Funny ha-ha, not like a clown

I like their ideas down under about the abortion issue:

Here are some suggestions for concerned gentlemen prepared to put their money where their morals are: # Sign up for a backyard castration or circumcision. Advocating a return to a system that drives pregnant teenagers to coathangers would carry far more weight if male petitioners had a little personal experience. No doubt there'd be plenty of women prepared to help out with this valuable, empathy-inducing exercise. # Make male masturbation punishable by law. If a four-celled zygote is an independent being and potential life worth protecting, surely so are all those spermatozoa brutally murdered by tissue wads and shower jets. # Pull back on the publicity photographs of aborted fetuses. Pro-lifers love displaying unhappy snaps of the consequences of terminations, but it's time to balance this with some educational shots of the consequences of giving birth to unwanted kiddies. Misery, poverty, domestic violence, crime and so on. A nice big billboard of a woman haemorrhaging in an alley after a dodgy termination would also provide some vital balance in this arena. # Experience up-the-duff-ness. Once again, the argument that all women should carry all pregnancies to term would be far more persuasive if male pro-lifers showed they were prepared to go through a similar ordeal. Medical technology has yet to catch up with Junior (the film in which Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as a pregnant man), but plenty of techniques are available to replicate the exhaustion, nausea, frequent need to urinate, constipation, dizziness, varicose veins, haemorrhoids, leg cramps, nosebleeds, bleeding gums, stretch marks, shortness of breath, itchy palms, swollen hands, heartburn and tender breasts associated with a normal pregnancy. Strapping 35 cans of VB to a man's midriff could replicate the average 13kg weight gain, while I understand childbirth can be simulated simply by combining a rectum and a watermelon. # Raise the sprogs. Now here's an exciting part of the pregnancy experience that concerned blokes can take on for real. Becoming the primary caregiver of children is an exhausting, expensive and thankless task (particularly if one's charges are going to include youngsters who would have been aborted due to grave health problems). But the men of the religious Right are such a caring and unhypocritical bunch. Surely they wouldn't refuse such an excellent opportunity to share the burden. In the meantime, perhaps the nation's male anti-abortion activists could track down some sex education that doesn't rely on abstinence-only principles. That way they'll make the startling discovery that the high jinks that lead to unwanted pregnancies require two people, and only one of them is a woman.