Tag Archives: mind boggle

Ah, Jeremy Hunt. You Utter, Utter Cunt.

Posted in Opinion, Personal, Rant, United Kingdom by
Jeremy Hunt, Weymouth, 11 June 2010

Jeremy Hunt, Weymouth, 11 June 2010 (Photo credit: The Department for Culture, Media and Sport)

For those of you not in the UK and not up to date with the latest cabinet reshuffle. The man pictured above is Jeremy Hunt, who did such an awful job as culture secretary (yes, he’s the man who was more than close with Rupert Murdoch before all the allegations of phone hacking resulted in the Leveson enquiry), that our genius of a prime minister, David Cameron thought there was no-one better to be in charge of one of the most important departments of the UK Government. This man is in charge of our beloved NHS. This man also believes abortion time limits in the UK are too long and wants them to be halved.

Today, he told an interviewer that he believes the time limit placed on NHS abortion to be a miserly twelve weeks. A time period in which a large proportion of women are not aware they are pregnant.

Like I did with Rep. Todd Akin, I have written Mr Hunt an email (and have sent it to his constituency email and through the Department of Health’s website).

Dear Mr Hunt,
I’d like to take just a moment to congratulate you on one thing: the British public thought you couldn’t be any more loathsome. Today, you proved them wrong. Great job! It honestly makes the mind boggle that you gave such an opinion, having clearly avoided actual evidence from scientific studies or having actually talked to the women of your constituency and beyond.
On one hand, after everything you’ve done I’m pretty glad you and the rest of your privately educated brethren are in power because it assures me that you’ll not be voted in again. The entire Conservative/Liberal Democrat government has been an utter shambles.

Anyway, I am writing to you today to discuss your views on the abortion limit being too long at 24 weeks. Are you being serious?
I mean, really.

By the time a woman misses her period she is already technically 4 weeks along, and if a woman is not regular in her menstruation, this can easily be written off as just being a longer cycle. Some women continue to have periods throughout their entire pregnancy – how do you propose those women (who will notice literally no change in their body until the baby reaches a significant size enough to produce a bump) find out about their pregnancy within 3 months?
For one, the strain on the NHS you are in charge of will be increased by an unknown margin. Home pregnancy tests are unreliable and expensive, so where are all the women worried about missing this, frankly ridiculous, margin going to go? To their GP to be given a free pregnancy test!
And what about those women who miss your margin because they haven’t noticed any changes in their body? They have two options, really. To continue their unwanted pregnancy to term, for the unwanted child to either be resented by the mother, or be placed into the care system where it is unlikely to ever be adopted into a family. Think about the cost of these women’s antinatal care, all the extra hospital beds in bigger maternity wards which will be necessary to accommodate all these extra pregnant women giving birth.
Put simply, twelve weeks is far too short a period to give women to discover their pregnancy, then have an abortion if they do not want a family.

You, Mr Hunt will never have to go through pregnancy. You will never have to worry about the possibility of getting pregnant because a man can just walk away with no consequences. So why do you think you should have a say in what women do with their own bodies? Why are the rights of a non-sentient featus (which it is until the 24 weeks limit, by the way) deemed by you to be more important to you and other members of your party than the woman being forced to carry it?

Yours,
Hannah Welsh.

Theresa May has also come out in support of this frankly ludicrous opinion. Surely a woman wouldn’t want her own reproductive rights legislated against, so why does she support restricting other womens’ right to an abortion after discovering they were pregnant too late for this tiny margin? I sense another email coming.
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