Convenience Big Store: The bitter new fight over abortion

3 September, 2021

Hello,

Young people tend to think of older people as an entirely different species, to believe that they no longer feel the kind of things young people feel. How wrong they are, as Taki, aged 85, reminds us in The Spectator. See below.

His piece brings to mind a famous poem by Thomas Hardy:

I look into my glass,

And view my wasting skin,

And say, "Would God it came to pass

My heart had shrunk as thin!"

For then, I, undistrest

By hearts grown cold to me,

Could lonely wait my endless rest

With equanimity.

But Time, to make me grieve,

Part steals, lets part abide;

And shakes this fragile frame at eve

With throbbings of noontide.

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All good wishes,

Jon Connell

Editor-in-chief

Texas

A pro-choice protestor outside the Supreme Court. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The bitter new fight over abortion

There's a chilling image circulating on social media, says the Houston Chronicle in an editorial: "a Texas-shaped coat hanger". The grim connotation won't be lost on anyone who lived through a time when women didn't have access to safe, legal abortions, so were forced to seek alternatives such as pills, back alleys, Mexican border towns and "DIY devices". It's a world many Texan women are fortunate never to have known.

Until now. Now lawmakers in Texas have banned abortions after a heartbeat is detected, typically at six weeks, when an embryo is "about the size of a lentil" and many women don't even know they're pregnant. "There are no exceptions in the law for victims of rape or incest." It's unbelievable that in the state of Texas, "land of personal freedom", a woman can be forced to carry the offspring of a man who sexually assaulted her. Such cases might be rare, "but even one is an unconscionably cruel mandate".

No matter how you feel about abortion, this is hardly a "radical law", says Tucker Carlson on Fox News. "Intentionally stopping a person's heart from beating is the definition of killing." It might have driven the media crazy, but really this proves that democracy still exists in America. "Why should Texas have to be exactly like California?" Voters can decide what they want for their communities – it's called self-government. We might not like this specific law, but being able to pass it protects the principle of civil rights for the rest of us, which "might be a good thing".

It's true that "millions of Americans will cheer", says Justin Webb in The Times. All those Christians who held their noses and voted for Trump in 2016 are getting what they were promised. But this decision drives a vast wedge between anti-abortionists and the "great majority of Americans", who still believe abortion should be safe, legal and available. President Biden has made his position clear, condemning the new law as an "assault on women's constitutional rights". If necessary, Washington could overrule Texas. But what would that do to the fraught relationship between the rural heartlands and the "feckless godless citizens of the big cities"? A fight about abortion is a fight about what America is and where the balance of power should lie. Once, prompted by slavery, America had a civil war over these issues. Now, prompted by abortion, it "may be shaping up for another".

Staying young

Three weeks ago "a terrible thing happened", says Taki in The Spectator. "I turned 85." What really hacks me off is the big lie I was told 60 or 70 years ago – that if I lived to a ripe old age, "inner peace would take hold of me" and the "rage to live" would subside. It's as big a lie as socialism, "or the one that says we're all created equal". The urge to chase beautiful young women never goes away. What does suffer is the performance, but that's not such a bad thing. "The words also tend to come slowly."

Property

THE COTTAGE This three-bedroom cottage in the ancient Buckinghamshire village of Brill, 12 miles from Oxford, has exposed beams, oak floors and a distinctive glass-paned Victorian shopfront. There's a garage at the end of the courtyard garden and the nearby Pointer does cracking pub grub. £530,000.

Life

David Corio/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

The oddball genius behind Bob Marley

Lee "Scratch" Perry was the strangest man I've ever met, says Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph. I interviewed the Jamaican music producer, who died this week aged 85, in 1997. He arrived in head-to-toe jewellery, wearing a gold crown and carrying a suitcase bursting with multicoloured feathers. He plopped himself down, "lit up a joint so improbably enormous it seemed to defy physics" and spoke largely in rhyming couplets. "Perry was a genius, and I don't bandy that word about lightly."

He as good as invented reggae, says The Times. In fact, he once claimed he gave Bob Marley reggae as "a present". The singer never denied it. They met in the late 1960s: Perry supplied backing musicians, encouraged Marley to embrace new sounds and produced what aficionados consider some of his best work. But the relationship was rocky. After a squabble about money, Perry threatened to kill Marley. Promptly, Marley stormed the producer's house in Kingston, "delivered a beating, smashed the crockery and departed with a fistful of cash". The next day, both men claimed to be "blood brothers" again.

Perry's creative methods were eccentric. He buried microphones under palm trees, thumping the trees to record their sounds. He routinely blew smoke into the recording console "so that the weed would get into the song". "He's the Salvador Dalí of music," said Rolling Stone Keith Richards in 2010. "The world is his instrument. You just have to listen."

Inside politics

"There's either a very convincing catfish, or Michael Gove is now active on Bumble," says the Popbitch newsletter. The Minister for the Cabinet Office separated from his wife in July. According to his dating app bio, he is 6ft tall, a Virgo, works out sometimes, is a social drinker/smoker, a conservative and "not sure what he's looking for".