It's my body – not yours

London protest against harassment at clinics

It’s difficult – if not downright impossible – to imagine that anyone could consider abortion to be ‘nice’.

But while many countries now have legal abortion, there are still countries that do not – and plenty of campaigners that would like to stop for former having legal abortion too.

From 25 September, in response to the campaign 40 Days for Life, a counter campaign, in support of reproductive rights, was launched: 40 Days for Choice.

40 Days for Life is not a new group, and it uses US-style tactics, picketing clinics where abortions are carried out or at least discussed: in other words, harassing those entering or leaving.

The campaign states quite clearly that it wishes to see “an end to abortion”.

Not just a reduction in times within which an abortion can legally be carried out, but an end to all abortions.

Now just think what that actually means.

It means that, even if a woman is likely to die unless she has an abortion ... well, she’ll just have to get on with it and die, won’t she: preferably as quietly as possible. Because, the message goes, the ‘unborn child’ is more important than her.

In Nicaragua, where an incoming government sucked up to the Catholic Church by introducing precisely such a ban, women have died and are dying because of it.

If there is a hell, then Daniel Ortega deserves to go there for this one move – and all to get himself off the hook over accusations of abusing his own daughter.

Which also says something about the church’s attitude to the rights of children once they’ve actually popped out, although we probably already knew that.

Indeed, to stay with Nicragaua, there have been at least two cases of a young girls being made pregnant as a result of rape.

The Catholic Church has squealed at the prospect of them having an abortion, threatening excommunication – but not for the rapist.

But setting that aside, such an aim works, philosophically, on the premise that life begins at the moment of conception. And that, if you’re religiously minded, is when the soul is miraculously ‘born’ too.

However, just one of the problems with this approach is that of spontaneous or natural abortion.

If one describes any fertilised human egg as a ‘unborn child’ (ie a human person), then there’s a lot of ‘children’ who ‘die’ when the body naturally or spontaneously aborts.

Scientific research suggests that less than 50% of all fertilised eggs will even be successfully implanted into a woman’s womb causing pregnancy to continue.

There is then a 25-50% chance of aborting before the woman even realises that she is pregnant. If, however, she makes it to a month, then the odds go up to 75% chance of carrying to term.

So if we accept the belief that life begins at conception, then nature herself is a mass murderer. Or, more pertinently, God, the creator of everything, is a mass murderer.

Mind, fundamentalists and their supporters in the US are trying hard to tackle this natural deviation from the plan that God himself obviously got somewhat wrong by bringing in laws to prosecute women who miscarry, if it is decided that they did something that may have brought that miscarriage on.

So, watch out with that glass of wine with your dinner – you might be pregnant and if you miscarry, you might then be responsible for murder.

In case you’re wondering whether this campaign really has a religious link, the campaign blog hopes “That all the campaigns across the UK will be blessed with God’s grace”, while the Twitter account says that the 40 days will be accompanied by “peaceful prayer”.

So what do they do? They harass people who are probably in a fairly conflicted and vulnerable state to start with.

In the meantime, we have a global population that is rising to levels that present problems when it comes to sustainability.

No – I’m not suggesting that abortion is the key, but pointing out that we’re hardly short of new human life as a result of abortion.

It’s a popular approach for anti-abortionists to claim that abortion is being used as a contraception, yet one that is not supported by research among those who seek a termination.

Of course part of the religious answer is that one should not have sex unless one is, at the least, prepared to get pregnant and, for many, unless one is intending to procreate.

Damn that God geezer again: makes sex so damnably pleasurable and then has his squaddies wandering around telling people not to do it because it’s sinful.

Worse still, if you’re a Catholic, then even a relieving wank is out of the question because that’s a mortal sin. Far better just to increase the global population. Or be celibate. Like priests.

Not only do anti-abortionists play to a sentimental view of when ‘life’ begins and what it means, they also like to pretend that they are ‘pro-life’. As opposed to anyone else.

