Abortion, rape and hypocrisy

On October the 22nd, pro-choice amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill will hit the table again. Dr Evan Harris MP, who has been instrumental in forcing these amendments onto the bill, said on Monday that this is ‘a once in a generation opportunity to modernise the law.’ With it, it’s time to modernise our attitudes.

A significant proportion of the UK believes that abortion is far more permissible if the pregnancy is the result of rape. In October 2007 a CBS News poll showed that 34% of the residents of the United states – the highest proportion of the sample- believed that abortion should only be permitted ‘to save a woman’s life, or in cases of rape or incest.’ And in a survey of British students, over two-thirds of those who identified as ‘pro-life’ believed that abortion should be permitted in cases of rape. This single fact tears a savage hole in ‘pro-life’ reasoning.

Believe it or not, there’s one area where the twisted logic of Governor Sarah Palin actually makes some sense: either abortion is murder, or it isn’t. I happen to believe that it isn’t, but let’s suspend disbelief for a second and suppose, as some people do, that a foetus is an entire and sentient person from the moment of conception. Murder’s still murder, even if you do it with virgin, unsullied hands. The prominence of the viewpoint that abortion is okay as long as the woman has been raped tells us what the real issue is here.

The real issue is women daring to have sex at all. What people really mind isn’t women evacuating the poor little embryos, it’s women daring to exercise sexual self-determination and getting away with it. In other words – in fact, in the words of several pro-choice websites – women deserve to ‘suffer the consequences of sin’. Of course, if a woman’s been raped then it wasn’t her fault she had sexual intercourse, so she’s excused.

It’s easy to see why the pro-choice movement takes such pains to parrot this wildly hypocrytical piece of rhetoric, appealing, like at the parliamentary rally this week, on behalf of women who might be ‘forced to have their rapist’s baby.’ But unless you subscribe to the misandrist Dworkinite premise that all penetrative sex is rape, there has to be more to it than that. A woman shouldn’t have to justify her decision to have an abortion in terms of her sexual purity.
If you truly believe that it’s alright for a woman to terminate a pregnancy when she has a good excuse for being pregnant -one that doesn’t involve the crime of consenting to sex – then you concede that it’s okay for some pregnancies to be terminated. In the pro-choice movement, we are convinced that nobody else should get to decide whether or not a woman ‘deserves’ an abortion. We believe that it should be her decision alone, not someone else’s blind sentimental call, and certainly not a question of sexual virtue. Let’s put aside this archaic reasoning and modernise abortion law to reflect 21st-century values.

****

Use Abortion Rights’ online lobbying tool to lobby your MP ahead of the crucial vote on Tuesday, or come to the protest on Monday the 21st at 5.30pm outside parliament, Westminster tube.

Stand up for women in Northern Ireland!

For months, Northern Irish MPS have been holding the government to ransom over abortion rights, using the bodies of their female constituents as bargaining chips over the 42 days legislation and claiming that if moves are made to extend abortion rights to Northern Ireland, the peace process will be threatened. ‘It’s time to call their bluff,’ said Diane Abbott MP at a rally in Parliament last night.

Diane Abbott has tabled an amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, due for its third reading on the 22nd of October, calling for an extension of the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland. This is precisely the same amendment that Emily Thornberry MP was forced to withdraw back in May, when Gordon Brown assured her that the move would be seen as a slap in the face by the nine DUP members who swung the 42 days vote in the Prime Minister’s favour. Today at noon, forty women from Northern Ireland will hand into Number Ten a letter signed by the leaders of civil society in NI supporting abortion rights for women in the region.

The women want to meet as many MPs as possible whilst they are in London, in order to counter some of the anti-abortion propaganda which is doing the rounds in Westminster. MPs are, for instance, being told by the government that they should not adopt an ‘imperialist’ or ‘colonialist’ attitude to NI and impose something on the region.

‘But there is no question of Westminster ‘imposing’ abortion on NI; it is already a reality of life here,’ said Alliance for Choice spokesperson Goretti Horgan. ‘Each year thousands of Northern Irish women travel to Britain and Europe and pay for private abortions. For women living on low incomes, getting the money together on time is impossible. An unwanted pregnancy can leave some women in a desperate situation – which is why we now find some women turning to the internet to buy the abortion pill.’ Women who have taken black-market abortion pills often present at hospitals in Northern Ireland with terrible bleeding – and if the reason for their symptoms is discovered, some could face a life sentence once they recover, last night’s audience was told.

