By Blad Tolstoy - Our new women's interests columnist!
We have informed our readers before that the march against alcohol is well under way. We know this because the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (the “charitable” arm of Johnson & Johnson) now spends as much money promoting alcohol prohibition as it used to on promoting smoking bans. American not-for-profits have to, by law, publish all the recipients of their donations and what those donations are for. We have amongst our colleagues, I shall add, those who take a keen interest in caching all this information in order to make sure the rest of us are well aware of what is going on.
Now we are already familiar in Europe and the UK with the fact that moves are afoot to restrict the use of alcohol but to-day (26th March 2008) that particular crusade took another step. Indeed, The Daily Telegraph reported that the government’s health “watchdog” has warned that pregnant women should drink no alcohol at all despite no evidence that that the occasional glass is harmful. This may come as no surprise as New Labour frequently provides no figures, or reliable figures anyway, to support its claims, although it never has any difficulty making them up when it needs to.
What is surprising, however, is that so many women to-day are just prepared to go along with these “dictats” believing, as a large number of them do, so many of the health scares that are put about by cranky health crusaders who have the ear of government.
This particular warning to women is nevertheless rather sinister, in that, we now have the government telling women what they can and cannot do with their own bodies when pregnant. We wonder how long it will be before both smoking and drinking when pregnant actually become crimes although enforcing any legal measures in this direction will be difficult. However, having said that, we have already noted proposals in America amongst certain health extremists to do just that and wonder how long it will be before such proposals turn up here.
What is disappointing though is that Britain, like America, has so many former bra burners who campaigned for women’s rights, but now, many of those same women have either lost the gumption or the will to preserve their adult autonomy in the face of the current and overwhelming onslaught on freedom of choice.
This current development is particularly unsavoury as it means that when pregnant a woman’s body will no longer belong to her but to the will and control of the state.
Time to march again ladies, for rights and freedoms are not something which once won are won forever. Life is a fight and likewise the maintenance and preservation of freedom is a permanent struggle and not a liberation which just happened once in the 1960s and 70s.
We have informed our readers before that the march against alcohol is well under way. We know this because the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (the “charitable” arm of Johnson & Johnson) now spends as much money promoting alcohol prohibition as it used to on promoting smoking bans. American not-for-profits have to, by law, publish all the recipients of their donations and what those donations are for. We have amongst our colleagues, I shall add, those who take a keen interest in caching all this information in order to make sure the rest of us are well aware of what is going on.
Now we are already familiar in Europe and the UK with the fact that moves are afoot to restrict the use of alcohol but to-day (26th March 2008) that particular crusade took another step. Indeed, The Daily Telegraph reported that the government’s health “watchdog” has warned that pregnant women should drink no alcohol at all despite no evidence that that the occasional glass is harmful. This may come as no surprise as New Labour frequently provides no figures, or reliable figures anyway, to support its claims, although it never has any difficulty making them up when it needs to.
What is surprising, however, is that so many women to-day are just prepared to go along with these “dictats” believing, as a large number of them do, so many of the health scares that are put about by cranky health crusaders who have the ear of government.
This particular warning to women is nevertheless rather sinister, in that, we now have the government telling women what they can and cannot do with their own bodies when pregnant. We wonder how long it will be before both smoking and drinking when pregnant actually become crimes although enforcing any legal measures in this direction will be difficult. However, having said that, we have already noted proposals in America amongst certain health extremists to do just that and wonder how long it will be before such proposals turn up here.
What is disappointing though is that Britain, like America, has so many former bra burners who campaigned for women’s rights, but now, many of those same women have either lost the gumption or the will to preserve their adult autonomy in the face of the current and overwhelming onslaught on freedom of choice.
This current development is particularly unsavoury as it means that when pregnant a woman’s body will no longer belong to her but to the will and control of the state.
Time to march again ladies, for rights and freedoms are not something which once won are won forever. Life is a fight and likewise the maintenance and preservation of freedom is a permanent struggle and not a liberation which just happened once in the 1960s and 70s.
