Silly hyperbole, mad exaggeration, desperate sensationalism

At first glance at the headings, I was admittedly dismayed. ‘Supreme Court kills abortion rights in the US’, screamed The Times of India. It went on to say that the fifty year old landmark Roe vs. Wade judgment that had made abortion a ‘constitutional right’ had been ‘overturned’ by a conservative dominated court, and went on to quote President Biden (a Democrat) calling it a ‘sad day’ and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (also a Democrat) declaring that the ruling is ‘a slap in the face to women’. Someone has even said on record that it shows that in America the rule of law is being replaced with ‘rule by judges’.

What absurd hyperbole, what wildly speculative scare-mongering, what utterly senseless allegations are being thrown around (immediately to be supported by tens of millions of twitter posts from people who can neither read nor think nor care to go into the nitty gritty of any serious issue at all, even to the minimal extent of reading the reports in full)!  

First and foremost, they have done nothing like ‘overturning’ Roe vs. Wade. All they have done is a) mandated that, barring emergencies, abortions cannot be carried out beyond 15 weeks (a little less than four months) after conception, because doctors, lawyers and most ethicists agree that after that the foetus begins increasingly to resemble a human being, so MTP virtually amounts to murder, and b) that state legislatures will henceforth be free to devise their own (stronger) restrictions. For the sake of comparison, The Times thankfully provided a chart to show what sort of restrictions other countries imposed: from there I learnt that in 2021, Poland, for example, imposed a ‘near-total’ ban on abortions, but apparently even that near-total leaves out all cases where the child is born as a result of rape, incest, or when the mother’s life is at risk. For heaven’s sake, what ‘right’ or ‘freedom’ are women and liberals screaming about having lost? In India, I have just been told (doctors and lawyers among my readers, correct me if I am wrong), there is no such ‘right’ at all: it is the doctor who decides, based on purely medical considerations, whether an MTP is warranted or not (it is another matter that as with everything else, there is a huge grey area where millions of women lose their lives or ability to give birth and/or their babies as a result of forced and botched abortions, most often done by quacks). My understanding is that there are now a vast number of people around who take childbirth and motherhood as something as trivial as going to the beauty parlour or buying an ice cream – was happily fornicating around/ just learned that we’re going to have a baby/ took more than three months to decide we don’t want it/ let’s get an abortion (like let’s have dinner at a chic restaurant)! And when conservatives, whether in the US or America (including a lot of women!), regard such an attitude as sacrilege – people should not breed like dogs and cats, without responsibility – they are branded orthodox, stupid, misogynistic and every other abuse you can think of. No man or woman has a right, we say, to bring a baby into this world without first having decided to take responsibility for it till it attains adulthood: if they dare to claim that they were just ‘having fun’, or it happened ‘by mistake’, they do not have a right to have unprotected sex at all. Rigid? Yes. Moralisitic? Yes, too. Orthodox? Fine. We don’t think quadrupeds make better human beings. Remember, always, that unregulated freedom brings only chaos, anarchy and loss of civilization in its train. The least I can say is, if someone – a mother to be – really has to kill the baby growing inside her, she had better know that it should be treated as one of the most serious decisions she will ever make in her life, and she had better decide fast: if possible, within days of knowing what has happened. It is nothing short of sin to wait three months or more. And if some people insist on that kind of responsibility, they are not perverts.

Turning to the huge recent brouhaha over the Agnipath/Agniveer scheme for hiring soldiers in India. The way the liberals/opposition politicians and press are going on, it is as if it will be the end of the world. The truth is a) the government’s hand has been forced, because they simply don’t have money enough to keep on footing the already monstrous pension bill for retired soldiers any more, b) they are trying to reduce to some extent the average age of our soldiers (it was becoming an old men’s army – more of a joke in a real wartime situation than anything else), and c) many countries, as the same newspaper assures me, have schemes for very short service military jobs, as short as four or five years, so the Indian government is not doing something either stupid or utterly unheard of. What kind of opposition is this, what kind of liberalism and socialism is this, that they will scream blue murder at whatever the government does without considering the merits and compulsions? I am not a great admirer of Modi's, and I rue many of his hasty ‘reform’ schemes, but why should I abandon all reason and information to criticize, often in the silliest, most abusive terms, everything that he does?

And what kind of press have we got that insanely exaggerates everything that it serves up, especially in the headlines, knowing that 99 per cent of voters don’t read beyond them? Isn’t it high time that reporters and editors and owners were sternly pulled up for writing content where the actual report sharply differs from, even contradicts, the headline? Isn't it time to wonder whether the proliferation of 'journalists' has itself become a serious pestilence?

P.S., June 29: Delightful to read in today's newspaper that the government is finally banning single use low utility plastic bags (from July 01), so soon after I wrote here about it: see the last post. I hope the ban is implemented in all seriousness. Pupu, I know, will be happy - she has been refusing to accept such bags at shops since she was so high!