites for contractors signed up to the scheme, it has trickled down to smaller contractors as well.
I am sure this is right and good, but the thought of a society in which wolf whistling was the big problem in men/women relationships is a pleasant one.
IMHO the question of female objection to male attention is closely related to who is doing the attending.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
I'm not sure you are (in a minority).
I'm very much in favour of abortion being legal, but I'd like that figure to be much lower. Not least because I find it hard believe that abortion is without long-lasting impacts on those who choose it (but perhaps that's coloured by my feeling that it's not something I would choose and which would have a long term impact on me - and I'm a man, so you can presumably multiply all that for women!). Far better to either avoid most of the pregnancies or provide better support for them to be taken to term.
The elderly driver problem has come up in my feed this morning.
This one was 87, and the balance of police action was not right. Cyclist lit up like a Christmas tree. The vehicle was started from stationery and driven across the road, when the cyclist was directly in front view and had been in view for almost 10 seconds.
Following an official complaint, the cyclist believing the driving crossed the threshold for prosecution for careless or dangerous driving, West Yorkshire Police stood by the decision and said it had "no issue" with the outcome and is "more than satisfied that there is no evidence whatsoever of an offence of dangerous driving".
It's interesting that the WYP did not address the "Careless" comment.
Meanwhile in the real world more devastating evidence of the gross incompetence and corruption endemic on the fabric of Tory Britain over the past 14 years.
National Audit Office refuse to sign off or endorse Public Accounts including local Authorities due to a calamitous number of Red Flags, incomplete missing data or in some cases no data at all in recent years.
This deserves a 10 million petition if anything does. People need to be held responsible and bought to account.
Meanwhile in the real world more devastating evidence of the gross incompetence and corruption endemic on the fabric of Tory Britain over the past 14 years.
National Audit Office refuse to sign off or endorse Public Accounts including local Authorities due to a calamitous number of Red Flags, incomplete missing data or in some cases no data at all in recent years.
This deserves a 10 million petition if anything does. People need to be held responsible and bought to account.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
Given the significant public support for the principle (setting aside for now the complexities), killing the bill is likely to be pretty unpopular.
Especially, as seems likely, if the government fails to come up with a replacement on their own time.
If the government wished to provide time for a more detailed assessment, and opportunities for detailed amendment, they could already have made that clear. They haven't.
If this is how it ends, then it's another failure on the part of Parliament to adequately represent its electorate.
Royal Commission is the answer here. Too divisive and strongly held views for a government to support despite a clear public majority in favour. Parliament won't allocate sufficient time and attention to the detail and drafting of laws from a private members bill.
Another decade and a few tens of millions for the lawyers, then.
"The long grass is the answer here."
I'm not convinced it is.
Why on earth a decade?
The last two we started were Long Term Care for the Elderly which ran from 1997-1999 and House of Lords Reform 1999-2000 which was done in 11 months.
I don't see why it should it take more than a year.
Should the country pay £100m to lawyers to get this law 10% better? Absolutely.
The Long Term Care one was thrown in the bin on delivery. I assume Lords one was too as nothing much has happened in decades.
Royal Commission is can kicking of the highest order.
It really doesn't have to be. There is clear public support but it is divisive and will take a lot of care and attention to create good law. For those two reasons there are inevitably other things governments will prefer to spend their time on. Delegating the creating good law part also takes away some of the opposition.
One of the cool parts of biology is that, even if you think you understand something, you can always go deeper.
Case in point: insulin. It's been studied for over a century, but a paper out today uncovers a major mechanism of how the body manages insulin recycling.
Briefly, inceptor is a protein in beta cells that acts as a lysosomal sorting receptor for insulin and proinsulin. Inceptor binds these molecules and directs them to lysosomes for degradation.
Knockout experiments in cells show that removing inceptor increases insulin stores. And if you treat cells with monoclonal antibodies targeting inceptor proteins, and thus disrupting their ability to bind to proinsulin, the same outcome happens.
The Biology that I was taught at A level in the mid to late 50's seems to have little relationship to that being taught now.
To be fair that was over 70 years ago. In the 1950's we didn't have NMR, X-ray crystallography was in its infancy. Our knowledge of structural biology alone is a 1000 fold greater. We can even use AI to predict how a give amino-acid sequence would fold in 3D.
The thing about biology (and one of the reasons I am a chemist, not a biologist, despite my job in a Life Sciences department) is that its really hard to de-couple the complexity. If I do a chemical reaction I can change one component at a time. Its really, really hard to do the same thing in biology because all the pathways interconnect. This is one of the reasons that I despair of people who think losing weight is as easy as eating less and moving more. The body has evolved over millions of years to react to different conditions, be they feast or famine or the need to run 25 miles a day or not. Biology is NEVER simple and if anyone tells you it is, they are very ignorant.
Indeed. The lack of simplicity is one of the joys of Biology. As a pharmacist one daily (more or less, anyway) came across situations where the human body didn't act in the predicted way when a drug was administered. In my A level days our teacher used to regularly rail against a Soviet biological scientist called Lysenko, who was a favourite of Stalin, since Lysenko's theories coincided with Stalin's word view. Nowadays I attend Zoom lectures on scientific subjects and when biological subjects are discussed I find mischievous opportunity to ask the speaker whether or not their findings give support to Lysenko's position. The answer is generally that they don't, but he wasn't as wrong as Western scientists held him to be in the 50's.
Biology is complicated. There are always edge cases. There are a small number of people who don't fit into a biological male v. biological female category. That makes me suspicious of any arguments that talk about a reality of a biological male v. biological female category. Life is complicated: we should try to find ways to accommodate that complexity.
I suggest that most people are accepting that some people are, in some sense, "born in the wrong body" and should be supported through a gender transition. I suggest that most people are also accepting that some transgendered individuals really have altered sex and should be treated as such for most purposes.
If I was in hospital on a male ward and Kim Petras was put in the bed next to me, I would be confused and perturbed. I imagine if you were a woman on a female ward and Balian Buschbaum was put in the bed next to you, you might feel similarly.
The question is where to draw the line. Activists who argue that no-one should be allowed to change sex, as is Cyclefree's position, and those who argue that it should be trivially simple to do so, as is Scottish Greens' position, are both taking stances that may run contrary to public support for some sort of compromise, middling way. Will this Supreme Court decision allow for some middle way?
Has any individual ever produced both sperm & eggs ?
There are people who produce neither.
There is a very rare condition called ovotesticular disorder where someone has both ovaries and testes, or with both ovarian and testicular tissue, possibly in the same 'ovotestis'. I'm no expert in this, but I believe there are some cases of ovotesticular disorder where the individual does produce both sperm and eggs, although producing neither or just producing eggs is commoner.
Is producing sperm or eggs the thing that matters most? If you are to share a space with someone, I think it matters more whether they look female or male, have female or male anatomy, and identify as female or male than what gametes they produce.
Trump has announced he will impose 25% tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China. Does this mean NAFTA is dead? How can you impose tariffs on apartner country ina free trade area?
It shows that whatever trade agreement or bloc you might be part of, every nation remains sovereign.
If they are only trade blocks then yes. Shame we weren't part of one of those.
Whatever they were. We could have imposed tariffs on Germany if we had wanted.
How? In the customs union there's no need for German goods even to be labelled as such.
Biology is complicated. There are always edge cases. There are a small number of people who don't fit into a biological male v. biological female category. That makes me suspicious of any arguments that talk about a reality of a biological male v. biological female category. Life is complicated: we should try to find ways to accommodate that complexity.
I suggest that most people are accepting that some people are, in some sense, "born in the wrong body" and should be supported through a gender transition. I suggest that most people are also accepting that some transgendered individuals really have altered sex and should be treated as such for most purposes.
If I was in hospital on a male ward and Kim Petras was put in the bed next to me, I would be confused and perturbed. I imagine if you were a woman on a female ward and Balian Buschbaum was put in the bed next to you, you might feel similarly.
The question is where to draw the line. Activists who argue that no-one should be allowed to change sex, as is Cyclefree's position, and those who argue that it should be trivially simple to do so, as is Scottish Greens' position, are both taking stances that may run contrary to public support for some sort of compromise, middling way. Will this Supreme Court decision allow for some middle way?
