Money

So, I'm thinking of getting a credit card but I don't know much about it all and hopefully the LJ collective will be able to help.

I've never had a credit card before. My combination of affluence and frugalness has usually meant that (excluding the student loan) I'm a net saver. I have an authorised overdraft of a few thousand pounds because I needed it to buy an annual season ticket when I was commuter, and once that got paid off, within a few months, there didn't seem much point in 'unauthorising it'. Nowadays I'm a student and live in college accommodation. I've got a very generous stipend that gets paid into my current account every three months. I don't know what my credit rating is. I've never been refused a loan but I've never asked other than the overdraft.

Why I want a credit card:
-I heard that being frugal and always being in credit isn't the best way to get a good credit rating. Apparently, having a credit card that I occasionally buy the shopping with and then pay off immediately will make my credit rating better. As long as it doesn't involve too much faff and doesn't cost me anything, it seems to be a good idea to improve it for when I may want to borrow money in the future.
-Apparently credit cards are in some ways 'safer' than debit cards. I'm not sure exactly how. I think it's that if you pay for something but the person you pay turns out to be a fraudster who runs off with the cash, if you pay with a debit card, you lose the money, but if you pay with a credit card, the credit card company lose the money.
-Nationwide are very good, but they have twice frozen my accounts due to admin glitches that weren't my fault. This didn't cause much of a problem as I just went into a branch and they sorted it out very quickly. However, if they had done this when I was abroad it would have caused big problems, so maybe it would be good to have a backup from a different bank/building society in case they ever do it again. (It's also less embarrassing in Sainsbury's to be able to produce a different card that works when the first one doesn't, rather than having to just leave your shipping at the check out.)
-In the next year I may be spending a lot of money, (think several thousand pounds) in chunks ranging from a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand pounds, on top of my usual living expenses. Now, I'm not going to spend more than my current savings plus money I save over the next year so I don't need to borrow money, but I heard that some credit cards have deals where they don't charge you interest for the first 12 months, in which case I could keep my money in a savings account earning interest and pay everything off on the 11th month. I've also heard of cards that earn you supermarket vouchers or money back so I may as well get that if I don't have to pay charges or pay the bill in full each month so I don't have to pay interest. Aren't there also cards that give money to charity for every pound you spend on the card?

I'm sure you all know an awful lot more about all this than I do so I would appreciate your words of wisdom.

Lesbian babies

There seem to be two issues being conflated in debates over the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. One is to remove the requirement that for IVF clinics to consider "the need of that child for a father" before offering treatment, the other is to allow same-sex couples to both be named on the birth certificate of the child.

Now, I think the first change is more of a token move than one that will really affect anything. Clinics currently only have to 'consider' the need for a father and currently many lesbian couples and single women have IVF treatment. I suppose the big difference is that clinics that didn't like treating lesbians might now be caught under anti-discrimination legislation if they always decide not to treat lesbians because they don't think it would be in the interests of the children produced.

The quote that I keep hearing about the second issue is that it would be 'tantamount to the government perpetrating a deception'. The problem is, under the current law birth certificates do this all the time. For a start, there are many babies born each year whose paternity is different to that assumed by their mothers partner and possibly their mother herself. I think I remember hearing that this is so common that hospitals get a bit cagey about telling children's fathers the child's blood type in case it reveals this. Putting that to one side (I don't think many people would advocate mandatory paternity tests for the birth certificate) under the current law, a man whose partner conceives through donor insemination because he is infertile is allowed to be named as the father on a birth certificate, even if there is no chance that he could be a biological parent. The gender recognition act extended this to transmen. The issue isn't that this act is allowing the state to perpetrate a deception that it couldn't perpetrate before, it is that it's pushed the deception to a point when anyone with a primary school level of understanding of reproduction can instantly detect it.

I think to understand this issue we need to have a proper grown up discussion about what birth certificates are for. I can see two extremes:
1) the birth certificate contains purely factual biological information as best known at the time of the registration. The main point of the listing of parents is to prevent biological relatives from accidentally breeding and to help the child gain information about their genetic inheritance.
2) the birth certificate reflects the social position of the child. Under this understanding it may even be reasonable to amend who the parents on the birth certificate are if one parent moves out of a child's life early on and another person becomes the main social parent.

At the moment I think the law is steering somewhere between these extremes in a fudge. Maybe we should decide which model we would prefer things to be like and what the point of birth certificates are.