Improving abortion
A little preamble: There is nothing in this world that winds yours truly up like political and/or religious opportunists banging on about restricting access to legal abortion, and foetus rights, and 40 years of legal abortion delivering Britain of two generations of conscience-free sluts, etc.
The truth is that pro-lifers drive me BANANAS. I have frothed about them all over the internet and most social events I've attended.
Alas, the pro-life contingent and their political backers witter on, undaunted by the fact that the great majority of the British public supports a woman's right to choose.
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About 300 women (and a small cluster of blokes) turned up at the Houses of Parliament last week for an Abortion Rights meeting about the threat posed to the 1967 Abortion Act by proposed - and opportunistic - anti-abortion amendments to the government's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. Pro-lifers are particularly keen to lower the present 24-week gestational limit for abortion.
The bill - as you doubtless have guessed - has absolutely nothing to do with abortion law (it's about reforming the regulation of human embryology as the sciences of fertilisation and embryology move on at pace). Sadly, complete irrelevance ain't putting the god-squad off.
One Baroness Masham has already attempted to perpetrate an amendment to reduce access to abortion for women who discover their babies have severe disabilities. Her notion was to force women in that situation to see their pregnancies to term - to give birth, as renowned pro-choice doctor Wendy Savage said at the abortion rights meeting - to children they know are doomed.
MPs might be crazy, but they're not all stupid, and the brighter ones know very well how women instinctively respond to the thought of being trapped by an unwanted pregnancy.
'There have never been so many women in this room [as there are tonight],' Labour MP Katy Clark began at the start of the meeting. She reminded us also that this very committee room in the House is used for Monday night meetings of the Parliamentary Labour Party.
'I spoke at the University College of London about this issue on Monday night, and older man and younger man after younger man stood up and debated what rights they thought that women should have... Well, many women are going to speak this evening. What we're expecting over the next few months [as the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill progresses)... is a whole range of arguments put forward about why abortion rights need to be restricted in this country... we must build such a campaign [that] the men who are going to vote on whether we have the right to make a choice have no choice but to accept that we need real rights...'
MP Diane Abbott hit the key point of the entire abortion debate when she observed that the anti-abortion lobby doesn't really give a stuff about children's rights, no matter its yabberings otherwise. As Abbott correctly observed, the people who so vehemently pronounce themselves concerned with the rights of the unborn child tend to fade from the picture entirely when the child is born.
Certainly, they are extremely hard to find when it comes to promoting better welfare benefits for single mothers, or voting for free nurseries for children, or speaking up for poverty-stricken children of asylum-seekers and that sort of thing.
'This is not about the rights of children,' Abbott said. 'This is actually an anti-woman campaign. This is about if we are going to be so bold as to have sex inside and outside the bounds of patriarchy, we should suffer.' Hear hear, Diane. Hear hear.
Even Conservative MPs see the point of supporting the majority view. Their own partly-legendary John Bercow - a pink-faced ranter whose extreme rightwing views once earned him the nickname Son of Tebbit - went out on the kind of liberal limb that generally has Tebbit raging about David Cameron and his new generation of Conservative blouses. I nearly fell off my perch myself when Bercow started, I have to admit.
'There isn't a compelling scientific, or ethical, argument that is made to support this proposition (to reduce the time limit for abortion),' came Bercow. 'We shouldn't simply be fighting a defensive and rearguard action against an attempt to turn the clock back 40 years with truly frightening consequences for thousands and thousands of women... there is a compelling case for the modernisation of abortion law... I happen to believe there is a good argument for a wider variety of locations in which the abortion procedure can be performed... I will be with the supporters of the 21st century and of women's rights....'
Couldn't have put it better myself. (Couldn't believe my ears, either. Talk about a complete ethical transplant. Luckily, Bercow's speech is on YouTube. Go ahead and watch him and feast on amazement).
Doctor and Lib Dem MP Evan Harris ('I'm usually known by the Daily Mail as Dr Death, for my support for a woman's right to choose') came up with the useful numbers. As a member of parliament's science and technology committee, he was able to report the committee's recent findings on the upper time limit for abortion in detail (this was the investigation that, if memory serves, a few of the Lord's messengers tried to infiltrate and influence at the end of last year - a couple of doctors who contributed to the committee's work on the science of abortion failed to declare that they were members of the Christian Medical Fellowship. Rotters).
Harris explained that one of the key questions MPs like to tax themselves with when it comes to abortion is that of the upper time limit for abortion, and foetal viability after 24 weeks. '[The science and technology committee found] that while survival rates of 24 weeks and over have improved, they have not done so below that gestational point... that is critical, because now we have an all-party report that sets out the clear evidence and makes it [the evidence around keeping the 24-week limit] absolutely clear.'
Harris also noted there was no reason why women needed to get signatures from two doctors before having an abortion (some of us think they shouldn't even have to get one signature), or why nurses couldn't carry out the procedure. 'We need to force this parliament to deal with these issues now... to ensure that we bed down the current time limit and get the liberalisation that we should have.'
Excellent stuff, and we'll give the last word on it on this occasion to NUS Disabled Students' spokesperson Alex Kemp. He told the meeting that the disabled people he represented were right behind a woman's right to choose. Baroness Masham could worry all she liked about the rights of a severely impaired foetus, but Kemp had sympathy with the women carrying such a baby. People with disabilities, Kemp said, know all too well what it means to have others tell you what is best for you and your physical person. He also said that they resent being used to bash women's rights in this way.
And who can blame him?
So... See the Abortion Rights website for more on upcoming rallies and meetings as the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill progresses.
See the whole meeting on YouTube. Will be back with more. As I say, I find pro-lifers the living end.