Has any individual ever produced both sperm & eggs ?
There are people who produce neither.
There is a very rare condition called ovotesticular disorder where someone has both ovaries and testes, or with both ovarian and testicular tissue, possibly in the same 'ovotestis'. I'm no expert in this, but I believe there are some cases of ovotesticular disorder where the individual does produce both sperm and eggs, although producing neither or just producing eggs is commoner.
Is producing sperm or eggs the thing that matters most? If you are to share a space with someone, I think it matters more whether they look female or male, have female or male anatomy, and identify as female or male than what gametes they produce.
Will you please quit with this. The people who decide to change gender are not the people you describe.
Maybe assisted dying (which I support) should take its place in the queue to be dealt with as soon as the government/parliament has satisfactorily dealt with social care, which they have all promised to do for the last couple of decades. I think this new government has already started equivocating and delaying; but the Dilnot report was in 2011.
One of the cool parts of biology is that, even if you think you understand something, you can always go deeper.
Case in point: insulin. It's been studied for over a century, but a paper out today uncovers a major mechanism of how the body manages insulin recycling.
Briefly, inceptor is a protein in beta cells that acts as a lysosomal sorting receptor for insulin and proinsulin. Inceptor binds these molecules and directs them to lysosomes for degradation.
Knockout experiments in cells show that removing inceptor increases insulin stores. And if you treat cells with monoclonal antibodies targeting inceptor proteins, and thus disrupting their ability to bind to proinsulin, the same outcome happens.
The Biology that I was taught at A level in the mid to late 50's seems to have little relationship to that being taught now.
To be fair that was over 70 years ago. In the 1950's we didn't have NMR, X-ray crystallography was in its infancy. Our knowledge of structural biology alone is a 1000 fold greater. We can even use AI to predict how a give amino-acid sequence would fold in 3D.
The thing about biology (and one of the reasons I am a chemist, not a biologist, despite my job in a Life Sciences department) is that its really hard to de-couple the complexity. If I do a chemical reaction I can change one component at a time. Its really, really hard to do the same thing in biology because all the pathways interconnect. This is one of the reasons that I despair of people who think losing weight is as easy as eating less and moving more. The body has evolved over millions of years to react to different conditions, be they feast or famine or the need to run 25 miles a day or not. Biology is NEVER simple and if anyone tells you it is, they are very ignorant.
Indeed. The lack of simplicity is one of the joys of Biology. As a pharmacist one daily (more or less, anyway) came across situations where the human body didn't act in the predicted way when a drug was administered. In my A level days our teacher used to regularly rail against a Soviet biological scientist called Lysenko, who was a favourite of Stalin, since Lysenko's theories coincided with Stalin's word view. Nowadays I attend Zoom lectures on scientific subjects and when biological subjects are discussed I find mischievous opportunity to ask the speaker whether or not their findings give support to Lysenko's position. The answer is generally that they don't, but he wasn't as wrong as Western scientists held him to be in the 50's.
My favourite 'wronged' scientist is Lamarck. Observing that Blacksmiths tended to have son's that were strong and also became blacksmiths he theorised that changes a person acquired over time could be passed on to their offspring. Now when science first described genetics and the inheritance of genes as the dominant reason for offspring looking like their parents, people have derided Lamarck ever since. And yet epigenetics suggests he wasn't as wrong as all that. Modifications of genes and gene expression through lived experience can impart changes on offspring. A classic example is the children born during and after the 'Hunger Winter of 44-45 in Holland.
The toilet issue: continues to be exaggerated? Can't we all legally use any loos? I can use female toilets I think. As long as I don't expose myself. Perhaps I'm wrong?
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Can you show me contemporary reporting where the 1967 Act promised abortion would be rare? (It has clearly delivered safe and legal.)
There was clearly a long and complex debate and different MPs had different views and expectations for the Act. However, the people behind the 1967 Act never expected abortion would be rare. A big driver for legalising abortion was the large number of people having illegal and unsafe abortions: https://www.kindtowomen.com/ is a short documentary on that that I recommend you watch. Clearly, the logic of legalising abortion is to make those events safe and legal; nothing in the legislation could reasonably have been expected to reduce the frequency of abortion.
There is no need for early abortion to be rare. Over half of fertilisation events fail spontaneously anyway. Nature aborts more than human intervention. Small clumps of cells are not people.
The elderly driver problem has come up in my feed this morning.
This one was 87, and the balance of police action was not right. Cyclist lit up like a Christmas tree. The vehicle was started from stationery and driven across the road, when the cyclist was directly in front view and had been in view for almost 10 seconds.
Following an official complaint, the cyclist believing the driving crossed the threshold for prosecution for careless or dangerous driving, West Yorkshire Police stood by the decision and said it had "no issue" with the outcome and is "more than satisfied that there is no evidence whatsoever of an offence of dangerous driving".
It's interesting that the WYP did not address the "Careless" comment.
They did, though, refer the driver for a Fitness to Drive Assessment. To be fair I suspect that may be more effective in changing habits that the hammer of prosecution. I've had one, and it was tough.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
Wasn't David Steel's Bill allocated adequate time at the request of the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins?
Yes. Which is sort of the government supporting legalisation, but is also sort of the government staying neutral.
That's the challenge, isn't it? Providing time is neutral in one way, but allows change and is therefore, ergo, pushing against the status quo.
Maybe assisted dying (which I support) should take its place in the queue to be dealt with as soon as the government/parliament has satisfactorily dealt with social care, which they have all promised to do for the last couple of decades. I think this new government has already started equivocating and delaying; but the Dilnot report was in 2011.
The main issue with social care is lack of money, and the inconsistency between what the public are willing to pay in tax and the services they expect. Assisted dying is a different type of issue and the law can be changed to reflect the publics view without significant changes in taxation.
One of the cool parts of biology is that, even if you think you understand something, you can always go deeper.
Case in point: insulin. It's been studied for over a century, but a paper out today uncovers a major mechanism of how the body manages insulin recycling.
Briefly, inceptor is a protein in beta cells that acts as a lysosomal sorting receptor for insulin and proinsulin. Inceptor binds these molecules and directs them to lysosomes for degradation.
Knockout experiments in cells show that removing inceptor increases insulin stores. And if you treat cells with monoclonal antibodies targeting inceptor proteins, and thus disrupting their ability to bind to proinsulin, the same outcome happens.
The Biology that I was taught at A level in the mid to late 50's seems to have little relationship to that being taught now.
To be fair that was over 70 years ago. In the 1950's we didn't have NMR, X-ray crystallography was in its infancy. Our knowledge of structural biology alone is a 1000 fold greater. We can even use AI to predict how a give amino-acid sequence would fold in 3D.
The thing about biology (and one of the reasons I am a chemist, not a biologist, despite my job in a Life Sciences department) is that its really hard to de-couple the complexity. If I do a chemical reaction I can change one component at a time. Its really, really hard to do the same thing in biology because all the pathways interconnect. This is one of the reasons that I despair of people who think losing weight is as easy as eating less and moving more. The body has evolved over millions of years to react to different conditions, be they feast or famine or the need to run 25 miles a day or not. Biology is NEVER simple and if anyone tells you it is, they are very ignorant.
Indeed. The lack of simplicity is one of the joys of Biology. As a pharmacist one daily (more or less, anyway) came across situations where the human body didn't act in the predicted way when a drug was administered. In my A level days our teacher used to regularly rail against a Soviet biological scientist called Lysenko, who was a favourite of Stalin, since Lysenko's theories coincided with Stalin's word view. Nowadays I attend Zoom lectures on scientific subjects and when biological subjects are discussed I find mischievous opportunity to ask the speaker whether or not their findings give support to Lysenko's position. The answer is generally that they don't, but he wasn't as wrong as Western scientists held him to be in the 50's.
My favourite 'wronged' scientist is Lamarck. Observing that Blacksmiths tended to have son's that were strong and also became blacksmiths he theorised that changes a person acquired over time could be passed on to their offspring. Now when science first described genetics and the inheritance of genes as the dominant reason for offspring looking like their parents, people have derided Lamarck ever since. And yet epigenetics suggests he wasn't as wrong as all that. Modifications of genes and gene expression through lived experience can impart changes on offspring. A classic example is the children born during and after the 'Hunger Winter of 44-45 in Holland.
