New Pro-Life Blog

Fiona Pinto, the Pro-Life Alliance candidate who was famously cleared of insulting behaviour for displaying a picture of an aborted foetus during the 2003 Welsh Assembly election campaign (and who briefly became infamous as the rumoured subject of some MacGonagallesque love poetry) has her own blog.

She's a woman with a mort of common sense.

During last week's hearing, one police officer described the image of the aborted foetus as 'one of the most gross, upsetting and totally despicable sights I have ever seen'. But Pinto said if people found the image shocking, that was a reason why abortion should be illegal.

Couldn't agree more. Had she been convicted we'd have had a situation where abortion was perfectly legal, but also considered so horrific that it could not be shown or described.

UPDATE - this story, via ifeminists, seems relevant.

Aug. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Russians, whose lives are shorter and poorer than they were under communism, have more abortions than births to avoid the costs of raising children, according to the country's highest-ranking obstetrician.

About 1.6 million women had an abortion last year, a fifth of them under the age of 18, and about 1.5 million gave birth, said Vladimir Kulakov, vice president of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences. ``Many more'' abortions weren't reported.

``The appearance of a first child pushes many families into poverty,'' Kulakov said today in the government's official newspaper, Rossiskaya Gazeta. ``Potential parents first try to start a career, stand on their feet and so forth.''

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the ensuing hyperinflation and depression deprived millions of Russians of their incomes and savings and discouraged couples from having children. By 2000, the number of pensioners in Europe's most populous country outnumbered children and adolescents for the first time.

The increase in poverty and the decline in the quality of health care since the fall of communism have left about six million women and 4 million men -- 7 percent of Russia's 145 million people -- incapable of having children.