Proposed change in abortion law – Ukraine

One of the most notable achievements of European society (for better or for worse depending upon your point of view) has been the separation of church from State during the evolution of the continent, and the resulting secular State.

For most European citizens, the Church is the Church and the State is the State  and never the twain shall meet again given the consequences historically.  No longer can the Church burn the heretics and non-believers who make up a sizable number of voters which no political party could afford to lose.

The Church remains, however, a significant social actor within most nations and is recognised and engaged with by the majority of States, be the governing party or leadership agnostic, atheist or of a different belief.  It can be, and is, a significant NGO both arguing for or against specific political policy.

Generally the secular model works fairly well and is particularly noticeable during electioneering where a candidates faith  (or lack or faith) is not a subject that features in any campaigning.  Something one suspects Mr Romney would appreciate but it unlikely to get across the Atlantic very soon.

However the Church (of whatever brand) like all organisations has its positions, interests and needs which most States will listen too and accommodate where it fits with the governing party’s own position, interests and needs.  State and Church therefore rub along together as best as they can whilst attempting to morally or politically lead the same flock.

Problems occur when the Church lobbies to create laws or to change laws which meet their position, but that large enough sections of a far less conservative society would strongly oppose to make the issue politically difficult for the State.

Ukraine currently allows abortion up until the 12th week of pregnancy and in extreme (one assumes medical emergency cases) the 22nd week of pregnancy.  That is the law.

The Orthodox Church however has been lobbying hard and has managed to get some lawmakers to submit a change to this law on abortion, proposing the practice be banned in Ukraine other than for medical emergency reasons.  It will soon come before the RADA for voting.

Now I am not interested in getting into the pro-life verses woman’s rights issues of the argument.  Everyone has their opinion  to which they are entitled.  I intend to look at this from the difficult position of the State, the current leadership of which face an election in October 2012 and are now faced with a very difficult vote (should the issue be forced to a vote in the RADA).

The current government, when it came into power, vowed to increase the population of Ukraine having recognised the national shrinking demographic.  (A continental issue not just one for Ukraine it should be noted.)  Thus banning abortions unless medically necessary would be one way to possibly achieve a jump in birth rates and some form of demographic recovery.  Vow kept.

However, the number of abortions in Ukraine has been significantly and consistently falling for the past 10 years.  In 2000 there were 434223 abortions performed in Ukraine.  In 2010 there were 176774.  With such  a steep  downward trend in society, is there any reason for State interference when it is a trend both Church and State (for different reasons) would approve of?  Whilst the trend continues, is this not a prima facie case for a State to leave well alone?

If acquiesce to the Church would get it on board in the run up to an election where the current government will struggle to retain such a sizable majority, if it hangs on to power at all (which it probably will), the Church, should it get such a legislative victory would undoubtedly sing the current governments praises and thus influence a reasonable amount of voters in the governments favour (either overtly or covertly).

At the same time, despite the fantasies propagated by marriage agencies about the “traditional values” of Ukrainian women, Ukrainian women are very emancipated and have been for a very long time.  Who if not the women, rebuilt the USSR after WWII and 30 million Soviets died, the majority being men?  The myth they sit at home and cook and pop out children on demand for the male head of the household is exactly that – a myth.

Therefore changing the law and banning abortion in all cases other than medical emergency (and any other specifically stated circumstance) could very well alienate a huge number of female voters which is a decidedly bad idea with an election looming.

There are then the casual effects to society to consider should this Church sponsored bill change the law.  Many Ukrainian women would simply travel to have the abortion done and those who could not may well resort to back-street abortions with horrendous consequences.

Those that had children may very well give them up to orphanages which are already woefully underfunded.

If they kept the children the State has such a poorly funded social welfare system that they could not afford to stay home and neither could they work, removing any tax they did pay from the system and increasing the social payment burden in the process.  That could increase numbers of child neglect cases and that, ultimately, could put increasing strains on the orphanages.

As the State cannot even make people pay their due taxes, finding and getting absent fathers to pay any form of maintenance is simply a non-starter.  Those women and children in that situation now, rarely see any money from the absent father and the State does nothing to enforce payment or track the father down.  If they could they would have far better tax revenues.