Quite. Probably a better example than Lysenko. Thanks.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
Being an embryo has worse odds of survival than a game of Russian Roulette.
Over half of all embryos fail to go to term naturally, most unnoticed.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
One of the cool parts of biology is that, even if you think you understand something, you can always go deeper.
Case in point: insulin. It's been studied for over a century, but a paper out today uncovers a major mechanism of how the body manages insulin recycling.
Briefly, inceptor is a protein in beta cells that acts as a lysosomal sorting receptor for insulin and proinsulin. Inceptor binds these molecules and directs them to lysosomes for degradation.
Knockout experiments in cells show that removing inceptor increases insulin stores. And if you treat cells with monoclonal antibodies targeting inceptor proteins, and thus disrupting their ability to bind to proinsulin, the same outcome happens.
The Biology that I was taught at A level in the mid to late 50's seems to have little relationship to that being taught now.
To be fair that was over 70 years ago. In the 1950's we didn't have NMR, X-ray crystallography was in its infancy. Our knowledge of structural biology alone is a 1000 fold greater. We can even use AI to predict how a give amino-acid sequence would fold in 3D.
The thing about biology (and one of the reasons I am a chemist, not a biologist, despite my job in a Life Sciences department) is that its really hard to de-couple the complexity. If I do a chemical reaction I can change one component at a time. Its really, really hard to do the same thing in biology because all the pathways interconnect. This is one of the reasons that I despair of people who think losing weight is as easy as eating less and moving more. The body has evolved over millions of years to react to different conditions, be they feast or famine or the need to run 25 miles a day or not. Biology is NEVER simple and if anyone tells you it is, they are very ignorant.
Indeed. The lack of simplicity is one of the joys of Biology. As a pharmacist one daily (more or less, anyway) came across situations where the human body didn't act in the predicted way when a drug was administered. In my A level days our teacher used to regularly rail against a Soviet biological scientist called Lysenko, who was a favourite of Stalin, since Lysenko's theories coincided with Stalin's word view. Nowadays I attend Zoom lectures on scientific subjects and when biological subjects are discussed I find mischievous opportunity to ask the speaker whether or not their findings give support to Lysenko's position. The answer is generally that they don't, but he wasn't as wrong as Western scientists held him to be in the 50's.
My favourite 'wronged' scientist is Lamarck. Observing that Blacksmiths tended to have son's that were strong and also became blacksmiths he theorised that changes a person acquired over time could be passed on to their offspring. Now when science first described genetics and the inheritance of genes as the dominant reason for offspring looking like their parents, people have derided Lamarck ever since. And yet epigenetics suggests he wasn't as wrong as all that. Modifications of genes and gene expression through lived experience can impart changes on offspring. A classic example is the children born during and after the 'Hunger Winter of 44-45 in Holland.
Quite. Probably a better example than Lysenko. Thanks.
You might also look at what Mao's regime tried to do with close planting etc for rice.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
Or abstain from sex until marriage and give funds to the Roman Catholic church and conservative evangelical churches to promote that
The toilet issue: continues to be exaggerated? Can't we all legally use any loos? I can use female toilets I think. As long as I don't expose myself. Perhaps I'm wrong?
Using a loo without exposing yourself sounds perilous for your trousers .
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
You need me for that.
Recently I had a chat about the birds and bees with my eldest, I consider it an utter success because after the chat he agreed to not have sex until he is at least 25 years old on the proviso I never talk about the subject with him ever again.
Maybe assisted dying (which I support) should take its place in the queue to be dealt with as soon as the government/parliament has satisfactorily dealt with social care, which they have all promised to do for the last couple of decades. I think this new government has already started equivocating and delaying; but the Dilnot report was in 2011.
Theresa May tried, the voters said sod off in 2017 and she lost her majority as a result.
No main party will ever touch social care funding alone again unless cross party agreement
Biology is complicated. There are always edge cases. There are a small number of people who don't fit into a biological male v. biological female category. That makes me suspicious of any arguments that talk about a reality of a biological male v. biological female category. Life is complicated: we should try to find ways to accommodate that complexity.
I suggest that most people are accepting that some people are, in some sense, "born in the wrong body" and should be supported through a gender transition. I suggest that most people are also accepting that some transgendered individuals really have altered sex and should be treated as such for most purposes.
If I was in hospital on a male ward and Kim Petras was put in the bed next to me, I would be confused and perturbed. I imagine if you were a woman on a female ward and Balian Buschbaum was put in the bed next to you, you might feel similarly.
The question is where to draw the line. Activists who argue that no-one should be allowed to change sex, as is Cyclefree's position, and those who argue that it should be trivially simple to do so, as is Scottish Greens' position, are both taking stances that may run contrary to public support for some sort of compromise, middling way. Will this Supreme Court decision allow for some middle way?
Has any individual ever produced both sperm & eggs ?
There are people who produce neither.
There is a very rare condition called ovotesticular disorder where someone has both ovaries and testes, or with both ovarian and testicular tissue, possibly in the same 'ovotestis'. I'm no expert in this, but I believe there are some cases of ovotesticular disorder where the individual does produce both sperm and eggs, although producing neither or just producing eggs is commoner.
Is producing sperm or eggs the thing that matters most? If you are to share a space with someone, I think it matters more whether they look female or male, have female or male anatomy, and identify as female or male than what gametes they produce.
Will you please quit with this. The people who decide to change gender are not the people you describe.
I was asked a question, so I answered it. My original post was focusing more on transgendered individual. However, I note that laws have to work for everyone. I don't want laws around transgendered individuals to negatively impact intersex people.
I would also note the following: clearly, there are cases where someone's biology is more complicated than one of two categories. People who decide to change gender report a different psychology. If I acknowledge someone's gonads or gametes can be complicated, I think I have to acknowledge that someone's brain can be complicated too. I don't know, these are not feelings I've ever had, but if someone's chromosomes can differ to their anatomy, I think it possible that someone's sense of self can also differ to their anatomy.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
Or abstain from sex until marriage and give funds to the Roman Catholic church and conservative evangelical churches to promote that
Abstention programmes have repeatedly been proven not to work.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
You need me for that.
Recently I had a chat about the birds and bees with my eldest, I consider it an utter success because after the chat he agreed to not have sex until he is at least 25 years old on the proviso I never talk about the subject with him ever again.
Quite - "you do what, with what in where? That's gross Daddy, I'm never doing that..."
When I was about 13 I swore that I would never drink alcohol, didn't see the point.
The toilet issue: continues to be exaggerated? Can't we all legally use any loos? I can use female toilets I think. As long as I don't expose myself. Perhaps I'm wrong?
Using a loo without exposing yourself sounds perilous for your trousers .
I spent some time with a catheter. Drinking with no need to empty a nagging bladder was ace, although you do have to watch that bag's capacity...
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
Being an embryo has worse odds of survival than a game of Russian Roulette.
Yes. Also need to add in miscarriages (best estimates 110-150k/year in E&W) and stillbirths of course.
Congratulations folks, for not only being the lucky gamete that met another gamete, but also making it to the outside in one piece.
Much of the abortion debate is based on a classic example of misunderstanding the anthropic principle, I suppose.
The elderly driver problem has come up in my feed this morning.
This one was 87, and the balance of police action was not right. Cyclist lit up like a Christmas tree. The vehicle was started from stationery and driven across the road, when the cyclist was directly in front view and had been in view for almost 10 seconds.
Following an official complaint, the cyclist believing the driving crossed the threshold for prosecution for careless or dangerous driving, West Yorkshire Police stood by the decision and said it had "no issue" with the outcome and is "more than satisfied that there is no evidence whatsoever of an offence of dangerous driving".
It's interesting that the WYP did not address the "Careless" comment.
They did, though, refer the driver for a Fitness to Drive Assessment. To be fair I suspect that may be more effective in changing habits that the hammer of prosecution. I've had one, and it was tough.
In a way that's fair comment.
But I think here (and I've occasionally seen other similar, or worse, videos) it is blatant enough that an on the spot suspension of license is necessary. The driver was just not looking, or entirely absent in mind, or could not see.
