For the last week, while canvassing, I’ve met several longstanding Labour Party members who said they didn’t know who they were voting for yet. Why? First, because they think defeating Boris is the most important issue. Second, because they needed to wait for the tactical voting websites to tell them who is more likely to…

In February 2019 an African-born woman living in the UK was the first person to be convicted of the genital cutting (FGM) of her small daughter. I observed the trial and wrote a long blog about it, which I posted here. I have never previously considered a “blog” to be a published piece of writing. As a…

The Channel 4 TV programme was shown on 27 February 2018, reported by Cathy Newman. It depicted the failure of a British detective named Leanne Pook to bring a successful prosecution against a Somali father of a six-year-old girl for allegedly arranging for her to have FGM, after an investigation that took two years. The…

The article “Sex workers in Haiti speak out on aid agency scandal” (1 March 2018, p.41) is very poor journalism in that it mixes together issues that don’t belong together. Firstly, while it points out that poverty and loss of family in Haiti left many women with no option but to sell sex for a…

Letter to the Editor of the European Journal of Contraception & Reproductive Health Care, by Marge Berer Received 04 Jan 2018, Accepted 23 Jan 2018, Published online: 19 Feb 2018 https://doi.org/10.1080/13625187.2018.1433825 Sir, In your recently published article “Progesterone for preventing pregnancy termination after initiation of medical abortion with mifepristone”, [1] the cases of three women…

This is a special edition of the HHRJ Journal on one of the key topics of the Campaign – abortion law and policy and the value of human rights in seeking to improve policy and practice. Being one of the three guest editors for this edition has been an important part of my Campaign work for the past…

When open access journals first came onto the scene, I was really worried about the various ways they would change the journal publication landscape and practice. More importantly than anything else, I felt it was unfair and inequitable to charge authors to have their papers published so that I, as a reader, could get access…

Dear Belfast Telegraph, RE: Suicide risk to woman accused of using poison to have abortion, court hears, by Alan Erwin, 11/01/2017 I find it quaint that you describe the medical abortion pills mifepristone + misoprostol as “poison” in your articles about prosecutions of Northern Irish women, and now a couple, who have used them to…

Two days ago, I published a blog that I have just deleted. The backstory involved turned out to be extremely complicated, far more complicated than I could have imagined, and having received an explanation for what happened, which was that one publication led to another that led to another and both were criticised, and then both amended their texts…

Trumped It has taken several days of listening to and reading a lot of useless verbiage about Trump, but I finally found a blog by Adam Shatz that expresses what I think has actually happened, and says some of what needs to be said about it. All the hand-wringing seems so self-dramatising. I don’t understand why some…