Is a generation of poor single parents and child poverty what the government sees as a sound policy when heading towards European norms?  Unlikely.

Talking of European norms, in banning abortion (other than in statutorily stated circumstance such as medical emergency) which other EU nations would it have for company?  Would the EU see such a move as a further back-sliding in human rights and womens rights in particular?

All in all a very difficult situation for policy makers to be in.

Protests about this proposed legal change have already started.  FEMEN (as you would expect) have already been arrested for climbing the bell tower of St Sophia’s in central Kyiv, ringing the bell and going topless (as is their signature protest action).  One has to suspect that should this legal change be seen to even remotely gain any traction the protests will become much larger.

Not a particularly nice thought for a sitting government with a major European tournament being hosted in 2 months time.  Massed rallies by the collective European feminati sisterhood would be a major embarrassment.

Much, one suspects, will come down to how much the current government needs to give something to the Church in the run up to the election to influence the masses favourably, or alternatively, how much can be gained by the current government to publicly and noisily putting the Church in its secular place in order to win over a large part of the female voter base by standing up for their existing rights under the current law.

One to watch in the coming months.

Human Trafficking

Today I was going to write about why reform in Ukraine is so slow and the bottom-up support that is missing.  That will have to wait until I get around to it.

Currently I am researching serious and organised crime for a document that will be published elsewhere in cyberspace in the months ahead.  Certainly it should be published by the year end.  Needless to say, Ukraine like most nations has issues with serious organised crime and within that broad heading human trafficking falls.

During this research, this very powerful, short and thoughtful Dutch video got my attention.  Whilst it does not go into the methodology, statistics, trafficking routes, reasons and end results, it does make anybody who watches it think twice about what is going on around them.

Watch it to the end – Something to think about!

Prostitution and Euro2012

Elsewhere in cyberspace, in the Ukrainian and Russian forums to be exact, a debate is running relating to prostitution and the Euro2012 football tournament to be held here in about 3 months time.

The debate is along the lines of prostitution remaining illegal and thus those traveling foreign fans, some of whom hail from nations where prostitution is legal, regulated and taxed by the State,  falling foul of the local police when indulging in carnal pleasures, or whether it should be legalised for the duration of the tournament in the hosting cities (or at least not pursued by the police for the duration of the tournament) or whether it should be legalised (or decriminalised)  anyway.

Should Ukraine follow the German (and others) route with regulation and tax, or should it keep its own domestic laws as they are?

Should the authorities turn a discrete blind eye during the tournament, particularly in regard to foreign fans and avoid unnecessarily arresting foreigners and the diplomatic issues related to persons detained?

All very tricky when good arguments can be made for all 3 options.  As it happens this is more of a philosophical debate than a real policy debate as there is little noise coming from the RADA relating to the issue at all.  Thus the law is unlikely to change.  That does not mean, of course, the blind eye policy will not be quietly encouraged.

Fortunately I live in a city that is not hosting the tournament so these issues will not affect Odessa unless the law does change.  One suspects that it is only a matter of time before somebody in the EU thinks it is a good idea to recognise prostitution as a profession and regulate and tax it similar to Germany across the entire EU block, but that is something for the future one suspects.

For me, the core issue is not one of prostitution being legal or otherwise.  It will happen regardless.  It is the question of choice of those involved in such activities.  There are some involved, male and female, who do this through absolute free choice.  There are others forced and coerced into it.  The latter to me is completely and utterly unacceptable.  The former as far as I am concerned is fair enough.

There are of course social issues when it comes to known red light districts for those residents who live there and are not involved in such activities but that is a regulatory and enforcement issue which some nations cope with quite well and others fail miserably at.

Now I have to make a full disclosure and say I don’t know any prostitutes who work the streets of Odessa.  I do know a Madame and several escorts who work for her but on no account work the streets or the bars and clubs.  I suppose at $100 per hour to visit a local hotel by appointment, there is no requirement to work for less or to have to hunt out men in bars and clubs at lesser fees and with the overheads of club entry.