The serious problem here is the slopey-shouldered let-it-go institutional attitude of the NYP. It could have been a child or pensioner crossing the sideroad, rather than a fit person riding a cycle who could physically cope with being knocked down.
How is running someone in full view down, to the extent of keeping your vehicle stationary until they are immediately in front *then* starting moving and running them down, NOT careless driving?
Either it is below expected standard in running someone down, or it is below standard in leaving home in a state of not being fit to drive a vehicle.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
Or abstain from sex until marriage and give funds to the Roman Catholic church and conservative evangelical churches to promote that
Abstention programmes have repeatedly been proven not to work.
What if we don't ever mention sex until people are married? Surely that would work......
Meghan Markle has released a statement following her appearance at a Thanksgiving event last week, sans husband Prince Harry.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are reportedly in the midst of a professional separation, with reports suggesting that their work relationship is “in a very bad state.”
Meanwhile in the real world more devastating evidence of the gross incompetence and corruption endemic on the fabric of Tory Britain over the past 14 years.
National Audit Office refuse to sign off or endorse Public Accounts including local Authorities due to a calamitous number of Red Flags, incomplete missing data or in some cases no data at all in recent years.
This deserves a 10 million petition if anything does. People need to be held responsible and bought to account.
The elderly driver problem has come up in my feed this morning.
This one was 87, and the balance of police action was not right. Cyclist lit up like a Christmas tree. The vehicle was started from stationery and driven across the road, when the cyclist was directly in front view and had been in view for almost 10 seconds.
Following an official complaint, the cyclist believing the driving crossed the threshold for prosecution for careless or dangerous driving, West Yorkshire Police stood by the decision and said it had "no issue" with the outcome and is "more than satisfied that there is no evidence whatsoever of an offence of dangerous driving".
It's interesting that the WYP did not address the "Careless" comment.
I remember when my grandfather asked his GP if he should keep driving the doctor told him he had numerous elderly patients who still drove despite being legally blind. I always bear this in mind when cycling.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
Doubtful about this. SFAICS on the whole people know fairly early on from very wide publicity that sex and pregnancy are closely linked and that contraception is the remedy for the sexually active who don't wish to be pregnant. I am not sure what more is needed in terms of quantity of information. Are many people getting pregnant out of ignorance? That all went in the 1950s didn't it?
The elderly driver problem has come up in my feed this morning.
This one was 87, and the balance of police action was not right. Cyclist lit up like a Christmas tree. The vehicle was started from stationery and driven across the road, when the cyclist was directly in front view and had been in view for almost 10 seconds.
Following an official complaint, the cyclist believing the driving crossed the threshold for prosecution for careless or dangerous driving, West Yorkshire Police stood by the decision and said it had "no issue" with the outcome and is "more than satisfied that there is no evidence whatsoever of an offence of dangerous driving".
It's interesting that the WYP did not address the "Careless" comment.
They did, though, refer the driver for a Fitness to Drive Assessment. To be fair I suspect that may be more effective in changing habits that the hammer of prosecution. I've had one, and it was tough.
In a way that's fair comment.
But I think here (and I've occasionally seen other similar, or worse, videos) it is blatant enough that an on the spot suspension of license is necessary. The driver was just not looking, or entirely absent in mind, or could not see.
The serious problem here is the slopey-shouldered let-it-go institutional attitude of the NYP. It could have been a child or pensioner crossing the sideroad, rather than a fit person riding a cycle who could physically cope with being knocked down.
How is running someone in full view down, to the extent of keeping your vehicle stationary until they are immediately in front *then* starting moving and running them down, NOT careless driving?
Either it is below expected standard in running someone down, or it is below standard in leaving home in a state of not being fit to drive a vehicle.
TBF that's an excellent driver by West Yorkshire standards.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
Or abstain from sex until marriage and give funds to the Roman Catholic church and conservative evangelical churches to promote that
Abstention programmes have repeatedly been proven not to work.
They need to be backed up by appropriate sanctions, eg death by stoning, to achieve the desired efficacy.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
You need me for that.
Recently I had a chat about the birds and bees with my eldest, I consider it an utter success because after the chat he agreed to not have sex until he is at least 25 years old on the proviso I never talk about the subject with him ever again.
Quite - "you do what, with what in where? That's gross Daddy, I'm never doing that..."
When I was about 13 I swore that I would never drink alcohol, didn't see the point.
I do now.
My late father-in-law used to tell us that at about the same age he attended a boys Sunday School class where the 'teacher' tried persuade all his pupils to Sign the Pledge, to refrain from alcohol. My f-i-l refused to do so; he wouldn't, he apparently said, be bound by a promise he made when not properly aware of what was involved. In later years he reckoned he was the only former member of that class who didn't drink.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
Or abstain from sex until marriage and give funds to the Roman Catholic church and conservative evangelical churches to promote that
I restrained from sex outside of marriage, applied retroactively.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
Or abstain from sex until marriage and give funds to the Roman Catholic church and conservative evangelical churches to promote that
Abstention programmes have repeatedly been proven not to work.
Without doubt the most ludicrous post I have ever read on here. Of course they work because by definition you can't get pregnant if you aren't having sex.
If more younger people got married earlier it would also mean they could have babies earlier when wanted and would help raise our declining fertility rate as well
Biology is complicated. There are always edge cases. There are a small number of people who don't fit into a biological male v. biological female category. That makes me suspicious of any arguments that talk about a reality of a biological male v. biological female category. Life is complicated: we should try to find ways to accommodate that complexity.
I suggest that most people are accepting that some people are, in some sense, "born in the wrong body" and should be supported through a gender transition. I suggest that most people are also accepting that some transgendered individuals really have altered sex and should be treated as such for most purposes.
If I was in hospital on a male ward and Kim Petras was put in the bed next to me, I would be confused and perturbed. I imagine if you were a woman on a female ward and Balian Buschbaum was put in the bed next to you, you might feel similarly.
The question is where to draw the line. Activists who argue that no-one should be allowed to change sex, as is Cyclefree's position, and those who argue that it should be trivially simple to do so, as is Scottish Greens' position, are both taking stances that may run contrary to public support for some sort of compromise, middling way. Will this Supreme Court decision allow for some middle way?
Has any individual ever produced both sperm & eggs ?
There are people who produce neither.
There is a very rare condition called ovotesticular disorder where someone has both ovaries and testes, or with both ovarian and testicular tissue, possibly in the same 'ovotestis'. I'm no expert in this, but I believe there are some cases of ovotesticular disorder where the individual does produce both sperm and eggs, although producing neither or just producing eggs is commoner.
Is producing sperm or eggs the thing that matters most? If you are to share a space with someone, I think it matters more whether they look female or male, have female or male anatomy, and identify as female or male than what gametes they produce.
Surely it's much simpler: have they ever watched an episode of Love is Blind or Real Housewives?
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
You need me for that.
Recently I had a chat about the birds and bees with my eldest, I consider it an utter success because after the chat he agreed to not have sex until he is at least 25 years old on the proviso I never talk about the subject with him ever again.
Quite - "you do what, with what in where? That's gross Daddy, I'm never doing that..."
When I was about 13 I swore that I would never drink alcohol, didn't see the point.
I do now.
My late father-in-law used to tell us that at about the same age he attended a boys Sunday School class where the 'teacher' tried persuade all his pupils to Sign the Pledge, to refrain from alcohol. My f-i-l refused to do so; he wouldn't, he apparently said, be bound by a promise he made when not properly aware of what was involved. In later years he reckoned he was the only former member of that class who didn't drink.
Thats funny! I did my PhD with a guy who had made a bet with his uncle (I think it was his uncle) that he could not drink until he was 28 (or something like - it was a long time). This guy did it. He drank soft drinks whenver we went out, was happy to go dancing at nightclubs etc. For ten years. Won the pointless bet and now is a drinker like most people. I often wonder if he regrets it. Some of my best uni times and sporting memories are tied up with drink (not too excess, although on a couple of occasions...).
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
You need me for that.
Recently I had a chat about the birds and bees with my eldest, I consider it an utter success because after the chat he agreed to not have sex until he is at least 25 years old on the proviso I never talk about the subject with him ever again.
