Month: November 2010

Pro-life atheism, or Christopher Hitchens is (not always) great.

November 22, 2010 /

Christopher Hitchens is one of the most ardent supporters of atheism ; in the manner of Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, he is a very efficient pamphleteer against superstition, obscurantism and the excess of religion in general. Unlike Dawkins, however, Hitchens is only a pamphleteer with a journalistic backgound ; he doesn’t have the expertise on zoology the Oxford professor has, nor he is educated in philosophy and astrophysics like Victor Stenger, for instance. Most of the time, he makes up for this lack of expertise with his enthousiasm and passion for secularism, making him a very efficient soldier of the atheistic army against religion.

However, there is one subject on which Christopher Hitchens differs greatly from most atheist thinkers. He is, as well as a secularist and a humanist, a supporter of the pro-life movement. Continue reading

Ani Difranco @ Shepherd’s Bush 27/1/11

November 12, 2010 /

One of my favourite feminist heroines is finally coming to the UK next year, I don’t know if there are any other fans here but if there are, I though it was my moral duty to post a heads up about her gig in London on the 27th of January. Tickets will presumably go quite fast. There are a few other gigs in other cities too.

http://www.o2shepherdsbushempire.co.uk/event/19935/ani-difranco-tickets

We Must Act to Protect Reproductive Freedoms

November 9, 2010 /

Below is a cross-posted article that Fatima Hussain and I wrote for The Tech, MIT’s newspaper.  It was written for an American audience and so the language is somewhat US-specific, but the content is not.  Incidentally, the article was the source of Friday’s quote of the day on Jill Stanek’s horrible blog, which means that if you’d like to read a really creepy comment thread on the article, you can find one here.

For as long as the United States government has existed, it has been shirking a critical moral obligation. We are talking, of course, about our nation’s failure to protect the right of every woman to receive an affordable abortion on demand.

Abortions in the United States are technically legal, but in practice they can be very difficult to come by. Many women cannot afford the cost of a safe abortion, and even for those who can, a devastating shortage of qualified abortion providers means that they often have to travel long distances in order to reach a clinic. Once they do get to a clinic, they are frequently met with threats of violence from right-wing extremists or stymied by state regulations deliberately designed to make it as hard as possible for them to receive the care they need. The United States is very far indeed from providing universal access to abortion services, and the results of this oversight are nothing short of tragic. Continue reading

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