To be honest it is not a conversation I have ever had with any of the ladies involved and I should point out rather robustly that as a married man whose wife also knows the Madam and the same escorts I do, then I have never met them in their professional capacity.  In fact the only reason I know them is via my wife and she knows the Madam from her school days.

It is difficult to say the escorts involved are doing it against their will.  They work only 3 or 4 days a week and also work unaccompanied across Europe for several days at a time via the services offered by this business and earning a very respectable Euro 1500 – 2000 per day.

It seems to me to be very different from those poor men and women who are forced into such a profession against their will, which is where my objections I have to such a business lay.

An interesting and quite passionate debate nonetheless on the local forums, with debaters of both sexes on all sides of the discussion.

One wonders how the Ukrainian authorities will deal with this issue when it rears its head in a few months time.

Happy Woman’s Day (and a perception correction)

Firstly, and especially for my Ukrainian and Russian female readers, but also for any other female readers, I wish you all a very special Woman’s Day.

I hope you are pampered to within an inch of your lives and placed firmly on  the pedestals your deserve if only for the day.

As many men will be repeatedly and very poorly trying to inform the women in their lives today……

…….and we are probably quite right (for once).

Now, having wished all my female readers a genuinely sincere Woman’s Day greeting, it is time I feel, to set a few perceptions straight.

Woman’s Day is not Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day or a combination of both with a smattering of birthday thrown in.  It has particular relevance in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova and more.

It is the recognition of the body feminine be it your mother, wife, sister, daughter, female boss, female colleagues, female subordinates, female friends, nieces, aunts and any other female who is influential in a mans life.  It is particularly relevant in this part of the world and its recent history.

Over the years I have been writing this blog there have been far too numerous to mention (literally hundreds if not thousands of unpublished) comments from western men asking where they can find a “traditional Russian or Ukrainian wife.”

Having replied out of sheer curiosity what “traditional wife” means, it would appear to have a definition which covers a large and diverse spectrum.  To list a few; good cook, good mother, stay at home, not look at another man, not have male friends, pretty, high heels or jeans looks sexy enough to stop traffic, and above all, recognise the man of the house is the boss etc. – You get the idea.

After years of reading such fantasies, and that is certainly what they are when it comes to Russian and Ukrainian women, I think Woman’s Day is a suitable day to set those perceptions straight.

Firstly, the book Domostroy was written in the 16th century when describing the life and requirements of a Slavic wife and women in Slavic society.  That book and those rules became null and void in Russia and Ukraine by the time the Bolsheviks restructured and re-engineered society, if not quite some time before .

Any remnant, real or imagined, that may have lingered disappeared when 25 million USSR Slavs died in WWII, the majority being male.

Just who do you traditional wife hunters think rebuilt the USSR when a high percentage of the male population was dead?  Who laid miles and miles of rail track by hand, who worked the fields, who drove trucks, who worked in the factories, who, when all is said and done, did almost everything and every job, when so much of the male population was dead for the next generation or two?

Next, most Russian and Ukrainian women are very well educated indeed.  They are probably at least as well educated if not better educated than you are.

The vast majority of Russian and Ukrainian school teachers, doctors and similar professions are female.  They work, they work hard and they work shifts.  They do not sit at home and pop out children at your demand and insulate themselves from friends be they male or female whether you like it or not.

Whilst there may not be genuine equality when it comes to pay and other areas in life, Russian and Ukrainian woman have enjoyed emancipation for a very long time.  Now they are emancipated and well educated.

They are also free to travel and have access to unregulated television and the Internet.  They are fully aware of just how green (or not) the grass is on the other side of the fence.

You will not impress them but waving wads of cash about or owning your own company, being a CEO or having your own small aircraft.  They will happily spend your money and let you take them shopping but that, unless they actually like you, is all you will get.

A traditional Russian or Ukrainian woman comes from a family where babushka rules the roost.  It is a matriarchy and not, contrary to western belief, a patriarchy when it comes to domestic life.  When I say domestic life that also includes when she (or you, or both) are going out, where, why and to do what, or see whom.

