A man from southern England posted a help wanted ad in his local newspaper looking for a drinking partner for his elderly father.
The job will pay roughly $14USD an hour and expenses for the lucky employee to take 88 year-old Jack Hammond from his nursing home to a local pub.
The chosen drinking partners are a retired doctor and former military man.
"Dad's now going to be going down to the pub several times a week -- three with his new friends and twice with me," Mike Hammond told The Times on Thursday. "I want to give him some of his old life back."
Late last week, the UK’s Royal College of Psychiatrists released a statement (PDF) saying that women who have abortions might be at risk for mental health breakdowns. The College recommended that women be told about potential mental health problems before choosing to have an abortion.
According to The Sunday Times,
Some MPs [Members of Parliament] also want women to have a “cooling off” period in which they would be made aware of the possible consequences of the abortion, including the impact on their mental health, before they could go ahead.
Right. This is one of many similar efforts that attempts to “protect” women from abortion. Women who are considering abortion should be presented with all relevant medical findings, including those about mental health. But such findings are often tied to a set of incredibly one-sided policy proposals, like this one, which strip the research of its objectivity and credibility.
Popularization of these “cooling off” periods, for instance, promotes the idea that a woman is not fit to make her own decision about abortion—she is emotionally confused, and her tiny girl-brain needs extra time to make such an important choice about her body.
Moreover, folding post-abortion depression into an inflexible argument against abortion reduces the likelihood that post-abortion counseling will be taken seriously. As Reva Siegel and Sarah Blustain write in this fantastic piece in The American Prospect,
The figure of a woman suffering abortion grief invokes a deep truth about mother love that, in different ways, is recognized by advocates across the political spectrum. But the anti-abortion movement is deploying this image to excite acts of public coercion that will not make women, or their families, more natural or loving or free.
Seriously, read this article. It’s a very compelling look at the way people pushing abortion restrictions—like those being advocated in the UK—paint women as helpless victims of biology and pro-abortion advocates.
In the United States, there's a large and growing problem of elites not serving in the military and, at the same time, the military becoming an institution dominated by the lower middle classes and by families who have a tradition of service. Although America has lower social mobility and lots of hereditary wealth, in Britain, they have a real royal family. But Britain's royals have a long tradition of military service. Prince Andrew, Charles' brother, served as helicopters pilot in the Falklands. And Prince Harry, brother of Prince William and third-in-line to the throne, is serving in the British Army.
Even though he's a royal, he's just a normal soldier and for the past ten weeks, he's been serving in Afghanistan. But we didn't hear about until a few days ago, when the Drudge Report broke the story. It turned out the British government got all the major media outlets in a room and requested that they not report that Harry was in Afghanistan, so he wouldn't endanger his fellow soldiers. The embargo was broken and now Harry is probably going to the Persian Gulf. But was it a good idea for the media to essentially be the lapdogs of the press? I think so.
Lord Darzi, a leading surgeon brought into Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government, said the programme could be piloted among pharmacists or nurses. The pill is currently available only with a prescription from a doctor, although most pharmacies are able to provide the "morning-after pill" without a doctor's authorisation.
Nurses and pharmacists would provide a brief health assessment at pharmacies, eliminating the need for a separate doctor’s appointment. How great would that be? I know lots of young women who would be much more likely to get on and stay on the Pill if it didn’t require doctors and multiple errands. And while hormonal birth control bears some risks, a qualified nurse or pharmacist should be able to determine a woman’s eligibility for it.
Given the ongoing struggle to make Plan B available over-the-counter and so-called conscience clauses, it seems unlikely that such a program will debut in American any time soon.
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