Second opinion

AS everyone knows, or ought to know, abortion is a woman's right. But some men go further, and say that it is a duty. Moreover, they are prepared to put their boot where their mouth is. They can't make a woman pregnant without kicking the foetus out of her.

They do not do this because life is horrible, and they fear to bring into the world a being like themselves. Nor do they wish to evade the responsibilities of parenthood, for they have no concept of it, and usually they have already fathered several children whom they have abandoned without a second thought. No, they are motivated by something approaching an abstract ideal: no woman ought to be pregnant. And this ideal is happily united with the pleasures and immunities of domestic violence.

Thus I am perfectly familiar with the kickstarted miscarriage as a form of contraception. This is a regrettably post facto method of family planning, however, and so last week I was pleased to learn of a man who thought ahead. He did not kick that person who now appears on all official documents as his 'partner' only after she became pregnant; he kicked her for several days every time, in her words, 'I was due my monthlies.' Better safe than sony: an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.

Of course, he was not in all other respects an ideal. . . I almost wrote husband; my age is beginning to tell. On the contrary, he had once broken her cheekbone with a hammer, and had half-strangled her and thrown her down the stairs many times (that is what stairs are for). I have also known this used as a method of family planning, but in this case it was done without instrumental purpose, for its own sake, as the fulfilment, as it were, of a Kantian categorical imperative.

What beautiful relations subsist between British men and women? My next patient had undergone the unusual experience — unusual, that is, for round here — of marriage. It was not death, however, that had parted man and wife, but a fist's blow in the mouth after the wedding reception, in the privacy of the nuptial bed, 12 hours after the tying of the knot. The groom was drunk and angry, and with rare good sense the bride got the message and scuttled off, never to return. 'It must've been the shortest marriage ever,' she said.

'Not at all,' I said. 'It lasted six times longer than my patient whose husband tried to strangle her at the reception, two hours after the ceremony. Your marriage was comparatively successful.'

My last patient of the day was extremely nervous. She had just discovered something about her live-in lover that gave her pause for thought. It was a pity, in a way, that she had not paused before she asked him to move in with her, the day after she met him.

'He admitted to me he's just come out of prison,' she said.

'Did he tell you why he was there?' I asked.

'Yes. He said he'd been involved in a pub fight and hit this man. He fell over, banged his head and died. He was done for murder.'

'And?'

'Well, I thought he was telling me the truth.'

'But he wasn't?'

'No.'

'What is the truth?'

'He strangled his last girlfriend and had sex with her body,'

Theodore Dalrymple