Monthly Archives: September 2011

Feminism Politics

Named for eugenicist – why is did the UKCMRI become the Francis Crick institute?

September 24, 2011 – 6:27 pm

The UKCMRI research lab, the monstrous carbuncle  being built behind the British Library, has been highly controversial, and extremely unpopular in the local area.

So when it came to its final naming, you might have thought that the developing consortium might have given some thought to choosing an inoffensive name for it – perhaps even a name that acknowledged some of the past faults of science, such as its failure to recognise women’s contribution, the Rosalind Franklin Institute, for example.

Well that’s if you hadn’t already encountered their patronising attitude to the local area and the arrogant, all-male leadership.

So what did they chose – the name of a eugenicist  who’s described even by the Wellcome Trust, consortium member, as “controversial”.

Eugenics: This was Crick in 1962…

I want to concentrate on one particular issue: do people have the right to have children at all? It would not be very difficult, as we gathered from Dr. Pincus, for a government to put something into our food so that nobody could have children. Then possibly – and this is hypothetical – they could provide another chemical that would reverse the effect of the first, and only people licensed to bear children would be given this second chemical. This isn’t so wild that we need not discuss it. Is it the general feeling that people do have the right to have children? This is taken for granted because it is part of Christian ethics, but in terms of humanist ethics I do not see why people should have the right to have children. I think that if we can get across to people the idea that their children are not entirely their own business and that it is not a private matter, it would be an enormous step forward.

(quoted in Science in the Third Reich, German Historical Perspectives/XII, ed Margit Szollosi-Janze, p. 234)

This is also the man who accepted the joint Nobel Prize with James Watson for the discovery of DNA when many today would claim that should have been, at the very least, shared with Rosalind Franklin.

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Feminism

After the Dorries amendment – where next for the pro-choice movement?

September 22, 2011 – 11:01 pm

Spent this evening at a powerful and thought-provoking Pro-Choice Public Meeting organised by Voice for Choice. Here are some of my notes..

Dr Patricia Lohr, BPAS medical director, who first trained and worked in America, said of that experience with regard to the sometimes deadly attacks on doctors who perform abortions:  “I realised you had to accept the risk and then ignore it. … I even had patients who could not understand how I could do this work.”

Of working in the UK in comparison, she said:  “We are extremely fortunate to work in a space where is debate but not violence, and instead of focusing on making abortion available can focus on providing best posssible abortion servcies.”

She said abortions should be provided: “as early as possible and as late as necessary”.

Dr Evan Harris, BMA Ethics Committee, former Liberal Democrat MP

He said we were seeing US tactics coming over here and even more so US money.

He said of the recent Nadine Dorries amendment (on which I spoke at an Abortion Rights press conference) that it wasn’t a total victory for the pro-choice side, but as a total defeat for the anti-abortion movement. It was disappointing that the medical profession, particularly the Royal College, had not been louder in its defence of the professional standards they established and supported.

Being, he said, “deliberately a little provocative”, he added: “From 1997 to 2010 we wasted the first properly prochoice majority we ever had.  We still have a 1967 Act, which good as it was at the time, still means (paternalistically) women still have to get the permission of two doctors to have a treatment which is in patent’s own interests; that a  procedure that could be safely and appropriately done by nurses stil has to be done by doctors. Abortions are not allowed to be done in the primary care setting, even thought  politicians have been trying to make more local provisions and move out of hospital many other procedures. Early medical abortion has to be done in a clinic and hospital. when it would be a better service if women were able to take at least second dose at home. The government says we need a British trial when many other countries have found this approach safe and effective – as if there is something in the British air that makes abortions different here, but they stopped only British trial half way through saying that it was illegal.”
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