A French cohort study involving 12,432 women suggested
that “a history of induced abortion increases the risk of preterm delivery, particularly for women who have had repeated abortions”.

and

We recommend:
1. That in the context of conflicting expert evidence on fetal pain and viability, this lack of consensus should be fully acknowledged in the report and the committee should
adopt the precautionary principle giving the fetus the benefit of the doubt, until a clear consensus emerges.

He basically has the opinion that if its against the word of the Bible then it needs to be discouraged no matter what the consequences. I was going to write to him and (jokingly) suggest that he should also campaign to withdraw NHS treatment for HIV to homosexuals or intravenous drug users. Or stop treatment for alcohol or smoking related illnesses.
The Bible says that the body is a temple, and homosexuality a sin, so we deserve what we get.
Anyway I’m going off thread here

*Britain in Sin is also available as a PDF. 31 pages of comedy gold. They even list the EU treaties that have broken the second commandment.

Apparently its all down to “Gordon Browns cronies” and other “Pro-Death MP’s”.

http://www.christianvoice.org.uk/Press/press057.html

Having said that, they’re also against the HPV vaccinations, as it will encourage promiscuity. They want to prevent something will reduce deaths due to cervical cancer on the grounds that in order to stop young unmarried people from ‘doing the deed’ that we have to keep the threat of it killing them.

Is it just me?
Clicking on your link (“I’ve posted the PDF here, until it appears on the parliament website”) to this Minority Report leads me back to the main report.

If it is me, I’ll Google for it, or else please post the full URL.
If it isn’t – has no one except you read it, including the above?

John

“Anyway, he took longer in make-up than I did, which is saying something. I was begining to worry they may replace us with another item.”

Am I just a prissy, hysterical, uber-sensitive queen, or there more than a hint of homophobic smearing in this?

That’s after she has had her fill of effectively calling him “Dr Death”.

What a vile woman.

It makes you wonder – just how big a mushwit do you have to be to be a Tory MP these days? On this evidence, there is certainly scope for plenty of mush.

And meanwhile the Daily Mail – or, as Dr Crippen’s blog used to call it, the People’s Medical Journal – gives poor Evan Harris, a sensible MP with a viewpoint based on some actual real-world experience and a functioning brain, the “Evil Dr Death” treatment.

*sigh*

Agreed. The limits of it are, as igb says, if you start getting into treasonable deductions. But there are traditional stereotypes, a kind of tacit agreement that only Intelligence organisations and people wearing a big “Investigative Journalist” label should get up to it. It seems to faze these MPs that such research is now within the capacity of anyone with a bit of database-fu (and, as you say, it seems to be a skill underemployed by news reporters these days, when they just wade into a story without doing trivially easy cross-checks on what agenda might be behind it).

Thinking back, this has always one of the classic non-sequiturs of Official Secrets Act: that something could be viewed by the Govt to be a secret when in fact it was a logical deduction from lots of freely available non-secret information (aka journalism).

A lot of what I think of as “proper” investigative journalism, and some of the political stuff depended on this kind of “sifting and piece-ing together” (think Woodward and Bernstein). Which is why I am often disappointed (though not surprised) that broadsheet coverage of science and technology questions doesn’t seem able to do the same thing.

Actually, this cartoon is appropriate to most of the site, in fairness.

Made me chuckle, anyway.

That’s why a clearance that permits you access to Secret, say, is also required for sufficient volumes of Confidential that allow information marked Secret to be deduced. An acquaintance some years ago had had to hold DV (ie sufficient clearance for TS and above) in order to work on an ERP system in the 80s, because one thing being planned from food and clothing deliveries to the nuclear deterrent, from which cruise plans could be deduced.

This is, in passing, why all those stories about “classified orders for biscuits” show a lack of understanding. If you were German and the date was May 1944, and you heard about a large order of biscuits being delivered to the depot Portsmouth but no similar order going to Dover, what would that tell you?

As Groklaw has demonstrated, Eric Raymond’s thing about “given sufficient eyes, all bugs are shallow” applies to legal documents: informationa bout the SCO/IBM thing has emerged simply because enough people are prepared to cross-correlate documents and extract latent meaning. N documents cross-referenced is (N(N-1))/2 comparisons, which requires computers, people or both.

What Ben’s done is take documents that even ten years ago would have been tedious to obtain and search, and extract information that was put there with no real expectation of being read. Do you remember the row about the inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence affair, where the initial downloadable versions of the evidence contained the addresses of the witnesses, a botch that cost about half a million in relocation? Not a problem in the past: how many people, Denning’s report into the Timothy Evans affair notwithstanding, buy HMSO reports? But today, in download city, all documents like that travel quickly.

So the MPs probably live in a kinder, gentler age in which HMSO reports are more for the private consumption of the political classes who play by Queensbury rules, not for Guardian-reading doctors who might, you know, _use_ the information.

Sorry, bit of a ramble…

ian

(*) Along with Magnolias and Collateral proof that Tom Cruise is actually rather a good, albeit limit, actor.