Abortions

The Guardian ran articles about abortion on Friday, with the interest arising from our government's need to be nice to the Northern Irish Protestants. People who, it seems, share out of date notions about all kinds of personal matters with the Catholics south of the border - whom they seem to hate so much. All very odd. Even odder that the southerners now seem to be slowly moving on, while the northerners are still stuck in the past.

But it was a red graphic about abortion across Europe which caught my eye, probably based on the blue graphic from WHO included here.

I was a bit shocked to learn that across Europe that there are about a fifth as many abortions as there are live births - assuming that most of them are more a form of birth control than anything else - and with the proportion rising to a half in Russia. But this last high may reflect the use of very early abortion there, scarcely an abortion at all in the nasty sense of the word, with something recognisable as a foetus. Doing mechanically after the event what we do chemically before, or very shortly after. Who is to say which is the better way?

Also striking that the two places with zero abortions, the two Irelands and Poland are both places which were managed for a long time by larger and more powerful neighbours and in which the Catholic faith became as much an assertion of separate nationhood as anything else. And which has persisted, despite their having now achieved separate nationhood. Unlike the faith headquarters, Italy, where abortion rates are not so very different from most other peoples'.

PS: in comparing Ireland to Poland, one should perhaps remember that, until relatively recently, Poland was far more mixed geographically, religiously and nationally than it is now. Much less of an island than Ireland.

Reference 1: https://gateway.euro.who.int/en/visualizations/choropleth-map-charts/hfa_586-abortions-per-1000-live-births/.