If your perception of a “traditional Russian/Ukrainian wife” is to stay at home, look drop dead gorgeous but only for you,  spit out children on demand, wash, cook, clean, bake bread, be happy to sit at home all day, go to church on Sunday,  have you choose her friends for her and say who she can and cannot be friends with, then it is a perception that is more than 500 years out of date, if that reality ever truly existed at all.

Trust me when I say there aren’t that many 500 year old women left knocking about in Russia and Ukraine that will meet those “traditional values”.

In over a decade of living permanently in Moscow and latterly Odessa I have never met a Russian or Ukrainian woman that fits the “traditional wife” mythology of the western male.

Woman’s Day in the former USSR and Warsaw Pact nations is particularly revered for a reason and that reason is that they (and not men) literally built the nations that exist today.  That did not happen by them staying home and darning socks longingly looking out of the window for a time-warped zealot returning home.

I hope this entry manages to register with some male readers who incessantly ask for help finding some western myth propagated by marriage agencies  with the sole purpose of taking your money in search of a “traditional woman” that doesn’t exist.

Now if you want a beautiful, intelligent, practical, hard working, opinionated, determined, emancipated but feminine to her toenails wife, should you be lucky enough to find one interested in you from Russia or Ukraine, then you will be a happy man and you will be loved as you have never been loved before – as long as you don’t try to change her and have her become something she traditionally is not!

Statistical recording and national image‏

Following on rather nicely from yesterday’s post about benchmarks and getting behind the numbers and headlines, here is a very good example of how, depending upon the way it is recorded, a specific incident can have add or detract from a national image simply by the way it is recorded by the “international watchdogs”.

For those unfamiliar with a group called FEMEN, they are a group of ladies who have taken to making a bare breast of things when it comes to political protest. They started stripping off in public years ago to highlight sexual exploitation and Ukraine becoming a sex tourist hot-spot, but have since moved on to “getting them out” over seemingly almost any issue they can think of.

Unfortunately that rather detracts from their original protest message which has not been addressed given Ukraine still remains a hub for middle-aged western men looking the the kind of good looking women that would have no interest in them at home. (Needless to say the women here are also rarely interested either).

FEMEN however, have moved on, thus causing pause for thought as the whether they simply like “getting them out” and the attention it brings them as an organisation over and above any particular cause they protest over. Quite simply they do not seem to stick to a cause long enough to have any major effect.

Anyway the latest FEMEN protest was outside the Embassy of Georgia in Kyiv, over three photographers detained in Georgia ostensibly it seems, for spying, despite one being the President of Georgia’s personal photographer. During their protests, caught on video and camera, a security guard for the Georgian Embassy takes it upon himself to physically repel the media and FEMEN protesters from around the embassy.

The video of said incident is here and it has not been censored, so you lucky people get to see a couple of FEMEN girls in all their glory.

The incident brought a formal and public apology from the Georgian Ambassador to Ukraine for the assault on the journalists, as well as a written apology on the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs website. All very good and diplomatically correct as far as apologies public and private are concerned, as well as the dismissal of the offending security guard.

However, how will it be recorded? Where and who will this assault on journalists be attributed to by the chaps at Reporters Without Borders? Is it counted against Ukraine or Georgia?

Whilst it happened in Kyiv and is therefore Ukraine, the territory of the Embassy of Georgia is de facto Georgian soil. It did though happen in the street outside the Georgian Embassy, so where does that territory end?

Does the fact the security guard involved in this assault being employed by the Georgian Embassy provide any form of diplomatic immunity (as the US tried to claim for their rather wayward CIA contractor in Pakistan earlier in the year) or not? If it does, how will RWB record this when it is carried out by a security guard acting on behalf (even if wrongly and in an unacceptable way) of the Georgian Embassy? It certainly is the case that the nation of Georgia accepts responsibility.

Ukraine, after all, has nothing to do with the assault on the journalists in this particular instance. They were being allowed freedom of assembly, freedom of speech and freedom to do their job without influence. The incident did occur in Ukraine (possibly depending on the technicalities of where Georgian sovereign de facto soil ends). The security guard may well have been Ukrainian or Georgian. The journalists and protesters were certainly Ukrainian.

