SharkBait’s Sunday Shout!
I’m pro-choice, in pretty much everything - the only proviso I put on personal choice is a pagan/wicca one "If it harm none, then do as you will." If it harms no-one else, then I struggle to see a problem. It’s when choice is pressured or removed that I get shouty and angry.
So This news from the USA, and This too - is all good as far as I am concerned.
US President Barack Obama has lifted a ban on federal funding for foreign family planning agencies that promote or give information about abortion.
Predictably the pro-lifers are shouting about it, pleading the old arguments. But as I see it there is no other way. A woman’s body is her own and she has the choice of what to do or not to do with it, and that includes pregnancy and termination of any pregnancy. Women should own their own fertility.
Guantanamo prison "will be closed no later than one year from now."
Wow. I mean, wow. Although I will admit to being slightly concerned over what they intend to do with those incarcerated at Guantanamo. But the process, the interrogations, the torture and the trials are all halted while it all gets investigated. We can but hope for some fair justice for those people in there.
I look round the rest of the BBC news site and at the rest of the world and I despair at the human race’s capacity for harm. I feel like such a small voice screaming into the wind. Other Sunday shouts have been lists of harm, of pain and of loss, it’s depressing.
But for a change, I can look across the Atlantic and smile at the changes happening. Barack Obama will be remembered as the first non-white US President, no matter what he does. So far he’s off to a great start. These two stories are the ones that caught my eye, and as someone who is not a US citizen, has never been to America, I don’t get a lot of what goes on over there. I have enough to get angry about here in England!
I’ve heard/read that Iraq is to be "returned to its people."; that US troops are to be brought home; that the administration is to be more open and that:
Not since the first days of President Jimmy Carter in 1977 has any president concentrated so clearly on cleaning up government and restoring the transparency of its processes to the American people.
It’s big stuff. More over at Women’s Space.
