Thursday, May 29, 2008

Abortion: The Final Answer

There's been a lot of talk recently about changing the law on abortion, for example reducing the limit down to 22 weeks or even 20 weeks. Few topics are more controversial, but fortunately I've come up with a brilliant plan to end the debate once and for all.

Forget all this talk of time limits, medical necessity and the like, I have the answer right here: we simply pass a law asserting that all women have the right to 'reasonable termination'.

Is that brilliant or what ? Obviously, we'll need a legal framework to decide what's reasonable. I'm figuring it should work something like this: as soon as the woman in question is in the recovery room, two cops should start interrogating her while she's still under the influence.

Next up, the cops should arrest her and hold her for 72 hours, while their colleagues start searching her house and questioning friends, acquaintances and bitter co-workers. Chief constables will always find the money for this, especially the ones who've given speeches warning of the dangers of a 'Chinese style' culture of infanticide.

Once they've dug up enough dirt, the police will carry out a series of interviews in which the suspect is asked questions like 'I notice you have "Silence of the Lambs" on DVD, do you like films with killing in them ?'. Or maybe 'I've heard you used to hang out with a couple of feminists, I bet you girls had a few laughs talking about how you'd like to abort a kid, right ?'.

After the 72 hours are up, the police can let the suspect go on bail, and pass the file on to an independent prosecutor. Obviously, the prosecutor's ultimate boss will have also given speeches warning of the dangers of a 'culture of death', but that doesn't mean the decision won't be made based purely on the facts of the case. In fact, there's a good chance that after a few months, they might even let the suspect know she's been cleared.

Then again, some of these cases will go all the way. In fact, some of these women will have to be held on remand, just to make sure they don't have any more abortions. Still, they'll all get their day in court... eventually. Like, maybe, fourteen or so months later. The jury might clear them, in which case no harm done. They might even get costs awarded. Legal costs, of course. Nothing for stress, time off work or anything like that though, that'd be stupid. As long as some of them get cleared eventually, no one can say we're anti-abortion, right ?

See, it's a brilliant idea! I came up with it while I was reading this comment thread over here.

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