Type "abortion" into Google Images and you will conclude that my chosen image is mild.

The UK abortion law was introduced on the 27th of October in 1967 by David Steel. With this fact alone, many people would immediately conclude that this law is immoral and wrong but allow me a few sentences to explain why this law saved as many lives as it killed.

At the time, casual intercourse had become accepted and contraception research was not as advanced as it is today. As a result, the level of unwanted pregnancies augmented but there were no medical solutions nor was it socially accepted to abort your unborn child. From this, abortion on the black market became a popular service but sadly resulted in many women dying during this unsafe and unpracticed process. Unsurprisingly, orphanages and binned babies increased in number and parliament decided to introduce the abortion law which allowed a woman to abort their pregnancy within 28 weeks of gestation.

Unrelated to the above paragraph, Wikipedia statistics will tell you that in 2001 ten thousand women were raped and in 2002 three thousand more than previously in the UK. However in 2007, BBC reported a day before my birthday that 85,000 women had been raped but only 800 people convicted for rape crimes in that year. Either these 800 men are very quick or our justice system is rubbish but let’s pause for a moment. 85,000 women in a year – that’s one in two hundred women. I hope you are shaking your head in disgust too. Go to your Facebook friend list and take note that it is likely that someone on your friend list will be raped in the United Kingdom.

Putting the shock value aside, I would like to link the two together – becoming pregnant through rape. In the United States, 5% of rape victims under the age of 45 became pregnant resulting in 32,000 unplanned pregnancies that year. Would you have an abortion? Well you would probably be mad not to. Firstly conception outside of marriage never results in a positive upbringing but more importantly who would want to bare a child conceived in such a manner to a father of such evil. Would you have an abortion if it was against your religion? No religion out right bans abortion and that is true across the board of the major religions from Islam to Christianity – even Catholics, contrary to common misconception allow abortion.

Abortion in Today’s Society

In David Cameron’s manifesto he has pledged to lower the current abortion time limit from 24 weeks of pregnancy to 20 weeks. In 2007 nearly 200,000 women received an abortion in England and Wales where 38% were medical related, leaving 62% to unwanted children. More interestingly, 90% of these abortions took place within 13 weeks of gestation and 78% within 10 weeks. This shows that there are very few women who actually carry their child for more than three months who then decide they do not want it. So why is this reduction in abortion time allowance relevant?

Britain has the scar on its reputation of having teenage mums pushing around prams, holding a cigarette, on the way to the council to pick up their benefits. Whilst this policy may not reduce the number of abortions in numerical figures, it will play a psychological role in the morals that this country holds. Over the previous decade, the morals of the British have diminished severely and the quoted rape figures reiterates my statement. Don’t fall into it. Don’t become a common Brit that can be categorized as scum, who ruin your whole week just on sight of them. Our current coalition government show promise, and with their recent transparent motives, our nation cannot swoop any lower and the only way is up.

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Society has progressed into the twenty-first century improving and self-assessing itself constantly. The concept of “what I conquer is mine” is no more and order has slowly found itself in the world. The more economic developed countries have found order first and subsequently showed the world how to live, or rather suggested an alternate way to live. Unfortunately at times, these alternate ways of living are enforced rather than adopted and this has cause in a loss of culture within history.

One concept that has caught my eye most recently is equality between men and woman. These two genders hold different roles in society and recently this used to be appreciated from both corners. However recently, in the pass decade or so, society has tried to bring together man and woman to be exactly equal in that when a woman has a “powerful” job, somewhere male dominated, she is seen as the first woman to do so and people see it as an amazing achievement to the oppressed woman around the world. In addition, the amount of female managers is much less in offices than men, is this sexism? No.

These statistics always irritate me in there existence alone. Every time the underdog wins, it is widely noted and commented on. But the fact that people comment on the rising numbers of women in top positions is implying that woman are an underdog. For example, when Oprah Winfrey became the first black female billionaire, the press went wild but merely saying that look at this underdog who is black and female is racist and sexist in itself but is paraded as applauding equality in the world. Another example is Halle Berry being the first black female to win an oscar award and most recently Kathryn Bigelow was the first female director to win the Best Director award – well best directress I suppose.

