Helmintholog

The girlfriend of someone I know very slightly recently had a late abortion for purely social reasons: in plain English because neither she nor the father are people anyone would trust as parents. Actually, I don’t know her, but I certainly wouldn’t entrust any baby of mine to the father and I suppose that any woman who would fall in love with him has shown deficient judgment.

My own position on abortion is that I am against late ones for precisely the reasons that I am in favour of embryo research. I think that a baby is certainly a human being, deserving to be treated as an end in itself, at the moment of birth, and just as certainly certainly no such thing at the moment of conception, even supposing you could pin down such a biologically ambiguous moment. Somewhere in between those two dates, things change so that an operation which ought to be freely available in the early part of a pregnancy should be very restricted in the later parts. After all, if a woman really doesn’t want a baby, she can always give it away for adoption. I know this is unpleasant and possibly traumatic, but so, by all accounts, is being killed. And at some stage — shall we say an arbitrary 18 weeks — a foetus becomes something that can be killed.

Now, when I have said this in the past, some women have replied that it is really unfair and brutal of me, since I cannot imagine what it is like to love a baby which has grown in your own stomach, and then to have to give it away. The case I mentioned at the start has crystallised why I feel this is unsatisfactory reasoning. It’s very simple. If the thing-in-the-womb has attained the state where it is truly lovable (and I take on trust that this can happen before birth) then it has also acquired an independent value. It should not be extinguished just to spare the mother pain.

Every week there are cases where parents kill their children rather than allow them to leave, or be taken by another parent in the aftermath of a divorce. We don’t call that love, though no doubt the murderer does. I think that any divorced parent must have heard the faint whisper of that temptation. But it isn’t love, and it isn’t right. If a foetus has grown to the point where the mother really does think of it as a baby, then she should grant it its own autonomy and let it make its way in the world with other parents if she can’t be a mother herself. Sometimes loving someone means letting them go.

Note that this is not an argument that all babies should be born or anything like that. It is directed against the specific, narrow instance in which a late abortion of a healthy foetus is defended because the alternative of adoption would be more painful for the mother. Phooey, I say.

• One of the canapé fashions in London this year is post-modern fish and chips: a few long thin potato fries arranged around a goujon of cod, and perhaps a couple of whitebait, in a cone of newspaper about the size of a large ice cream cone. Last night, at a party given by a very rich woman, these were served, with two notable twists: the napkins accompanying them were ironed linen, not paper and the paper they came wrapped in was the Wall Street Journal.

• Something else I learned then. If you have enough money, it is possible to redo the floor of your London house so that it smells, faintly, but distinctly, of the pine dust of Swedish manor house.

• An encounter with another Guardian writer: “I remember you. You’re the man who says I’m a ghastly woman who writes ghastly things about people.” The other woman present mutters something to the effect of QED. I say — truthfully — that I had never used the word ghastly, and would not. I had said, to her face, that she wrote cruel things. “I’ve been watching your shoes all evening. They’re so clever!” says the third party. The conversation moves into happier regions.

• Brooding over a curious smothered scandal which bubbled up, or at least appeared in the Daily Mail, while I was away: one of Cardinal Murphy O’Connor’s advisers was accused of procuring an abortion for his then girlfiend in 1989. I remembered a lunch I had with him earlier this year: a very clever, rather attractive man who had spent a good ten minutes trying to persuade me that eventually the whole world would come round to the belief that the unborn foetus was a fully human being. “Come off it”, I said, citing miscarriage statistics. If we really thought that the foetus was equivalent to a human being, we would be prostrated with grief every time a woman had a miscarriage. He pooh-poohed this. It must have been at about that time that another of his discarded mistresses was miscarrying twins, if I have read the Mail story right.

• Apparently, in Swedish law, it is not a crime to bit torrent American films, though films made in the EU, music, and computer programs are all protected by copyright law. But Swedish law does not recognise that films can be worked on under work for hire, so, in the absence of a specific assignation of rights to the producer, the copyright is shared between the director, the photographer, and even the writer. Therefore, the prosecutor who wrote this opinion (and who later busted the Pirate Bay site) does not feel he can respond to complaints about file sharing from American film companies.

• Two companies or at least web sites have been set up in Sweden purporting to insure bit torrent users against law suits. Pay them a premium, and they say they will pay your fines. Dear valued Bit torrent user …

• Last year there were 987 road accidents involving wild boar reported in Sweden.

some football game which was, at least according to Sky News, the most important story of the evening except for the scheduled riot afterwards,which seems to have been postponed by jealous Germans.

In general, I was obviously hoping that England get knocked out quickly because the country would have been absolutely unendurable had we won: a kind of reverse Diana effect.

In particular, to lose because Wayne Rooney got sent off was excellent. He is stupid, vicious thug, with no self-control at all, and thus, obviously, a role model for millions. He might have got away with kicking a prostrate opponent in the balls, and then shoving away the opposing team mate who complained. But when he saw he would be booked, he walked round to swear at the referee for this. Overpaid thugs get away with that kind of thing in almost every match I see. It made my heart sing to see him sent off for it. Makes him a real role model at last.