In a leader editorial about the documentary, Hanne Kjöller raises her concerns for the kind of society prenatal diagnostic testing creates. Highlighting that she is a pro-choice advocate, she asks what will happen when screening programmes that can detect autism in foetuses are introduced. How narrow can the perception of the perfect child get?

Kjöller’s problem is in the qualifier. She insists that she is pro-choice, but the choice, it seems, is only really valid under certain circumstances – if you choose to have an abortion, your choice must be justified using principles acceptable to intellectuals like Kjöller. “I want the decision to be the parents’,” she maintains, continuing: “But I want everyone who stands before the decision – about testing or no testing, and about abortion or no abortion – to see that the choice in the long-run is also about the kind of society we want.” Now that’s what I call choice with strings attached.

I feel Kjöller’s pain. Of course it’s about what kind of society we want, and by making abortion services readily available we open up choice to people whose decisions we can’t control. It’s as scary as democracy, really. I used to be keen on the “I’m whole-heartedly pro-choice, but…” phrase too. Until I ended up in the situation where the imaging technician turned away the screen and got that look on her face. It would be easy for me to say that in our situation, it wasn’t about choice; we didn’t have one. But that would be to dodge a difficult conversation.

See, I have a problem with Kjöller’s argument, and my problem, too, is in the qualifier. She is pro-choice, but only on the condition that she retains the right to judge those taking advantage of that choice. She is pro-choice, but she reserves the right to blame parents making that choice for creating a narrow-minded, judgemental world. Truth be told, she is not really pro-choice at all, because she is not prepared to be open-minded enough to take the consequences.

It should be said, of course, that Kjöller’s reservations reside primarily within the prenatal diagnostic testing realm and not within that of abortion services. Naturally, if parents don’t know whether their babies are healthy or not, the choices they make are completely blind to unjustifiable justifiers, and as such, their decisions can be considered pure and innocent. But modern technology doesn’t allow for an opaque veil of ignorance, so where do we draw the line? And, really, aren’t there plenty of other ethically questionable justifiers? How, for example, do we feel about termination for convenience? Whose moral compass gets to decide when we’ve crossed the line? Kjöller’s?

The abortion debate is difficult for a reason, and yes, it has to be nuanced: we have to admit that both the pro-choice and the pro-life sides involve compromises. But surely the basic principle of choice (though I must reiterate that the parents facing it are unlikely to feel like they’ve got one) is based on the belief that only the parents themselves know whether or not they are ready and able to be parents? I highly doubt that giving them the right to make that call only once it has been proven that their baby is 100% healthy, or only if they can assure us that they are completely and utterly ignorant in regards to their baby’s health, simply because we have agreed that aborting a baby with a chromosomal abnormality would be evil, would somehow lead to a more open-minded society.

It has been said that the personal is political, and that is true. This is why we legislate around these issues. But Kjöller’s definition of choice, making it into an ethical stance like any political decision, is problematic in this situation; when the toughest of decisions becomes more personal than political and the rest of society stands there watching with its politically correct and ethically romanticised fists in the air, open-mindedness goes out the window.

It’s not easy, but you can’t have it both ways. After all, choice isn’t really choice if it’s conditional. The same way that Kjöller finds some abortion qualifiers problematic, I find that pro-choice qualifiers of any kind sit quite uncomfortably alongside the context within which the fight for universal abortion rights has been and is being fought. No, I don’t want to live in a society where the perception of what is normal gets narrower by the day either. But that doesn’t mean that I’m prepared to sign up for one where even pro-choice campaigners sneer at the choices made by women who simply couldn’t cope.

[All Swedish-to-English translations are my own.]

“Prayer is,” Swedish blogger Lisa Magnusson writes, “humility, submission. But its consequence is that all suffering is, if not self-inflicted, at least something that can be rectified by believing enough and praying sincerely enough” [my translation].