Nevertheless, it would seem rather harsh for RWB to count this as an assault on the press in Ukraine within the statistics, as the circumstances will soon be forgotten or never known surrounding it by those simply looking at the numbers during the hype of the next statistics publication.

Ukraine, fairly justifiably, may feel aggrieved at the opaque slight that it would have on the Ukrainian nation. It has enough instances of its own without being statistically held responsible for incidents at the Georgian Embassy in Kyiv, a location like all Embassies and Consuls that Ukraine has little control over on a day to day basis. Attempts to do so would cause a major diplomatic incident of far more gravity than the incident that has actually happened.

Any reasonable person would expect it to count against Georgian statistics given the full and very public apology from the government of Georgia.

The question is, will it count against Georgia given it happened in Kyiv?

As I said in yesterday’s post, it is always necessary to get behind the numbers and headlines to understand how the “international bodies and watchdogs” reach their published and somewhat influential results.

Odessa Brides Parade – 29 May 2011

Well dear readers, giving you some advance warning, the annual Odessa Brides parade takes place on 29 May this year.

Rather fortunate that the weather has turned for the better it seems.  Anyway here is the itinerary should you want to either watch or avoid it:

At 1 p.m., the participants of the Parade will gather at Dumskaya Square.
After this, the brides will walk along Deribasovskaya Street, the City Garden, and then a photo session will be held by the Opera Theater.
After the photo session, the Parade will march along Primorskiy Boulevard, Dumskaya Square, Potyomkin Stairs, monument to Duke de Richelieu, Vorontsovskiy Palace and the colonnade.
By the romantic colonnade, the brides will traditionally throw the bouquets to the crowd.

SEO and keywords – A sad relfection on Odessa or the people searching?

Well dear readers, amongst the ever growing amount of spam I get that never makes it to the comments section, recently there has been a lot of SEO companies and keyword companies trying to move me up the Google and Yahoo rankings.

As of this blog entry I have allowed only 322 comments since I created the blog……and rejected 5457!

There have also been a few suggestions I move the content to a PPC friendly platform……but I am too technically challenged to know how.

Anyway intrigued,  I thought I would do some investigation into what the biggest hitting search criteria for Odessa is.

So, here we are, in no particular order:

Odessa women, Odessa escorts, Odessa brides, Odessa dating, Odessa nightclubs, Odessa womens pics, Odessa apartments, Odessa, hotels, women in Odessa, Odessa agencies, Odessa marriage agencies, naked women Odessa, sexy Odessa women, Ukrainian women in Odessa, women in Odessa, hot Odessa women, beaches in Odessa.

Starting to see a familiar theme?

Much further down the top SEO and keyword lists are Odessa life, life in Odessa, politics in Odessa, tourism in Odessa, Odessa politics, Odessa restaurants, banking in Odessa, business in Odessa, visas for Odessa,  Odessa night life, Odessa clubs, Odessa universities, jobs in Odessa, employment in Odessa, Consuls in Odessa and other everyday necessities such as bus, train and plane times in Odessa.

So the question is, who is to blame for the search parameter popularity and obvious bias?  Is it Odessa or is it those who still believe that the women of Odessa religiously follow the Domostroy doctrine and will provide foreign men with all of the mythical traditional family values they think exist in modern Ukrainian women?

Sometimes I wonder about some of you people…… I really do!

Womans Day

Lest you forget dear readers, today is Womans Day…….and a big deal in these parts.

Today I succumb to the priorities of a relationship rather than what’s happening in Odessa or generally in Ukraine.

I feel a coerced subordinated trip to the jewelers, clothes shops, florist and  restaurants on today’s agenda, in an infinitely poor way of showing my appreciation and gratitude  to my woman who is special every day……and not just the official day of “Women”.

For my female readers, I wish you the day that you would hope for and send you all these virtual flowers:

Monet_Vase_with_Flowers_1880

Tomorrow I shall return having paid the necessary homage to she that must be obeyed!