They'll be voting to keep the 24-time limit for abortion this week: here's Labour MP Emily Thornberry on the Labour party and the pro-choice lobby's chances:
Leading Labour pro-choice MP Emily Thornberry is youngish (47), new to the national scene (first elected to parliament in 2005), able to talk a blue streak (she was a criminal lawyer), charismatic, and - at first interview, anyway - refreshingly disinterested in caution.
Truly disinterested, even: she says and does - apparently - anything. She freely describes some Labour colleagues as Neanderthals. She says that others hold views that she thought died with the 1950s. She takes a worthy - if unusual - pleasure in winding up the myriad police that patrol the Houses of Parliament. Giggling like a fruitcake, she marches us past security and up to the HoP's terraces (possibly the terraces that Plane Stupid comandeered for their Heathrow-runway protest a month or two back?) and lets us photograph her there, even though the coppers on the terraces twitch when they see the camera and call in a couple of reinforcements.
She is either keen to be shot, or of the refreshing opinion that a future for a Labour politician might just depend on distinguishing oneself from the flinching, centre-ground-hugging nambly-pamblies who are so responsible for the grovelling tone of Labour today.
She's loyal - particularly to Gordon Brown, out of whom she must scare the living shit. Ditto, no doubt, for moribund pretenders like Charles Clarke, Jack Straw, and Whatisface Miliband - the one whose wide and startled eyes so consistently put one in mind of a fawn that has suddenly felt a finger up its butt.
I'd trade a whole ounce to see Thornberry laying some of her better lines on prissy old turncoats like Harriet Harman and Jacqui Smith: 'I was a student when [John] Corrie was trying to cut down access to abortion. I come from a generation that used to go on the street shouting "Corrie - Withdraw, like your father should have!' Brilliant. I can almost feel Harriet pursing her tight little dog's-bottom mouth.
Still - it is depressing, Thornberry says, to find yourself having to campaign to protect existing abortion legislation in 2008. As we speak, she and I are slumped over the 14 May notices of amendments for this week's reading of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill: as most of you will already know, the usual conservative/hysterical suspects are proposing a range of alternatives to the present 24-week time-limit for legal abortion: 12 weeks, 14 weeks, 16, 18, 20 and 22.
Like many on the modern pro-choice scene, Thornberry is a liberaliser: she wants to see better access to legal abortion, and the removal of some of the more stringent aspects of the Abortion Act as it stands - the requirement for two doctors' signatures for women who want abortions, etc. She's right to say it is depressing to find the existing Act threatened.
That's not the only depressing part, though. Some of us find it depressing that the Labour party is now such an ideological shambles that the pro-life drivel being peddled by the likes of Nadine Dorries can compete as a political option.
Thornberry says that Dorries is marginalised and unlikely to have much influence, but she also says that the 24-week limit is seriously threatened this time round in her view - an admission which rather suggests that the fuss the likes of Dorries has generated has given even supposedly liberal MPs pause for thought.
Thornberry says that even MPs she thought of as pro-choice are trying to romance her with compromises on the 24-week limit. For instance: some have tried to tell her that an acceptable pro-choice compromise would be to cut the time limit to 22 weeks, but to liberalise other aspects of abortion law at the same (remove the requirement for two doctors' signatures, etc).
'They think that is a pro-choice position,' Thornberry laughs. 'People have said [to me] - "you can have compulsory sex education in schools - you can have whatever you want, Emily, but let's [agree] to cut the time limit back to 22 weeks..."' Thus Labour dithers about a woman's right to choose - a fight it should rise to as a matter of course, and a territory it should so easily make its own.
Thornberry says that I can dream on about Gordon Brown positioning his troops either way: 'It's absolutely true that the party hasn't whipped this... He's not going to. Get over it. Ha ha ha.' Probably best not to put your last buck on the Labour left, either: Thornberry says that she sees herself as part of the soft left in Labour, but 'we are the most disorganised group... it's hopeless, really. The couple of times when I've voted against the government, it's been with a group of comrades, but we've been all over the place.'
Thornberry points out that Labour traditionally has taken a liberal view on abortion rights: one can only hope, then, that when the vote on the time limit is taken this week, this tradition turns out to be one of the few Labour hasn't abandoned.
Thornberry says that she likes to think that a pro-choice stance (and a rigourous defence of the 24-week limit) can be a vote-winner, even in a marginal seat like her own. 'Largely, the feedback [from her constituents] is positive... MPs - they don't want it to be their issue, because it is so divisive... They (MPs) are mostly men. They're not going to think about abortion, and they are afraid that if they put their head above the parapet, that the Catholic lobby... the Baptist lobby... whatever it is... [they] will lose their seats.'
I'd say Balls to that. Labour MPs are going to lose their seats regardless. Even a two-week reduction to the legal time limit will be a pro-life, rather than Labour, victory.