The fact that we do have Best Actor and Best Actress awards separately shows in itself that men and women cannot even compete in the same level which is sexist and this is seen across the board and not just film awards but in sport and job titles such as waiter and waitress. What infuriates me the most is that the woman sees the man as a bench mark to peak of social existence i.e the woman will always try to go and do what the man does but will never start her own trail or break new heights that man has not achieved. Instead, the woman will try to be the first in what man has already done. Now of course this is no way an insult to woman but rather to men who look down to woman and women who try to equal men.

Recently the tables for best companies to work for were released and Nandos high-street restaurant won by some points. Strangely, one of the indices that measured whether the company was good or not was the ratio of woman to man and if this ratio was greater than one, the company held a high rank in the league table. Now to me, this is the prime example of how we think we are doing good but doing something entirely the antithesis. A company is not better if more woman are working there but nor is a company better if it has more men working there. The fact this ratio exists shows that racism and sexism still exists so when you hear people say “look how society has evolved” – they are just ignorant.

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“Tonight, we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done” said President Bush after the horrific actions on September 11th 2001.

Whatever comments and digs people have made in the direction of the former President, the above comment sums up the Iraq war more than President Bush realised. Recently we saw Prime Minister Blair give his statement at the Queen Elizabeth II court where he robustly justified his decision on joining America in liberating Iraq from the dictatorship and tyranny of Saddam Hussein. As the 2010 elections approach, the labour party is still scarred with waging two wars whilst in power and unfortunately they are still going on. Iraq has seen over 100,000 of its citizens fall and British troops have lost 250 soldiers in Afghanistan. I’m not sure why these numbers should be shocking but at the end of it, it was a war.

During the reign of Saddam Hussein, the rest of the world had this fear of Saddam built up by Europe and North America. Their allegations were that he had weapons of mass destruction and within forty-five minutes, Saddam could destroy countries as far as Turkey. Whilst this intelligence was later nullified with no weapons of such ability found at all, the public world immediately came to the conclusion that this war was illegal. However, the reasons for going into war was never that Saddam actually possessed these weapons but rather that Saddam had the ability to attain these weapons. From this, one would immediately say, why stop a buyer instead of a seller. Well, most likely these so called weapons would be traced back to the Americans and well, they don’t want to reveal that.

Yes Saddam had no link to Al-Qaeda and yes Saddam had nothing to do with the events of September 11th but that is not why they invaded Iraq. They invaded Afghanistan for this, and next is Pakistan and Yemen to find this “axis of evil” Osama bin Laden (who comes from one of the richest construction families in the Arabia). September 11th did not cause the west to invade Iraq but rather moved the spotlight onto this region and they soon realised what this dictator was doing and was planning to do and this is why the Iraq war can be justified.

Saddam was a tyrant, he deserved to be taken down. I spent two weeks in Iraq over the Christmas holidays and every single Iraqi was thankful that democracy had been brought to Iraq and they had been liberated from his evil hold over a great country. Not only were the Iraqis relieved but Saddam had enemies such as Iran, Lebanon, Turkey and Syria to name a few, who were all more than happy to see his death on YouTube.

If things had stayed as they were and Europe and America had not taken space in the Middle-East, a huge weapons trade would be going on amongst the black market and then perhaps the nearby countries would be suffering more than they are now. In fact, I feel these surrounding countries should be thankful to the invading nations after freeing them from such a disease that spoiled the image of the Middle-East.

So when analyzing President Bush’s comments stated above, justice was delivered to the Iraqi people and to the whole of that nation. Yes, America still consider the Middle-East as the enemies and will never allow them to grow and thrive like the west has, however, I am thankful to the liberators because I can now travel and see the countries in that region for the beauty they truly hold rather than travel in fear of this indecent human being.