Reading this, it hit me: absurd as this situation seems to many of us, it is all too familiar to a system in which we, as consumers, are ourselves omnipotent, and we, as consumers, have only ourselves to blame when the suffering strikes. Because with choice as the all-pervasive solution to all problems, who can we blame other than the person who chose wrongly?

Zygmunt Bauman writes that our fears have been privatised: in the neo-liberal world, individual problems and risks never add up to collective matters. We stop asking for help, start feeling insecure, and assume responsibility for our misery. “There is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher famously said.

Perhaps neo-liberalism isn’t all that different from older forms of Christianity, lingering still today in some parts of the world, which preach about original sin and forgiveness. Perhaps, in an increasingly secular world, neo-liberalism is our new religion, an opium for the masses, the fear of a strict, condemning god replaced by the fear of individual failure.

We laugh at the thought of prayer as a substitute for scientifically-proven medication. Why is no one laughing at the idea of the hero-like, omnipotent, self-sufficient consumer in place of community and solidarity?

Now that I think of it, having read a lot recently about the way society happily forgives absent fathers, I realise that my father was quite different from theirs, too. Their fathers often seemed more or less peripheral whenever I was at their houses; if they were at home at all, they were quietly doing some gardening or something sport-related. I don’t remember speaking to them much.

I can’t swear that my memory of my childhood is an accurate reflection of what it was really like. I realise now that there’s a lot I don’t remember, and my memories of everyday moments are all quite brief and sporadic. I remember the mashed potatoes and meatballs my dad used to make, though I’m sure he only ever made them very occasionally. I remember his super healthy breakfast cereal, and how we used to beg him for the crunchy, slighly sweeter luxury version of it.

I remember the whole family having crisps and dips on Friday evenings and me spreading out a blanket across the floor in front of the telly every year on the night of the Eurovision Song Contest, marking every contribution. I remember the one time me and my brother had a proper fight and how guilty I felt after hitting him across the head with the wooden handle of a skipping rope dad had made.

I remember my mother teaching me how to make a fish gratin, and I remember how she decorated a chair at the kitchen table with wild flowers for every birthday. I remember the two of them planting seeds and bulbs in the spring and pulling lawn weeds in the summer.

What I realise when I think about my childhood is that it’s never quite clear who did what in our house; I’m pretty sure both my parents took turns washing the car, and they both cooked and baked. And it was clear to me then that perhaps we were not a true representation of your average Swedish household, but not once did I think that my mother did things fathers do or vice versa.

Having read about all these fathers who pissed off and became popular fun-daddies every other weekend, it is tempting to celebrate my father for being a father just as much as my mother was a mother, for sharing the parenting duties and being as important a part of my up-bringing as my mother was. But that would be to somehow undermine the fact that my mother did exactly the same thing, working full-time while being a present, loving parent of three kids. We’ve become way too good at praising a father who “helps out” while never giving a mother anything but snide comments when she isn’t enough.

Together, my parents were enough. It’s not my dad’s baking or my mother’s career that made me who I am: the environment I grew up in, the environment they created, did.

2011 was the year when:

… I disagreed with Charlie Brooker for perhaps the first and only time in my life;

… the UK Uncut demonstrations took place, and I wrote about why I don’t like the Economist;

… I spent most if not all of Easter on a blanket in the sun in Waterlow Park;

… I admitted to feeling dubios about the ‘Baby on board’ badges;

… I learnt that blood really is thicker than water;

… I wrote about sexist politicians and considered the high proportion of Oxbridge grads at the Guardian;

… I learnt that when your friends say ‘Don’t call, because I’m not ready yet’, you should always, always, always ignore it and call anyway;

… I went to London Feis and was so blown-away by Camille O’Sullivan that I had to write a tribute to everything that isn’t gracious;

… Amy Winehouse died, and, finally, I wrote about loss and how the predictable can be sad;

… I shared my views on the UK riots;

… I quit a perfectly nice, decently-paid full-time job;