It gets particularly amusing in the US, where many of the same ‘pro-lifers’ turn distinctly anti-life if there’s the chance of a nice execution going.

Simply, it is far better to describe them as being anti-abortion or even anti-choice.

Those who are pro-choice believe that a woman has the right to choose – whether that be to have an abortion or not.

There is something rather disturbing about a group of people wanting to control the sex life and body of complete strangers.

Not only wanting to, but believing that they have the right to.

In the US again, it’s doubly creepy – and hypocritical – since many of the same people who oppose abortion also like to rant and rave about keeping the state out of as much as possible.

Expect women’s reproductive systems. Obviously.

The idea that a foetus – a life that is not realised – should take precedence over a realised, developed life, even if that kills the latter, is one that can only come about, ultimately, through a hatred of women: in most cases, a hatred either borne of religious belief or lent some form of legitimacy by it.

A belief that women are to blame for sin, for The Fall.

It also comes with a view that sex, outside of heterosexual, monogamous marriage, is wrong, and that female sexuality in particular is dangerous and needs to be controlled.

A few other religions have similar ideas too.

It's quite remarkable just how dangerous to civilisation my cunt appears to be.

It is difficult to imagine any other circumstance in which people seem to imagine that they have a right to control another human being’s body – apart from the question of the right to die, where religion also gets involved, and where those who otherwise want the state out of private lives suddenly want it to defend what they believe to be God’s will.

People have every right to believe that abortion is wrong. They have every right to campaign openly and honestly.

They do not have the right to bully and harass in an underhand effort to get their way.

It would be nice if anti-abortion campaigners would start a political party and stand for election, just to see how popular their views are. But they won’t. For obvious reasons.

As a placard at one protest against 40 Days For Life put it: 'Keep your rosaries out of my ovaries'.

• You can keep up to date with the campaign at the following:

@40DaysofChoice

40daysforchoice.tumblr.com

Across Flanders fields to a most Catholic city

The most Catholic city in the most Catholic country in Europe. That's one description of Brugge.

And even the shortest of ambles around this extraordinary place is enough to see the importance of Catholicism.


Oh, it may not be as obvious as in the number of churches, but it's there in other ways.


There are, for instance, more little Marian shrines on buildings than I have seen anywhere else, be that in rural Ireland or in Venice.


And they're not simply signs of the past, adorning only the city's older buildings, but there are plenty of new ones too.


It's there too in the church-run alms houses that sprang up to deal with the poverty that rose when the city's fortunes declined as its sea route silted up, and in its remaining beguinage – where unmarried or widowed women could adopt a life of religious devotion without actually taking full vows.


But then again, the history of the region is such that religion is perhaps one of the few things that unites this country.


Belgium is only a century and a half old. So much of it's identity is in its religion. Language has long been – and remains – a dividing factor, with those in the Dutch-speaking north feeling as though there is still not cultural and linguistic equality.


Indeed, only in very recent years has Dutch been given equal legal status with French. And, as an elderly man told me – while I was innocently trying to buy a Steiff cat – the Belgian royal family have only just started managing to speak the odd word of Flemish (Dutch).


But far from its religiosity having turned it into a pleasure free zone, Brugge has much to offer the more sensually-inclined visitor. There's beer, for starters. And chocolate. And how much else can anyone ask for? Okay, okay - but let's not go down that route just now.


Trade made Brugge great – the high point was from 1200 to 1400. And if those dates don't don't make you gulp a tad, then some of the buildings will. Enjoying a revival – partly courtesy of EU funding, tourism and the UNESCO recognition that has put it on tick-box lists for every coach party to hit Europe – this tiny city is a real step back in time.


That's not to fall for the 'living museum' baloney, though. It's a living city, and while tourism may be massively important, it's not the be all and end all.