Quite - "you do what, with what in where? That's gross Daddy, I'm never doing that..."
When I was about 13 I swore that I would never drink alcohol, didn't see the point.
I do now.
I think I only ever had one chat with my father about the birds and bees, it was on the drive to university where he reminded me that I was a good Muslim and I shouldn’t try any of the local delicacies which I took I mean to stick to a halal diet and not to drink alcohol, something which I’ve stuck to.
It turns out he may have been talking about females where I spectacularly failed to be a good Muslim.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
Or abstain from sex until marriage and give funds to the Roman Catholic church and conservative evangelical churches to promote that
Abstention programmes have repeatedly been proven not to work.
Without doubt the most ludicrous post I have ever read on here. Of course they work because by definition you can't get pregnant if you aren't having sex.
If more younger people got married earlier it would also mean they could have babies earlier when wanted and would help raise our declining fertility rate as well
You obviously have never had anything to do with a Family Planning Clinic.
Trump has announced he will impose 25% tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China. Does this mean NAFTA is dead? How can you impose tariffs on apartner country ina free trade area?
It would be a blatant breach of (Trump's own) treaty, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's dead. What happens next would decide whether it's just in abeyance, or beyond recovery.
NAFTA was superseded by USMCA or CUSMA (if you're Canadian). But yes, tariffs would seem to be a breach.
This is a taste of things to come. You wake up, flick on the radio, and it's "US President Donald Trump has said ..." and there'll be another piece of his wrong-headed spiteful simplistic nonsense dominating the airwaves. It's a technique. Provoke, inflame, intimidate, dominate.
Thank you, circa 250k voters in the RustBelt. You're lovely people.
Works in opposition. Unless he achieves actual dictatorship, I doubt it will for very long, in government.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
You need me for that.
Recently I had a chat about the birds and bees with my eldest, I consider it an utter success because after the chat he agreed to not have sex until he is at least 25 years old on the proviso I never talk about the subject with him ever again.
Quite - "you do what, with what in where? That's gross Daddy, I'm never doing that..."
When I was about 13 I swore that I would never drink alcohol, didn't see the point.
I do now.
I think I only ever had one chat with my father about the birds and bees, it was on the drive to university where he reminded me that I was a good Muslim and I shouldn’t try any of the local delicacies which I took I mean to stick to a halal diet and not to drink alcohol, something which I’ve stuck to.
It turns out he may have been talking about females where I spectacularly failed to be a good Muslim.
I must have been asking questions at some point because my mum gave me a book to read. I don't recall the details. That was it. I attended an all boys grammar school and we didn't get much guidance there either.
Meghan Markle has released a statement following her appearance at a Thanksgiving event last week, sans husband Prince Harry.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are reportedly in the midst of a professional separation, with reports suggesting that their work relationship is “in a very bad state.”
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
You need me for that.
Recently I had a chat about the birds and bees with my eldest, I consider it an utter success because after the chat he agreed to not have sex until he is at least 25 years old on the proviso I never talk about the subject with him ever again.
Quite - "you do what, with what in where? That's gross Daddy, I'm never doing that..."
When I was about 13 I swore that I would never drink alcohol, didn't see the point.
I do now.
I think I only ever had one chat with my father about the birds and bees, it was on the drive to university where he reminded me that I was a good Muslim and I shouldn’t try any of the local delicacies which I took I mean to stick to a halal diet and not to drink alcohol, something which I’ve stuck to.
It turns out he may have been talking about females where I spectacularly failed to be a good Muslim.
I must have been asking questions at some point because my mum gave me a book to read. I don't recall the details. That was it. I attended an all boys grammar school and we didn't get much guidance there either.
I attended a similar establishment and got loads of guidance in the playground, most of it wrong!
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
You need me for that.
Recently I had a chat about the birds and bees with my eldest, I consider it an utter success because after the chat he agreed to not have sex until he is at least 25 years old on the proviso I never talk about the subject with him ever again.
Quite - "you do what, with what in where? That's gross Daddy, I'm never doing that..."
When I was about 13 I swore that I would never drink alcohol, didn't see the point.
I do now.
My late father-in-law used to tell us that at about the same age he attended a boys Sunday School class where the 'teacher' tried persuade all his pupils to Sign the Pledge, to refrain from alcohol. My f-i-l refused to do so; he wouldn't, he apparently said, be bound by a promise he made when not properly aware of what was involved. In later years he reckoned he was the only former member of that class who didn't drink.
Thats funny! I did my PhD with a guy who had made a bet with his uncle (I think it was his uncle) that he could not drink until he was 28 (or something like - it was a long time). This guy did it. He drank soft drinks whenever we went out, was happy to go dancing at nightclubs etc. For ten years. Won the pointless bet and now is a drinker like most people. I often wonder if he regrets it. Some of my best uni times and sporting memories are tied up with drink (not too excess, although on a couple of occasions...).
I'm the contrary: I wish I had drunk less. It was only every used as a crutch to get past a social situation, whereas in retrospect it was easier to just avoid the social situation.
Incidentally, businesses can help to. Remember the old meme about builders wolf-whistling at women? It, and similar acts, did happen frequently.
Nearly thirty years ago, the construction industry came up with the Considerate Contractors Scheme. A small part of this was to agree that such behaviour was unacceptable - and for some firms, meant dismissal. From what I've read, not only has this pretty much stopped such behaviour on building sites for contractors signed up to the scheme, it has trickled down to smaller contractors as well.
I am sure this is right and good, but the thought of a society in which wolf whistling was the big problem in men/women relationships is a pleasant one.
IMHO the question of female objection to male attention is closely related to who is doing the attending.
You miss the point.
The point is this: there was a poor behaviour that was so common that it was sometimes featured in sitcoms and comedy shows: the workman on scaffolding, builder's bum prominent, whistling at a passing attractive girl. Hopefully we can all agree that this was low-level bad behaviour.
You just don't see it any more. It hasn't been totally wiped out, but it is nowhere near as common as it once was; and that is largely because of peer pressure within the industry, helped by this scheme.
The more bad or poor behaviour that we make socially unacceptable, the better. Don't turn a blind eye; don't say "Boys will be boys". And in my view, tolerance of low-level bad behaviour leads to worse behaviour.
It doesn't have to be laws. It is up to us.
(This post was interrupted by a prolonged scritch of a kitten.)
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
Or abstain from sex until marriage and give funds to the Roman Catholic church and conservative evangelical churches to promote that
Abstention programmes have repeatedly been proven not to work.
Without doubt the most ludicrous post I have ever read on here. Of course they work because by definition you can't get pregnant if you aren't having sex.
If more younger people got married earlier it would also mean they could have babies earlier when wanted and would help raise our declining fertility rate as well
Well clearly abstention leads to no unwanted pregnancies.
But I have my doubts that abstention programmes lead to abstention.
You see where the logic chain breaks down?
You need to be very, very persuasive to overcome people's natural desire to have sex. Someone professionally religious saying "because God says so" doesn't cut it.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
Or abstain from sex until marriage and give funds to the Roman Catholic church and conservative evangelical churches to promote that
Abstention programmes have repeatedly been proven not to work.
Without doubt the most ludicrous post I have ever read on here. Of course they work because by definition you can't get pregnant if you aren't having sex.
If more younger people got married earlier it would also mean they could have babies earlier when wanted and would help raise our declining fertility rate as well
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
Or abstain from sex until marriage and give funds to the Roman Catholic church and conservative evangelical churches to promote that
Abstention programmes have repeatedly been proven not to work.
They need to be backed up by appropriate sanctions, eg death by stoning, to achieve the desired efficacy.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
Or abstain from sex until marriage and give funds to the Roman Catholic church and conservative evangelical churches to promote that
Abstention programmes have repeatedly been proven not to work.
Without doubt the most ludicrous post I have ever read on here. Of course they work because by definition you can't get pregnant if you aren't having sex.
