by Stewart Cowan

Drinking While Pregnant Could Become a Criminal Offence

What isn’t (or isn’t going to be), I am starting to wonder?

From one of Dick Puddlecote’s posts last week,

DUP MP Ian Paisley quite rightly ripped into incompetent former health minister Anna Soubry over the loss of 900 jobs in his constituency at an annual cost of £160 million to the UK economy.

The lost jobs are to be at what I believe is the UK’s last remaining cigarette factory, Gallaher’s in Ballymena, Co Antrim.

The Belfast Telegraph has the story,

[Ian Paisley MP] criticised those he accused of calling for “over-regulation” of the industry in the EU. “I am not in the habit of scaremongering or crying wolf,” he said.

“For the past five years since I became Member of Parliament for North Antrim I have warned about the serious unintended consequences for jobs in North Antrim if government locally nationally and in Europe continues to over-regulate the already heavily regulated tobacco industry.

“Indeed, in July 2012 I warned that 1,000 jobs were under threat. Unfortunately those warnings fell on deaf ears. This was despite me arranging over twenty on-site visits for politicians from all parties and the government to see the impact more regulations would have on jobs.

The closure of the last cigarette factory on the mainland was announced last Spring,

The Bristol-based tobacco company, the world’s fourth largest by market share, plans to close its factory in Nottingham, where it employs 540 people, as part of a European restructuring programme designed to help it save £300m a year from September 2018.

The group added that forthcoming European regulations, which will ban the sale of packs of 10 cigarettes and 30g packs of rolling tobacco, would also affect production.

The agenda, of course, is deindustrialisation to bring this country to its knees. Together with ideological subversion, I don’t think we have many years left of relative prosperity or any sort of national identity or freedom to speak of.

Here we are, a country of some ten million smokers that very soon won’t produce a single cigarette; a land of politicians obsessed with carpetting the countryside with wind turbines and yet we don’t have one major manufacturer of these things; an island nation whose ships and boats are increasingly being made in countries from France to Korea and so on.

I see these failings as a serious dereliction of governmental duty. Worse than that, I believe it to be sabotage of our industry by traitors for geopolitical reasons.

Finally to the point of the post. I saw a link on the article above to this article: Drinking while pregnant could become criminal offence, warn charities ahead of Appeal Court hearing.

The fear stems from this,

A council is seeking criminal injuries compensation for a six-year-old girl with “growth retardation” caused by her mother’s alcohol consumption during pregnancy.…

Foetal Alcohol Syndrome was diagnosed 252 times in England in 2012 to 2013.

The charities claim however that there is “continuing uncertainty” in the medical profession over the relationship between drinking and harm to the foetus.

They have said mothers and their babies would not be best served by treating pregnant women with drug or alcohol abuse problems as criminals.

One of the “charities” is the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (bpas). It is the first time that I can remember agreeing with them.

The week before last, their boss, Ann Furedi, wrote a cold-hearted piece for The Independent, entitled “Abortion is safe, and it should be as available as easily as contraception.” The subheadline is, “The time has come to decriminalise it altogether.”

I’m sure she knows fine that it almost has been. BPAS provides contraception and abortions. The wellbeing of unborn babies seems to be of no concern. It is all driven by pure feminist selfishness, as Ms Furedi says,

“We should take very seriously any legal developments which call into question pregnant women’s fundamental right to bodily autonomy and right to make their own decisions.”

BPAS isn’t a charity, is it? It’s part of a political movement. It’s heavily involved in the UK’s slaughter of the unborn so that Ms Feminist can have autonomy over her ‘own body’. It is too inconvenient for them to consider that pregnancy means there are now two lives to contemplate. Actually, three, but fathers seem to be increasingly neglected in this society which still apparently treats women as second class citizens if you believe the militant feminists. There are also the potential grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles, etc. with a stake in the decision, so this pathetically thoughtless attitude of ‘my body, my choice’ won’t do.

Ask a smoker what it is like to be part of an underclass. They aren’t allowed the “autonomy” to do what they will with their bodies. Oh no. Tobacco products must be covered in outrageous graphics. They must be hidden behind doors in shops. Soon they will be sold in “plain” packaging, i.e. practically all that will be left are the warnings. Smokers have been banished even from pubs and many other places, possibly soon public parks too, simply because of the myth of the danger from secondhand smoke and the prejudice of the hand-wavers who “don’t like the smell” and the vested interests of those “charities” like ASH, that has been in business for decades by ensuring the slow erosion of the civil liberties of smokers.

Obviously I don’t approve of pregnant women getting plastered. In fact, seeing any woman drunk is unpleasant, even if they think they can do whatever they want with their ‘own bodies’.

I was friends with a woman many, many years ago. During her first pregnancy, she did everything “right” and her son was born a paraplegic so when she discovered she was expecting the second time, she carried on behaving as she had been, heavily smoking roll-ups and drinking large amounts of cider. She gave birth to a very premature and thus dangerously lightweight baby, but who lives on with full bodily functionability.

Not that this proves or disproves anything at all!

But ‘health’ seems to be very misunderstood by everyone concerned from doctors to governments and it seems that all freedoms must be stamped out because of this new ‘holy grail’ of longevity.

It is proving to be very oppressive.