Yet when you walk into the Burg – a small square, first mentioned in documents in the 9th century – and see the medieval Stadhuis (left), in all its flamboyant gothic glory, your jaw is only going in one direction.


You are walking in the footsteps of millions before. And those millions include the likes of great Flemish artists such as Bruegal and van Eyck and Memling, who will have seen this scene you now see.


It is history and time concertinaed in a way that is as freakish as it is exhilarating. Because while we in the UK might all have seen the occasional old building – and the occasional ancient ruin – there is something quite different about seeing whole streets and squares that have barely changed in centuries.


This is not to suggest that the city of Brugge has stuck itself in formaldehyde. It is not a theme park. It is not a museum. Indeed, perhaps rather unexpectedly, modern buildings are present, but the architecture reveals a great sensitivity to the surrounding history. Not subservience or crass pastiche, but sensitivity.


On Tuesday, we turned right out of our central hotel and, within a few metres, had found ourselves transported to working-class Brugge. In this case, since it was the morning of 1 May, there were trades unionists gathering outside bars for an early drink, before setting out on their march.


A brass band was with them. It was a scene that could have come straight out of northern England. And later, as we stood at the edge of the inner city, beneath on the peripheral windmills, we watched a further group of trades unionists, with their own band, marching to join the ones we'd left refreshing themselves.


And walking in the middle of this scene that could have come pretty much straight out of Brassed Off was a priest in his vestments – a reminder that in parts of the continent, there are Catholic trades unions associations.


There is plenty of other history here. Traveling through the Flanders countryside after rain had left swamp conditions everywhere, one couldn't help but wonder who had ever had the bright idea of fighting a war in such terrain.


The scenery around is something so instantly recognisable: grass, water, cows and pollarded trees – you know it because you've seen it in Flemish paintings from centuries ago.


But the thought of less pastoral events brought to mind the hellish visions of Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch.


In the meantime, one of our guides around the city was George William Thomson Omond, a Scottish advocate and history writer, whose Bruges and West Flanders from 1906 had been downloaded onto his iPad by The Other Half and was quoted at some length during our stay.


Omond had no obvious qualifications as an historian – one of the most interesting aspects of his work was that it was less a history and more a travelogue: indeed, you could see it as the precursor to the blogging of our own times.


But it added an extra flavour to the trip – and perhaps there is little more that any author could ask?


We heard bells peel from all around us and at many times every day.


Walking past an old alms house, an elderly, wrinkled face looked out blankly – another reminder of the impolite art of Bosch and others, revealing a reality that was hardly pastoral.


The buildings ranged in age and, on occasion, the sheer mass of step gables made you feel as though you'd been shrunk down to take on the status of an extra in Legoland.


Brugge is many things – not least, the real background for many great painters of the Northern Renaissance – it is steeped in far more history. And even a slight bit of digging quickly repays the effort required to get beneath the skin of tourist guide platitudes.


And perhaps most obvious of all is the realisation that the medieval magnificence that you can find defy notions of uncivilised times. The jaw-dropping Stadhuis alone is worth the visit.

Churches, churches everywhere

It's possible in Venice to escape from a number of things – MacDonalds and other fast-food outlets for starters. There's apparently only one of the former in the city – which seems like a laudable achievement to me.

But one thing that you cannot hope to escape from in Venice is religion. There are churches everywhere – every famous vista of Serenissima has some religious note or other in it. The piazza in San Marco? Will that be 'San Marco' as in 'Saint Mark', with the Basilica di San Marco and the Campanile di San Marco? Even the Doge's Palace is covered in ornately carved religious references (left, Adam and Eve).

And if you want to see art, well the best places to go are the churches – apart from Gallerie dell' Accademia; but then that turns out to be dominated by religious art, much of which was hauled out of assorted religious establishments by Napoleon, who set up the Gallerie and filled it with the works from the establishments he'd just disbanded. I knew Boney must have had his good points.