If more younger people got married earlier it would also mean they could have babies earlier when wanted and would help raise our declining fertility rate as well
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
Most abortions aren't even a procedure; they're medically induced (usually before ten weeks) by pills like mifepristone.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
We need to be a bit careful with official statistics on abortion. It used to be a surgical procedure but nowadays abortions are mainly induced with drugs, and during the pandemic, at home. It is possible that shagging increased during the pandemic in tribute to the Prime Minister or because there was nothing else to do, but abortions shot up.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
Given the significant public support for the principle (setting aside for now the complexities), killing the bill is likely to be pretty unpopular.
Especially, as seems likely, if the government fails to come up with a replacement on their own time.
If the government wished to provide time for a more detailed assessment, and opportunities for detailed amendment, they could already have made that clear. They haven't.
If this is how it ends, then it's another failure on the part of Parliament to adequately represent its electorate.
Royal Commission is the answer here. Too divisive and strongly held views for a government to support despite a clear public majority in favour. Parliament won't allocate sufficient time and attention to the detail and drafting of laws from a private members bill.
Another decade and a few tens of millions for the lawyers, then.
"The long grass is the answer here."
I'm not convinced it is.
Why on earth a decade?
The last two we started were Long Term Care for the Elderly which ran from 1997-1999 and House of Lords Reform 1999-2000 which was done in 11 months.
I don't see why it should it take more than a year.
Should the country pay £100m to lawyers to get this law 10% better? Absolutely.
Because it's very obvious that government doesn't want any involvement in such legislation.
Trump has announced he will impose 25% tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China. Does this mean NAFTA is dead? How can you impose tariffs on apartner country ina free trade area?
It would be a blatant breach of (Trump's own) treaty, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's dead. What happens next would decide whether it's just in abeyance, or beyond recovery.
NAFTA was superseded by USMCA or CUSMA (if you're Canadian). But yes, tariffs would seem to be a breach.
This is a taste of things to come. You wake up, flick on the radio, and it's "US President Donald Trump has said ..." and there'll be another piece of his wrong-headed spiteful simplistic nonsense dominating the airwaves. It's a technique. Provoke, inflame, intimidate, dominate.
Thank you, circa 250k voters in the RustBelt. You're lovely people.
Works in opposition. Unless he achieves actual dictatorship, I doubt it will for very long, in government.
True. I was just emoting there really. He's the elected leader of the US and he has a mandate (albeit not for everything that came out of his mouth during the campaign). In fact, if one is dry and dispassionate about this (which I can be) it's going to be fascinating how he gets on.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
Or abstain from sex until marriage and give funds to the Roman Catholic church and conservative evangelical churches to promote that
Abstention programmes have repeatedly been proven not to work.
Without doubt the most ludicrous post I have ever read on here. Of course they work because by definition you can't get pregnant if you aren't having sex.
If more younger people got married earlier it would also mean they could have babies earlier when wanted and would help raise our declining fertility rate as well
Although only a personal experience but those I know who marry in their early 20s often get divorced and those that marry later in life more often stay married.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
Or abstain from sex until marriage and give funds to the Roman Catholic church and conservative evangelical churches to promote that
Abstention programmes have repeatedly been proven not to work.
Without doubt the most ludicrous post I have ever read on here. Of course they work because by definition you can't get pregnant if you aren't having sex.
If more younger people got married earlier it would also mean they could have babies earlier when wanted and would help raise our declining fertility rate as well
Well clearly abstention leads to no unwanted pregnancies.
But I have my doubts that abstention programmes lead to abstention.
You see where the logic chain breaks down?
You need to be very, very persuasive to overcome people's natural desire to have sex. Someone professionally religious saying "because God says so" doesn't cut it.
Hell as the alternative was sometimes persuasive.
As I also said they could still have sex, just within marriage if more got married in their 20s not their 30s and later
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
You need me for that.
Recently I had a chat about the birds and bees with my eldest, I consider it an utter success because after the chat he agreed to not have sex until he is at least 25 years old on the proviso I never talk about the subject with him ever again.
Oh, I've had worse than that. In my early twenties, I was in a relationship with a lady a little over a decade older. She had two kids in their early teens, and as the kid's dad was pretty absent, she asked me to have a talk with her son about the birds and the bees.
It was somewhat awkward. He knew most of what I was willing to say anyway, and he ended the conversation by asking: "So are you doing it with mum, then?"
There are some moments in your life that are so absolutely cringeworthy that they could be put in a sitcom. That was one of mine.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
Or abstain from sex until marriage and give funds to the Roman Catholic church and conservative evangelical churches to promote that
Abstention programmes have repeatedly been proven not to work.
Without doubt the most ludicrous post I have ever read on here. Of course they work because by definition you can't get pregnant if you aren't having sex.
If more younger people got married earlier it would also mean they could have babies earlier when wanted and would help raise our declining fertility rate as well
Although only a personal experience but those I know who marry in their early 20s often get divorced and those that marry later in life more often stay married.
I have no idea if that is statistical true.
Seems plausible on a simple time at risk analysis - the later you marry, the less time you have to get a divorce before you die
Trump has announced he will impose 25% tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China. Does this mean NAFTA is dead? How can you impose tariffs on apartner country ina free trade area?
It would be a blatant breach of (Trump's own) treaty, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's dead. What happens next would decide whether it's just in abeyance, or beyond recovery.
NAFTA was superseded by USMCA or CUSMA (if you're Canadian). But yes, tariffs would seem to be a breach.
This is a taste of things to come. You wake up, flick on the radio, and it's "US President Donald Trump has said ..." and there'll be another piece of his wrong-headed spiteful simplistic nonsense dominating the airwaves. It's a technique. Provoke, inflame, intimidate, dominate.
Thank you, circa 250k voters in the RustBelt. You're lovely people.
Works in opposition. Unless he achieves actual dictatorship, I doubt it will for very long, in government.
I take it you were in a coma between 2016 and 2020?
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
Or abstain from sex until marriage and give funds to the Roman Catholic church and conservative evangelical churches to promote that
Abstention programmes have repeatedly been proven not to work.
Without doubt the most ludicrous post I have ever read on here. Of course they work because by definition you can't get pregnant if you aren't having sex.
If more younger people got married earlier it would also mean they could have babies earlier when wanted and would help raise our declining fertility rate as well
Although only a personal experience but those I know who marry in their early 20s often get divorced and those that marry later in life more often stay married.
I have no idea if that is statistical true.
I've never been divorced, but I lived with a lovely lass for four years before she left me for another continent. Those four years certainly knocked some of the rough edges off me, and made my later relationship with Mrs J much easier.
Meghan Markle has released a statement following her appearance at a Thanksgiving event last week, sans husband Prince Harry.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are reportedly in the midst of a professional separation, with reports suggesting that their work relationship is “in a very bad state.”
OK, who had six years to separation?
There's a slight Andy-Fergie feel to that statement, maybe the other way round.
One of the cool parts of biology is that, even if you think you understand something, you can always go deeper.
Case in point: insulin. It's been studied for over a century, but a paper out today uncovers a major mechanism of how the body manages insulin recycling.
Briefly, inceptor is a protein in beta cells that acts as a lysosomal sorting receptor for insulin and proinsulin. Inceptor binds these molecules and directs them to lysosomes for degradation.
Knockout experiments in cells show that removing inceptor increases insulin stores. And if you treat cells with monoclonal antibodies targeting inceptor proteins, and thus disrupting their ability to bind to proinsulin, the same outcome happens.
The Biology that I was taught at A level in the mid to late 50's seems to have little relationship to that being taught now.
To be fair that was over 70 years ago. In the 1950's we didn't have NMR, X-ray crystallography was in its infancy. Our knowledge of structural biology alone is a 1000 fold greater. We can even use AI to predict how a give amino-acid sequence would fold in 3D.
The thing about biology (and one of the reasons I am a chemist, not a biologist, despite my job in a Life Sciences department) is that its really hard to de-couple the complexity. If I do a chemical reaction I can change one component at a time. Its really, really hard to do the same thing in biology because all the pathways interconnect. This is one of the reasons that I despair of people who think losing weight is as easy as eating less and moving more. The body has evolved over millions of years to react to different conditions, be they feast or famine or the need to run 25 miles a day or not. Biology is NEVER simple and if anyone tells you it is, they are very ignorant.