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People die every day. Some say one person dies every six seconds with a birth every three, thus increasing the population to a now near seven billion. However, last week’s events in Haiti saw one of the largest decreases in population in the shortest amount of time. The usual questions are asked when one hears the death toll of 200,000 people and counting, of why this has all happened. Well this simple answer is, there was an earthquake of 7.0 on the Richter Scale and the buildings were not designed to withstand such force through its walls and thus collapsed which destroyed infrastructure, slowing down aid to the people who need it. The complicated answer is – God.

Never would one find a religion, cult or society that doesn’t say God is not kind or not merciful. I believe even an atheist or agnostic would not go as far and say God is not one of these characteristics. Why then are so many people dying daily, of disease, sudden death, war or, most interesting of all, natural disasters. Most causes of death we hear of today are man made e.g war, disease, health problems etc, each one can be traced back to an action one did i.e being a smoker, alcoholic, drug addict or whatever your poison may be, however natural disasters, one finds it difficult to blame someone. We cannot exactly start blaming nature for earthquakes and hurricanes, although I have lovely image in my my mind of Obama shouting at the grass and waging nuclear war against the amazon forest for bringing terror to this world.

I believe in God, that we are all creations of God and God loves all creations. However, it is difficult to grasp the concept that a natural disaster, which is what God has willed, caused such atrocity as Haiti. Why couldn’t this earthquake not cause any death, why did death have to be a result of the earthquake. Could it not have happened off land where the result would be a small tidal wave which may have reduced the death toll. All these questions obviously do not have an answer. Whilst sometimes these questions are better off not being asked. It is easy to say, yes I believe in God. For me, there are three ways of saying this. One is saying something with your lips, someone says “Repeat this” and we say it without thinking. The second is with our mind where someone, in the same way, asks us to say something and we think about it for a moment and then say it. The third is with your heart. Very rarely do people speak form the heart these days. If everyone did, no one would be a liar. So to say I believe in God from the heart means a lot more than when one says it from the lips or the mind.

The Bigger Picture

Today, the rational mind leads the way in thinking. Everything has to have a reason to why it is being done and has to be done in the most logical and practical way. The problem with this type of thinking is that everything has to become very literal and apparent. This means that, whatever one is doing, we need to see the reasons behind it straight away. It is seldom for an ‘intellectual’ to do something blindly, without seeing the cause and effect behind it. Unfortunately, this method of thinking cannot be applied to understanding God and the actions behind it. The rational mind cannot comprehend why God does what He does, and so when trying to understand it, we create these questions that have no answer. However, if one were to understand the concept of God, that He exists in interest of all sectors and not just worshipers or only people who believe in Him but rather in interests of humanitarianism too. This is where we fail to see the bigger picture and focus more on the negative that has resulted rather than the opportunity for a positive outcome.

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As you may have realised, I am a fan of McCain. This is because of his superior policies on tax, health and foreign affairs. When people wanted “change”, were they looking for a war with Pakistan, Iran or Cuba? Or where they wanting limited wages? Surely this is not the change people perceived.

Stop.

Unlike my colleague Slimbo Jones from the Highest Mountains (that is his actual name, if it isn’t you can shoot me in the face) wrote a political review which deserves a read at minimum, I am writing on a parallel topic.

Everyone has gone through their own change in the last few months. Many have started University, moved out or even taken on a different view on life – however, how is this relevant to you? Before your change began, you had formed an expectation of your new dimensia, be it from asking people or other means of research, you had an expectation of what it would be like.

If we take an example of living away from home – people have moved from 50 miles to 5 miles to “live out”. You had an expectation of what it would be like to do so but what is your perception of it now? If you expected “living out” to be one big rave and you realise now it isn’t, is your perception negative? Yes/No?

Obama won because he told the people what to expect and they expected a lot. When he brought out “We Need Change”, people perceived it to be brilliant. So what is the point of all this? Keep an open mind? Surely society knows that.

For the wise ones who are still reading, you are advantageous from this moment on. There is no ending phrase that I wish to inspire you with, only that your mind was stimulated in the right direction in that you are more rational and logical when it comes to expectation and thus your perception on all matters will be clear.

I must thank Salim Kassam, Eskay, Slimbo Jones from the Highest Mountain, Slim and Mohamed S Nassam for his inspiration.

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