Our church visits were limited to three – Palladio's Il Redentore (left, but not the same architect's Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore, due to the timing of Venetian lunch), plus a church on Murano, Chiesa di San Pietro Martire, and then another in, I think, Dorsoduro on the main islands, and which dated from the 9th century.

There were Bellinis to be seen and Tintorettos and Tiepolos. In short, you could easily risk a religious art overload. And that's before you start spotting the little shrines in the streets themselves (see picture below).

And of course, we’d also contrived to be in Venice for the first half of Holy Week, as the sight of people walking along the narrow streets, carrying olive branches, was a constant reminder.

But if it’s impossible to avoid the signs of religion in Venice, it’s difficult too not to find oneself contemplating what brought into being those buildings and displays of artistic brilliance. In other words, to consider religion.

My own religiosity died a remarkably painless death, unnoticed, around 10 years ago. “Why?” asked my friend George one evening, several pints into a post-work Friday drink, when I had insisted that, for all my disavowal of organised religion, I still believed in God.

I couldn’t answer that simple question and the subject dropped. But when the next census landed on our doormat and I was filling it in, I realised with some surprise that I was going to answer the religion question as ‘none’. Subconsciously, it seemed, that ‘why?’ had done its work.

After decades spent under a burden of guilt and fear, it was no loss. Although then began a new process – partly of trying to logically work out why I’d arrived at my new state of unbelief and also one of anger with the institution that had held such sway over my life.

It was a few years before I would willingly enter a church again – the Westerkerk in Amsterdam, as it happened, for a recital of organ music – without my mind grinding a metaphorical axe as I entered.

But not only was this Venice, with its myriad (mainly) Catholic churches, this was also a time when the Catholic church itself is desperately trying to deal with the scandals around child abuse by clergy and the subsequent cover-ups of that abuse.

More than one person has asked whether the Catholic church can surivive. Well, of course it will.

But aside from the survival of the organisation in question, it has also been asked as to how religious belief can survive in the face of such a scandal.

My first reaction was that it is entirely legitimate to point out that God is not the same as the abusive clergy.

But that, as I wondered around Venice, struck me as too easy.

The Christian god has always been represented as omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent – and indeed, if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t, for instance, be able to see your sin. Which might be something of a disadvantage come Judgment Day.

So for all that ‘free will’ can be used to explain the actions of abusers – and the influence of Lucifer too – that still leaves a little problem: that of the abused. Surely an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful god, who – as the Bible has us believe, gets upset when even a sparrow falls – could have protected those children? It wouldn’t have had to be overly dramatic – nothing to interfere with the challenge of faith: just a heart attack here, a fall there, and the abusers would have stopped their abuse.

But it’s more complex even than that.

Because if an all-powerful God created everything and, in being all-seeing and all-knowing, knows not only everything that has ever existed but everything that will ever exist, then that God actually created the situations that would cause the abuse, knowing that it would happen.

He might, to offer another explanation, have created a situation whereby everyone had a couple of choices available to them on any action. Or more – because the number is irrelevant. The all-seeing, all-knowing God has always known what would be the outcomes of his actions and his creations and his decisions: and in the case of child abuse by his own servants, he has apparently lifted not one, divine finger to stop the suffering.

“Suffer the little children”, means, it would seem, exactly what it says on the tin.

So even if this God existed, it rather belies the idea of a loving God, as sold to people down the millennia since the advent of Christianity.

And why – other than for entirely dishonest reasons of self-preservation (Pascal’s Wager, in other words) – would one wish to worship such an entity, even if that entity wouldn’t actually know perfectly well that one’s worship was not genuine?

This is the ultimate mindfuck. And the deeper you let yourself contemplate this quite labyrinthine matter, the more paths you find that lead you back to this same conclusion.

If he exists, the Christian god is either not omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient – or he is not the ‘loving’ god of Christian tradition; quite the opposite.

But then again, perhaps the children really should suffer? Perhaps, indeed, they should have suffered in (bought-off) silence – a sort of religious character-building exercise?