Indeed. The lack of simplicity is one of the joys of Biology. As a pharmacist one daily (more or less, anyway) came across situations where the human body didn't act in the predicted way when a drug was administered. In my A level days our teacher used to regularly rail against a Soviet biological scientist called Lysenko, who was a favourite of Stalin, since Lysenko's theories coincided with Stalin's word view. Nowadays I attend Zoom lectures on scientific subjects and when biological subjects are discussed I find mischievous opportunity to ask the speaker whether or not their findings give support to Lysenko's position. The answer is generally that they don't, but he wasn't as wrong as Western scientists held him to be in the 50's.
Yes he was, since he was reasoning from Marxist dogma, not evidence. And rejected the latter when it wasn't convenient (almost all of the time).
That the process of genetic inheritance can involve processes other the genetic code itself, is somewhat beside the point.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
Or abstain from sex until marriage and give funds to the Roman Catholic church and conservative evangelical churches to promote that
Abstention programmes have repeatedly been proven not to work.
Without doubt the most ludicrous post I have ever read on here. Of course they work because by definition you can't get pregnant if you aren't having sex.
If more younger people got married earlier it would also mean they could have babies earlier when wanted and would help raise our declining fertility rate as well
Although only a personal experience but those I know who marry in their early 20s often get divorced and those that marry later in life more often stay married.
I have no idea if that is statistical true.
I doubt it makes much difference if you have met the right person.
However biologically speaking there is no doubt it is easier to get pregnant in your 20s than older
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
Or abstain from sex until marriage and give funds to the Roman Catholic church and conservative evangelical churches to promote that
Abstention programmes have repeatedly been proven not to work.
Without doubt the most ludicrous post I have ever read on here. Of course they work because by definition you can't get pregnant if you aren't having sex.
If more younger people got married earlier it would also mean they could have babies earlier when wanted and would help raise our declining fertility rate as well
Although only a personal experience but those I know who marry in their early 20s often get divorced and those that marry later in life more often stay married.
I have no idea if that is statistical true.
I can think of two reasons it might be true.
First, couples who marry ten years earlier than other couples have ten extra years in which to get divorced.
Second, couples who marry later are more likely already to have children, which is one of the lifechanging events that can lead to divorce, so they have already got over that first hurdle.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
Or abstain from sex until marriage and give funds to the Roman Catholic church and conservative evangelical churches to promote that
Abstention programmes have repeatedly been proven not to work.
Without doubt the most ludicrous post I have ever read on here. Of course they work because by definition you can't get pregnant if you aren't having sex.
If more younger people got married earlier it would also mean they could have babies earlier when wanted and would help raise our declining fertility rate as well
Although only a personal experience but those I know who marry in their early 20s often get divorced and those that marry later in life more often stay married.
I have no idea if that is statistical true.
That fwiw was me. Married at 24 and again (and still) at 46.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
Or abstain from sex until marriage and give funds to the Roman Catholic church and conservative evangelical churches to promote that
Abstention programmes have repeatedly been proven not to work.
Without doubt the most ludicrous post I have ever read on here. Of course they work because by definition you can't get pregnant if you aren't having sex.
If more younger people got married earlier it would also mean they could have babies earlier when wanted and would help raise our declining fertility rate as well
Although only a personal experience but those I know who marry in their early 20s often get divorced and those that marry later in life more often stay married.
I have no idea if that is statistical true.
I've never been divorced, but I lived with a lovely lass for four years before she left me for another continent. Those four years certainly knocked some of the rough edges off me, and made my later relationship with Mrs J much easier.
Meghan Markle has released a statement following her appearance at a Thanksgiving event last week, sans husband Prince Harry.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are reportedly in the midst of a professional separation, with reports suggesting that their work relationship is “in a very bad state.”
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
Or abstain from sex until marriage and give funds to the Roman Catholic church and conservative evangelical churches to promote that
Abstention programmes have repeatedly been proven not to work.
Without doubt the most ludicrous post I have ever read on here. Of course they work because by definition you can't get pregnant if you aren't having sex.
If more younger people got married earlier it would also mean they could have babies earlier when wanted and would help raise our declining fertility rate as well
Although only a personal experience but those I know who marry in their early 20s often get divorced and those that marry later in life more often stay married.
I have no idea if that is statistical true.
I've never been divorced, but I lived with a lovely lass for four years before she left me for another continent. Those four years certainly knocked some of the rough edges off me, and made my later relationship with Mrs J much easier.
I had no idea you were a continent!
I'm the eight continent, which lies just beyond the edge of most world maps. I am a wonderful place, filled with Jertyhals and Illominuans. The sun rises perfectly in the north most mornings, and sets suitably late so as to not annoy @Leon. The beaches are sandy, the sea warm, and the flutterbies plentiful.
The assisted dying Bill could be scrapped before it is voted on as a group of cross-party MPs have tabled an amendment to stop it.
MPs are scheduled to vote on the Private Members’ Bill proposed by Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults on Friday.
But Ben Spencer, the Conservative MP, Munira Wilson, a Liberal Democrat, and Labour’s Anna Dixon have co-sponsored a so-called “fatal motion amendment” that could kill the Bill if enough MPs support it.
The amendment comes amid widespread concern in the Commons that such a significant change was proposed as a Private Members’ Bill, meaning there is limited detailed assessment and analysis of the provisions it includes.
This is opposition in principle dressed up as concern about the detail.
It's a strength that it's a PMB rather than a government (and therefore adversarial party) matter. That is how we created our consensus on abortion, wasn't it? David Steel in 1967.
I am not sure the abortion bill is the best analogy.
It was promised as being safe, rare, and legal and it has proven to be anything but.
I am somebody favourable to assisted dying but this bill doesn’t inspire confidence.
Not rare. But safe and legal.
Legal is a given, of course, if you have a law to make abortion legal!
On rarity, it is quite an eye opening number for abortion - quick Google (Statista) gives me 214k abortions (E&W) in 2021 versus 695k live births (UK). There will be many more pregnancies, of course, which would be a better denominator, but it's a big proportion and slightly underestimated by excluding Scotland and NI, isn't it?
I don't have a problem with abortion - in principle, I don't think I would ever have chosen it personally - but those proportions give me pause for thought. The timings and reasons would merit investigation.
(Interestingly, live births are all over the place, from 670k up to about 812k nd back again in the last twenty years, but abortions are much more static - similar amounts of sex and accidents, I guess, but varying numbers of intentional pregnancies)
I am very much in a minority on PB I think, but it seems to me that in a civilised society with contraception and a welfare state abortion levels really should be quite low, and quite exceptional, and should not be routinely normalised.
I am loads more comfortable about assisted dying than seeing abortion as routine minor procedure; I am puzzled there is not a stronger sense of this in a society which would be generally sympathetic to humanism and with an appreciation of new life for its intrinsic worth.
If you want to reduce abortions, give more support to family planning services and sex education. It's simple to do.
You need me for that.
Recently I had a chat about the birds and bees with my eldest, I consider it an utter success because after the chat he agreed to not have sex until he is at least 25 years old on the proviso I never talk about the subject with him ever again.
Comments
Trump is putting protectionism v free trade back firmly on the agenda again
The thing about biology (and one of the reasons I am a chemist, not a biologist, despite my job in a Life Sciences department) is that its really hard to de-couple the complexity. If I do a chemical reaction I can change one component at a time. Its really, really hard to do the same thing in biology because all the pathways interconnect. This is one of the reasons that I despair of people who think losing weight is as easy as eating less and moving more. The body has evolved over millions of years to react to different conditions, be they feast or famine or the need to run 25 miles a day or not. Biology is NEVER simple and if anyone tells you it is, they are very ignorant.
Also, Germany vs USA:
https://youtu.be/wKttQlu9FVM?t=23
On the ground floor, individual unisex cubicles, accessible to all in the building.
In contrast, in our Manchester office, there are only cubicles in the men's.
Both offices only a few years old.
What they do have in common is hand driers only, no paper towels. Which I find a bit of an annoyance.
👍 For: 152 (+28)
👎 Against: 164 (+27)
🤷 Unsure/Abstain: 79 (+44)
❓ Unknown: 244 (-99)
Forecasted Result:
👍 For: 287
👎 Against: 287
Changes w/ Yesterday.