‘The poverty of some women in NI also impacts on the numbers of late abortions in Britain,’ said Ms Horgan. ‘The time it takes some women to find enough money to have an abortion means that women from here are three times more likely than British women to have abortions after 20 weeks. However, thousands of others are forced to continue pregnancies they find intolerable. This includes women pregnant as a result of rape and sexual abuse’, says the Alliance for Choice spokesperson.

‘If you’re afraid of falling into some colonialist mindset by overriding Stormont, please, forget it – we need our human rights,’ said Dr Audrey Simpson of the Northern Irish Family Planning Association, reminding those present that when the Bill was last on the table in May, Northern Irish MPs had ‘no qualms’ in voting to cut the time limit from 24 to 12 weeks for English, Welsh and Scottish women.

Whilst a majority of Stormont MPs are vehemently anti-choice, they do not represent the needs and opinions of their constituents on this matter. Northern Irish MPs are elected along sectarian lines, with a simple choice between orange and green candidates. Since 1967 over 80,000 women have travelled to England to have abortions, but there’s one big reason why more pro-choice women, doctors and lawyers aren’t speaking out, according to Annie Campbell of the Alliance for Choice: ‘they are afraid’.

Ms Campbell explained how women suspected of seeking abortions in Northern Ireland have been the victims of appalling abuse, adding that anyone vocally supporting the pro-choice cause in Northern Ireland can expect significant harrassment. ‘This is a global war and, as usual, women’s bodies are on the frontline,’ she said. She urged all the women and men present at the meeting to lobby their MPs, asking them to speak out for Northern Irish women ‘because at the moment, we can’t speak for ourselves. There’s no use in us lobbying our MPs for the right to legal abortion – for all we know we’ll just be put on a hit-list,’ she said.

Dr Evan Harris MP, who has been instrumental in furthering the pro-choice cause in parliament, repeated the call for pro-choice citizens to lobby their MPs and urge them to vote for the positive amendments on the bill, reminding those present that ‘this is a once in a generation opportunity to modernise the law’.

It’s also the last chance Northern Irish women will have to fight for their rights to legal abortion for a very long time: soon, criminal law will be devolved to Stormont, after which ‘we won’t see positive change for generations,’ said Annie Campbell.

If you agree that it is unacceptable that a group of women in the UK are still treated as second-class citizens and denied reproductive self-determination, here’s how you can get involved –

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

1)Write to your MP, asking him or her to vote in support of the amendment extending abortion rights to Northern Ireland, and encourage your friends and family to do the same. ‘We get so much hate-mail from pro-life groups that every supportive letter we receive makes a genuine difference’, said Katy Clark MP last night.

2) Sign the online FPA petition in support of extending rights to Northern Ireland, here.

3)Come along to the protest organised by Abortion Rights UK ahead of the crucial vote – details will be posted here as soon as they appear and will also be available at Abortion Rights.

4)Add your voice to the Pro-Choice Majority website, containing testimonials of delays and obstruction to the process of medical abortion by representatives of the 80% of the UK who support a woman’s right to choose.

Palin and the gender agenda.

I rarely talk about American politics on this blog, and even less so since the hype has ramped up over the November election. Part of this has been becauseI believe that voyeuristic obsession over a political event with which British voters are relatively uninvolved exacerbates British political apathy. Whilst the US shivers with hopeful energy, we’re back-pedalling aimlessly towards what might be a new decade of conservatism, inequality and misery. Despite all this, however, we cannot avoid being moved by what’s happening in the States. The mood is infectious. Hope. The audacity of it! Hope, and its enemies. One of those is Sarah Palin, newly announced as John McCain’s running-mate. And once again, the battleground for this election has been pitched on the much-trampled turf of women’s bodies everywhere.

Let me make one thing absolutely and abundantly and categorically clear. There is no such thing as a ‘pro-life’ feminist. You cannot be a feminist and oppose a woman’s right to choose. Let me repeat that for the brainwashed and hard of hearing:

You cannot be a feminist and oppose a woman’s right to choose.

You can be a feminist and be uncomfortable with the notion of abortion. You can be a feminist and communicate that discomfort to third parties. You can be a feminist and choose never to have an abortion yourself. You can be a feminist and support greater rights and opportunities for young mothers everywhere so that fewer women will have to choose between pregnancy and their career. You can do all of these things and be a feminist. What you cannot do is stand in the way of any other woman’s moral and political right to reproductive self-determination.