I lost track some time ago of how many pictures of the martyrdom of St Sebastian we saw, each one seemingly feyer than the previous one.

‘Oh look – I’ve been shot full of arrows, but I’m not the least bit distressed because I’m a good boy, I am, and I’m going to Heaven.

‘Oh my – I’ve pulled one of the arrows clean out … now just as long as they don’t muss my golden locks at all I’ll be able to endure anything.’

St Bartholomew was managing a similar expression as he was being flayed. And never mind all the artistic representations of the crucifixion.

Suffering: it’s good for the soul.

And never let it be said that Christianity in general and the Catholic church in particular hasn’t relished a bit of sado-masochism – and they have the nerve to call kinky people perverts!

For some reason or other, one night when we were in Venice I dreamt that I met and had a debate with the Pope. Perhaps it’s a good thing that, by the time I’d woken, I could remember only that, and no details of the dreamt conversation.

But if Venice leaves one with an idea about religion, it’s surely the impression that more humans have created more beauty for the Christian God than that god deserves on the basis of his cruelty and barbarity.

The creations of a Palladio or a Bellini or even a Vivaldi (another son of Venice) are ‘holier’ (if you will) and purer and more deserving of reverence than the god that many of their works were intended to praise.

And I hope, therefore, that whatever happens to the Catholic church (and other religious groups, Christian and non-Christian), the buildings and the art of Venice will surivive. And for that reason, I happily handed over €10 for a pass to the so-called Chorus churches (including Palladio’s Il Redentore), on the basis that their preservation is well worth a donation.

It's all a question of dignity

I am now convinced that even inanimate matter has a life of it’s own.

The Queen B herself told me so this morning.

There she was, sitting on the bathroom shelf amid the pots and potions as I went about my ablutions, when the shelf rose up and tipped her off.

I know this, because cats do not fall off things all by themselves.

And if they do have such ‘an accident’, then the Great Commandment applies: ‘thou shalt not laugh at the cat’. Because the cat gets very, very huffy indeed if she sees you laughing at her.

She stared accusingly at the shelf – so I know it was the shelf’s fault. I bit my tongue.

Then she turned and, tail in the air, strutted out of the room, determined to show every ounce of her feline dignity.

A couple of hours later, my attention was drawn to a 2006 report from Newsweek, which says that scientists studying the behaviour of non-human animals, in the search for signs of self-awareness, have discovered that the famous mirror test might not be a reliable indicator.

This is the test whereby a mark is put on an animal and then they’re placed in front of a mirror to see if they notice that something is different about their appearance – to see if, for instance, they attempt to remove the mark. Elephants can’t ‘pass’ the test, apparently – although we know they’re intelligent. Yet some animals that do ‘pass’ are not expected to, because they don’t have the ‘right’ sort of brain.

Boudicca, our little Queen B, has never shown any indication of interest in her reflection. None of her predecessors did either. But they have all shared that sense of dignity that particularly reveals itself when cats fall (or not).

And if you have a finely tuned sense of personal dignity, then it would seem fair to suggest that that reveals a certain self-awareness. So, on an anecdotal basis, I suspect that the scientists are right: the mirror test is flawed.

Of course, reading this article the day after Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, in the same year that also marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, served as a useful reminder of just how anthropocentric we humans are, right down to the whole idea of our having dominion over the rest of life on this ball of rock we call home.

So it’s rather amusing to see that even the Vatican has finally got around to admitting that evolution happens. But that's so last century, boys.

Boudicca, who probably doesn’t realise this (although one can never be too sure with cats), is an everyday reminder to me that we are not the only sentient beings, and that we have a responsibility of care for the rest of the world around us, which we should never simply take for granted.

Although perhaps that’s just more anthropocentricity speaking? After all, I’m equally convinced that in any relationship with a cat, I’m not remotely the top dog, so to speak.