… I argued that there is no 12-week rule;

… I considered what it means when androgynous men take over the catwalks;

… I decided that there’s nothing wrong with self-medicating with a bit of polished, well-produced pop – because it works;

… after talking about it for years, I started a master’s in Political Communication and breathed life into a part of me that had been asleep for too long;

… the possibly mind-bogglingly awful film I don’t know how she does it came out, and I wrote about it without even seeing it;

… I published a belated outburst about the panel show and the token woman;

… I stayed in London for Christmas and got a lovely, relaxing break that I needed more than I had anticipated;

… and, last but not least, I discovered the brilliant new Brewdog pub in Camden.

What I take with me from 2011 is that trying to control things is a waste of time, because you can’t; that investing time in yourself is always worth while; that a bit of blogging, some well-produced music, and time spent in a sunny park with your dearest family and friends can go a long way; and that if you marry the right person, together you can get through anything. I am now very much ready to pour myself a glass of pale ale, spend the last night of the year with some of my favourite people in the world, tell 2011 to fuck off, and look to a brighter future.

Come on, 2012. You’ve got an easy act to follow. Onwards and upwards.

This is of course something he’s put a lot of thought into, and I’m sure there’s fine egalitarian reasoning behind his decision. The irony is that through his statement he pinpoints exactly why this is complex: if saying that someone is one of our greatest actors seems like more of an all-encompassing compliment than suggesting that they’re one of our greatest actresses, we suggest that the latter is the exception, that one can be our greatest actress without for that matter necessarily competing with male actors at all.

In a recent episode of Stephen Fry’s new linguistics show, Planet Word, he pondered how our linguistic identity affects our world view, and a guest on the show explained how the word for ‘bridge’ carries different qualities in different languages. Germans, for example, are more likely to describe a bridge as beautiful, slender, even fragile, while Spanish people tend to talk about bridges as tall, strong, and solid. Why? Because in German, the word (die Brücke) is feminine, while in Spanish it (el puente) is masculine. Further to making me want to avoid German bridges, this says a lot about our psyche. Just think about the implications of our linguistic make-up for our world view!

There is of course nothing wrong with distinguishing between traditionally feminine and masculine, and I doubt anyone would suggest that we should get rid of these distinctions altogether. What this highlights, though, is that these traditional values and properties are deeply ingrained in our culture, and if we are likely to judge a bridge by them, we are probably very likely to do the same with people. Moreover, the fact that there’s always a norm means that there’s always an exception. That the norm is more often feminine in regards to professions to do with care, physical weakness, childcare and tidying won’t come as a surprise to anyone, and I’ve argued the case for dentists and surgeons before.

I would never dream of criticising a bipolar homosexual (that’s Mr. Fry) for a lack of understanding for those deviating from the norm. In fact, I’m not trying to criticise anyone here: expressing cultural heritage through the use of our dear language is not only a necessary exercise, but one can prove very interesting. I am merely hoping to act as a spotlight on that cultural heritage. And I’m hoping that the next time you cross a German bridge, you will think about this whole thing with masculine and feminine, norm and exception, once and for all.

I think that there are two great reasons why higher education should be funded by the state. Firstly, because education shouldn’t be something available only to the well-off, and the fact that the UK is at the very bottom of the developed world’s social mobility league says a lot about how we’re doing on that point. Secondly, because not everything can be measured by individual salaries; not everything in politics is about individual gain. In a parliament where a large amount of MPs claimed they couldn’t actually understand the reasoning behind the Alternative Vote, it should be clear that education strengthens democracy.

Or, as Camila Vallejo, Chilean student rebel leader and face of the populist uprising, said: “We want [...] to stop seeing education as a consumer good, to see education as a right where the state provides a guarantee. Why do we need education? To make profits? To make a business? Or to develop the country and have social integration and development?”

I think these are the questions we should be asking ourselves. Then we can ponder whether it’s still worth going to university.