There is a world of difference between being against abortion on a personal basis and supporting, or leading, movements to make the practice illegal. There are no good arguments for making abortion illegal, a policy which, where it has been tested in other nations, has been shown to lead directly to hundreds of thousands of adult women dying in horrific pain along with their unborn children following illegal backstreet terminations. Distasteful as you may or may not find it, women will always seek to terminate unwanted pregnancies. The very least we can do in civilised societies is make it safer for them to do so, along with facilitating access to contraception in order to reduce the number of terminations that need to take place – something which, by the way, Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin is also against.

Mrs Palin is anti-contraception, anti-gay rights, identifies as a ‘feminist for life’, wants to overturn Roe vs. Wade and is an important advocate for the American pro-gun contingent. Mrs Palin is, in fact, about as right-wing as you can get, and has been chosen as a running mate by a presidential candidate who had met her only once as a sop to the American far-right and, potentially, to all those who might have voted for Hilary because she has tits and a cunt. A more cut-and-paste insult to American feminists, and, indeed, to political women worldwide couldn’t have featured in the wet dreams of the god-guns-and-tame-pussy lobby.

Thankfully, it’s not working. Feminists across the world have condemned Palin’s appointment, and none more vocally than British feminists, because we know – having lived through the Thatcher years and been dogged more recently by the apparitions of Widdecombe and Dorries – that a vote for a woman is not always a vote for women. We want women in power because we want politicians who care about women’s issues. As Anne Perkins comments in the Guardian today, women on the far right have traditionally been more politically successful because it is right-wing women who omit gender issues from their policymaking. Thatcher ‘did not do women’s rights’. We all remember the eighties, even if for some of us most of what we remember is The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and some terrible lines in babywear.

It is unacceptable enough to support the ‘pro-life’ faction in its quest to criminalise women’s reproductive choices if you are an ordinary member of the voting public. It is less acceptable if you area woman, and know what it is to fear unwanted pregnancy. It is doubly unacceptable if you are a rich woman who does not know what it is to have to raise a child alone and in poverty., and it is triply unacceptable if you are in political power. Mrs Palin is all these things, and merits no less than the condemnation of real feminists everywhere. A case for post-natal abortion if ever there was one.

There are those on the far right who would see women returned to the status of frantic, downtrodden baby-making machines in a constant state of anxious pre-pregnancy, with no control over when and how they get pregnant or when and how and if they give birth. There are those on the far right who seek to roll back the tide of conservatism to further colonise women’s bodies, and the lobby, although small, is so vocal that there are those on the left who find themselves tempted to pander to them. Especially men on the left, who will never experience unwanted pregnancy.

No candidate in the upcoming US elections supports the further legalisation of abortion. Obama has stated that he will restrict late-term abortions with some exceptions. Once again, the battle lines are drawn and the fight is over women’s flesh, not just in theory but laid down in our millions under the feet of men wrestling for power. Our precious and hard-won reproductive self-determination is just another pawn in their arsenal. And that’s the greatest insult of all.

Wives and fathers, please stand up.

Disclaimer: nowhere in this post do I claim that fathers are irrelevant. What I’m standing up (well, sitting on a pile of blankets with my laptop) to say is that there are some pretty damn outdated notions of what fatherhood means out there. Male parents? Bring it on.

You bloody traitor, Kathleen Parker. You weak-willed, belly-showing traitor. Maybe you’ve the luxury of a man to help take care of your two sons, but, please, know for sure that that’s what it is – a luxury. Women have been raising children alone for centuries untold, and, since feminist liberation, we have been enabled to provide for ourselves and our children on a more basic level. If that alienates men from their traditional roles of breadwinner and head of the table then too bad. I was raised by a single mother who was also a part-time lawyer; it did me no harm whatsoever, and I fully intend to be one myself one day.
Michael Gove and his ilk can rant about absent fathers until they’re blue in the balls, but if what we really want is for men to return, of their own accord, to the home, then we’d better do something about how domestic work and childcare are seen in this country. House-work and the raising of children are not seen as noble occupations, worthy of respect; if they were, I’d venture that fewer women would be so desperate to throw themselves into the non-domestic world of work, still so fundamentally a man’s world. Since the opening up of legal gender emancipation in the 1960s-70s, women won the right to enter into work organized for men, on men’s terms. Nobody told men that they now had the right to stay at home with the children: the idea would be laughable. That’s women’s work. And, partly because it’s women’s work, child-rearing is still one of the least respected professions on the planet. No wonder the men aren’t lining up to take their turn with the late nights, dirty nappies and parents’ evenings.
So, precisely in what way do children ‘need’ fathers – or is it, in fact, fathers who need children? Traditionally, the role of the head of the household was to provide for his wife and kids on a material basis. Now that that financial role is being adequately filled by many women all on their own, if men want to be more involved in the lives of their children, there will have to be a genuine sharing of domestic roles on a more sustained level, along with policies to back that up from the highest levels of government. The plain fact is that now that women are allowed to financially provide for themselves, we no longer need husbands to raise children effectively, if, indeed, we ever did. What women could do with, fundamentally, are wives –other people, male or female, to share the load of domestic work and money-earning in a spirit of genuine support and partnership. When more men can stomach seeing themselves in the role of ‘wife and father’, then we’ll have a basis for negotiation. Parker goes on to claim that contemporary reproductive freedoms have emasculated men:

‘Legally, women hold the cards. If a woman gets pregnant, she can abort – even without her husband’s consent. If she chooses to have the child, she gets a baby and the man gets an invoice. Unarguably, a man should support his offspring, but by that same logic shouldn’t he have a say in whether his child is born or aborted?
Granted, many men are all too grateful for women to handle the collateral damage of poorly planned romantic interludes, but that doesn’t negate the fact that many men are hurt by the presumption that their vote is irrelevant in childbearing decisions.’

Why is it unarguable that a man should support his offspring? With state help, most women are perfectly capable of doing so on their own, in a pinch. I’m fervently pro-choice, pro-choice to the wire, and part of that passionate belief that women deserve no less than absolute control over their reproductive capacity entails a certainty that with full reproductive control should come full reproductive responsibility. When a women has made a choice to carry a child to term, unless she has chosen to put it up for adoption, she then has full financial as well as emotional responsibility over that child until it can support itself (and often long afterwards – thanks mum!). I know I’m not the only feminist and progressive who finds she can’t support mandatory child support payments from genetic fathers. The trouble with this position is that it’s an outright statement of what men have feared for decades – that their sacred role as breadwinner is no longer relevant, and that in order to have a say over the upbringing of their genetic offspring, the terms of fatherhood will need to be re-negotiated on a deep and radical level.
I love my partner deeply and would be thrilled to bear a child who carried half of his genetic material. If we are still together at the time my child is born I will be only too happy for him to help me raise it, for him to share legal guardianship and for my child to call him ‘dad’. And this is not because it’s his moral or genetic right, but because I’m lucky enough to have met an emotionally and domestically literate man who I think would make a wonderful parent. But I want him around because he’s a fantastic person, not because my kids need a male parent. And if he doesn’t want to be involved, I’ll manage. Before they are their own, my kids will be just that – mine – and my money will pay for the nappies and school shoes.

So sorry about your balls, guys, but before they are their own these babies are ours, and they will remain ours whilst they are born from our bodies. We would be only too delighted for you to help us – genuinely help us – with the work of raising the next generation, but fatherhood is a privilege, not a right. If you’re truly man enough to be a wife and father, bring that to the table and we’ll talk.

YES!

FUCKING YES.

We did it.

Tomorrow, we can start the fight again. Tomorrow, we can pick up our tools and gather our resources and go back to battling patriarchy and injustice in whatever small ways we can. But today? Let’s just sit back and have some well-deserved drinks and look at what we’ve acheived together, forty years after we made the first steps towards reproductive justice in this country.

24 reasons for 24 weeks: a pro-choice call to arms…

As part of her campaign to force the government to reduce the 24 week limit within which women can legally have abortions, the MP Nadine Dorries yesterday unveiled ’20 reasons for 20 weeks’. Today, we publish 24 reasons for 24 weeks, as part of a larger campaign to fight for women’s rights to abortion. This was written by me in conjunction with Jess McCabe at TheFWord, and is backed by the London Feminist Network, Liberal Conspiracy, TheFWord, Abortion Rights, Red Pepper magazine and Feminist Fightback.

24 reasons for 24 weeks.

1. There has been no improvement in the survival rates of infants born before the 24-week time limit during the past decade, according to the British Medical Association.

2. Last autumn, the Commons Science and Technology Committee of MPs found no medical basis for a change in the law.

3. Research shows that lowering the time limit does nothing to lower the number of abortions taking place.

4. There are many far better ways to reduce the number of late-term abortions. People who object to late term abortions should be fighting to make early abortions easier to access, and to increase the availability of proper sex education and access to contraceptives.