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1861095459688689705
Vast majority of LD MPs for and vast majority of Tory MPs against.
Labour MPs split but of those declared more narrowly for. More Green, SNP and Plaid MPs for, more DUP and Reform MPs against.
At big venues you generally do want urinals for speed, but in most situations cubicles is enough.
Royal Commission is can kicking of the highest order.
IMHO the question of female objection to male attention is closely related to who is doing the attending.
I'm very much in favour of abortion being legal, but I'd like that figure to be much lower. Not least because I find it hard believe that abortion is without long-lasting impacts on those who choose it (but perhaps that's coloured by my feeling that it's not something I would choose and which would have a long term impact on me - and I'm a man, so you can presumably multiply all that for women!). Far better to either avoid most of the pregnancies or provide better support for them to be taken to term.
This one was 87, and the balance of police action was not right. Cyclist lit up like a Christmas tree. The vehicle was started from stationery and driven across the road, when the cyclist was directly in front view and had been in view for almost 10 seconds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGajEX9flzw
Following an official complaint, the cyclist believing the driving crossed the threshold for prosecution for careless or dangerous driving, West Yorkshire Police stood by the decision and said it had "no issue" with the outcome and is "more than satisfied that there is no evidence whatsoever of an offence of dangerous driving".
It's interesting that the WYP did not address the "Careless" comment.
https://road.cc/content/news/cyclist-knocked-bike-criticises-police-response-311419
National Audit Office refuse to sign off or endorse Public Accounts including local Authorities due to a calamitous number of Red Flags, incomplete missing data or in some cases no data at all in recent years.
This deserves a 10 million petition if anything does. People need to be held responsible and bought to account.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/nov/26/watchdog-refuses-to-sign-off-uk-public-sector-accounts-over-unreliable-data
In my A level days our teacher used to regularly rail against a Soviet biological scientist called Lysenko, who was a favourite of Stalin, since Lysenko's theories coincided with Stalin's word view. Nowadays I attend Zoom lectures on scientific subjects and when biological subjects are discussed I find mischievous opportunity to ask the speaker whether or not their findings give support to Lysenko's position. The answer is generally that they don't, but he wasn't as wrong as Western scientists held him to be in the 50's.
There is a very rare condition called ovotesticular disorder where someone has both ovaries and testes, or with both ovarian and testicular tissue, possibly in the same 'ovotestis'. I'm no expert in this, but I believe there are some cases of ovotesticular disorder where the individual does produce both sperm and eggs, although producing neither or just producing eggs is commoner.
Is producing sperm or eggs the thing that matters most? If you are to share a space with someone, I think it matters more whether they look female or male, have female or male anatomy, and identify as female or male than what gametes they produce.
Cyclefree says "loose language (sex and gender used interchangeably in an inconsistent way)"
This is the root of most absurdities. Trans activists do it deliberately. Other useful idiots are fooled.
There was clearly a long and complex debate and different MPs had different views and expectations for the Act. However, the people behind the 1967 Act never expected abortion would be rare. A big driver for legalising abortion was the large number of people having illegal and unsafe abortions: https://www.kindtowomen.com/ is a short documentary on that that I recommend you watch. Clearly, the logic of legalising abortion is to make those events safe and legal; nothing in the legislation could reasonably have been expected to reduce the frequency of abortion.
There is no need for early abortion to be rare. Over half of fertilisation events fail spontaneously anyway. Nature aborts more than human intervention. Small clumps of cells are not people.
I've had one, and it was tough.
That's the challenge, isn't it? Providing time is neutral in one way, but allows change and is therefore, ergo, pushing against the status quo.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XT9z1OUpeLmmPU-unj7VxmYI4qU6NFQlNcXDJUiQYWw/edit?gid=683441814#gid=683441814
Recently I had a chat about the birds and bees with my eldest, I consider it an utter success because after the chat he agreed to not have sex until he is at least 25 years old on the proviso I never talk about the subject with him ever again.
No main party will ever touch social care funding alone again unless cross party agreement
I would also note the following: clearly, there are cases where someone's biology is more complicated than one of two categories. People who decide to change gender report a different psychology. If I acknowledge someone's gonads or gametes can be complicated, I think I have to acknowledge that someone's brain can be complicated too. I don't know, these are not feelings I've ever had, but if someone's chromosomes can differ to their anatomy, I think it possible that someone's sense of self can also differ to their anatomy.
When I was about 13 I swore that I would never drink alcohol, didn't see the point.
I do now.
But I think here (and I've occasionally seen other similar, or worse, videos) it is blatant enough that an on the spot suspension of license is necessary. The driver was just not looking, or entirely absent in mind, or could not see.
The serious problem here is the slopey-shouldered let-it-go institutional attitude of the NYP. It could have been a child or pensioner crossing the sideroad, rather than a fit person riding a cycle who could physically cope with being knocked down.
How is running someone in full view down, to the extent of keeping your vehicle stationary until they are immediately in front *then* starting moving and running them down, NOT careless driving?
Either it is below expected standard in running someone down, or it is below standard in leaving home in a state of not being fit to drive a vehicle.
Meghan Markle has released a statement following her appearance at a Thanksgiving event last week, sans husband Prince Harry.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are reportedly in the midst of a professional separation, with reports suggesting that their work relationship is “in a very bad state.”
Certainly I am happy for labour, conservative, and lib dems to be held to account for their incompetence
Bradford is shocking.
In later years he reckoned he was the only former member of that class who didn't drink.
If more younger people got married earlier it would also mean they could have babies earlier when wanted and would help raise our declining fertility rate as well
It turns out he may have been talking about females where I spectacularly failed to be a good Muslim.
Unless he achieves actual dictatorship, I doubt it will for very long, in government.
The point is this: there was a poor behaviour that was so common that it was sometimes featured in sitcoms and comedy shows: the workman on scaffolding, builder's bum prominent, whistling at a passing attractive girl. Hopefully we can all agree that this was low-level bad behaviour.
You just don't see it any more. It hasn't been totally wiped out, but it is nowhere near as common as it once was; and that is largely because of peer pressure within the industry, helped by this scheme.
The more bad or poor behaviour that we make socially unacceptable, the better. Don't turn a blind eye; don't say "Boys will be boys". And in my view, tolerance of low-level bad behaviour leads to worse behaviour.
It doesn't have to be laws. It is up to us.
(This post was interrupted by a prolonged scritch of a kitten.)
But I have my doubts that abstention programmes lead to abstention.
You see where the logic chain breaks down?
You need to be very, very persuasive to overcome people's natural desire to have sex. Someone professionally religious saying "because God says so" doesn't cut it.
The official statistics come with lots of graphs in pretty colours showing different subgroups.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/abortion-statistics-for-england-and-wales-2022/abortion-statistics-england-and-wales-2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLNlv4O3Rcs
I have no idea if that is statistical true.
As I also said they could still have sex, just within marriage if more got married in their 20s not their 30s and later
It was somewhat awkward. He knew most of what I was willing to say anyway, and he ended the conversation by asking: "So are you doing it with mum, then?"
There are some moments in your life that are so absolutely cringeworthy that they could be put in a sitcom. That was one of mine.
ETA: Apparently a real thing, though: https://www.co-oplegalservices.co.uk/media-centre/articles-sept-dec-2018/will-marrying-young-end-in-divorce/ Although (seriously) time at risk might come in to it there - if, as implied - the measure is divorce before 30 years, then the older ages at marriage will have fewer getting to 30 years and perhaps less capacity - income, health, mental - to realistically consider divorce.
Mix of decent outcomes and falling over the line.
That the process of genetic inheritance can involve processes other the genetic code itself, is somewhat beside the point.
However biologically speaking there is no doubt it is easier to get pregnant in your 20s than older
The bigger problem is that I don’t think the proposed solution is correct and that needs to be throughly debated
First, couples who marry ten years earlier than other couples have ten extra years in which to get divorced.
Second, couples who marry later are more likely already to have children, which is one of the lifechanging events that can lead to divorce, so they have already got over that first hurdle.
But the racing is on so no time to investigate.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/nov/26/watchdog-refuses-to-sign-off-uk-public-sector-accounts-over-unreliable-data