5. No contraception is foolproof, and anyone can find themselves pregnant against their will; until foolproof contraception is available, legal pregnancy termination up to 24 weeks will remain necessary.

6. Some women need late-term abortions because severe abnormalities in pregnancy, such as Edward’s syndrome, are rarely identified until 20-21 weeks. Reducing the time limit would force some women to carry severely impaired or dying fetuses to term – an horrific experience.

7. Some vulnerable women need late-term abortions because an abrupt change in personal circumstances – such as domestic violence, which often escalates in pregnancy – leaves them unable to continue with the pregnancy.

8. Some women do not realise that they are pregnant until later in the pregnancy, because they are taking contraceptives, because they are menopausal, or because their periods do not stop. Young women in particular may also go into denial, a serious psychological phenomenon, before they find the courage to approach their GP.

9. Even taking these cases into account, only a tiny proportion (1.5%) of terminations take place after 20 weeks, and 90% of all abortions in the UK are carried out before 12 weeks.

10. Accessing an abortion is already difficult and traumatic enough. The UK does not have abortion on demand, unlike many European countries – it can take months for a woman to have a termination, and hostile doctors can make the process more difficult or delay women in the system until beyond 20 weeks, especially for Irish women who have crossed the sea to access
abortion services in the UK.

11. Only 15% of fetuses born before 23 weeks survive to leave their neo-natal units, and most will suffer severe health and/or physical problems. Babies born as prematurely as 21-22 weeks are nearly always born brain damaged and severely disabled – meaning that they may have very little quality of life to look forward to.

12. There is no option for ‘viable’ fetuses to be removed from the womb early, so women who carry unwanted pregnancies to term after 20 weeks are forced to carry the growing fetus in their body for months more and then undergo labour, causing permanent physical scars, pain and trauma.

13. When women have to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, they risk losing their jobs and damaging their long-term mental and physical health.

14. Fetuses cannot feel pain until much later in the pregnancy, according to experts. “The idea of fetal pain is an absurd and cruel one,” said Dr Stuart Derbyshire PhD, a researcher at Birmingham University.

15. Fetuses are never ‘alive’ after abortions: their brains are not developed enough to sense, think or feel pain.

16. Lowering the time limit to 20 weeks will create a black market trade in unsafe late-term abortions, endangering thousands of women’s lives. Eighty thousand women every year die from complications following backstreet abortions. We don’t want that to start happening in the UK.

17. Fetuses are not viable at 20 weeks: they cannot survive alone, and keeping them alive outside the womb requires complicated and expensive medical technology. Even with that technology few survive for long, causing incredible heartbreak to all involved. The idea that fetuses usually survive alone before 24 weeks is “a cruel deception for prospective parents with
premature babies,” according to Dr Evan Harris MP.

18. Safe, legal abortions at 20-24 weeks rarely have negative psychological effects – but the mental trauma of undergoing an unwanted pregnancy can last a lifetime.

19. In this country, we do not legislate over moral questions such as adultery, and abortion laws should not be the exception to that proud tradition. It is unacceptable to make laws on a moral question where there is any doubt. Pro-life campaigners are already free to make their views heard and to influence individual decisions.

20. The right of a woman to decide what happens to her own body should not be subject to the whims of changing public opinion.

21. Keeping late-term abortion legal will mean that abortions which are going to happen anyway will be carried out safely and hygenically. Many thousands of abortions up to and beyond 24 weeks happened annually before abortion was legalised in the UK in 1967. Those abortions were unsafe and many women died as a result. ‘We used to see women from the local community
bleeding to death in accident and emergency after backstreet abortions,’ said retired nurse Iris Fudge.

22. Seventy-six percent of the United Kingdom is pro-choice. The majority of women in the UK want their rights to safe, legal termination to be protected.

23. Those who are campaigning to reduce the time limit want to end legal abortion entirely – a dangerous and arcane concept. Reducing the time limit will bring them one step closer to their goals.

24. If faced with an unintended pregnancy, a woman in consultation with her doctor is the best person to decide on how to proceed.

What you can do:

*Use the Coalition for Choice website to get in touch with your MP and urge them to support the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.

*Call or go to see your MP and make sure they turn up to vote on the day. Unless they’re a frothing Tory, in which case tell them that all the cocaine in Glasgow is going to be free for one day only.

*If you have the time, please come to the crisis protest called by Abortion Rights:

Emergency Protest – as MPs vote on women’s abortion rights
Tuesday 20 May, 5.30pm
Outside Parliament, W1, London