Louise Nousratpour
Friday March 14, 2008
The Morning Star
LOUISE NOUSRATPOUR reports on how the women's movement is fighting the anti-abortionists' attempts to make choices for us.
ANTI-ABORTION Tory MPs who voted for the Iraq war, nuclear weapons and cuts to benefits for lone parents and the disabled like to refer to themselves as "pro-life" and call defenders of women's rights "child killers."
Tory MPs Anne Widdecombe and Ann Winterton, who both supported the Iraq war and Trident nuclear weapons replacement, are on a "road show" to promote the anti-abortion agenda around the Human Fertilisation and the Embryology Bill expected to reach the Commons in spring.
Fellow anti-abortion MP Nadine Dorries, who also voted "very strongly" for Trident replacement, insists that the debate around abortion "is not an issue of women's rights or pro-life - the question is, are we a decent and humane society or aren't we?"
Pro-choice campaigners are worried that MPs such as Dorries may table amendments to reduce the current 24-week upper time limit for abortion to 20 or even 13 weeks.
The anti-abortionists are pegging their argument on recent reports about the "excellent survival rate" of babies born alive between 22 and 25 weeks.
However, a report by the Commons science and technology committee argued last year that there has been no significant change in foetal viability to justify a reduction in abortion time limit.
Fewer than 2 per cent of abortions take place after 20 weeks and this, campaigners say, is due to "exceptional and very difficult" circumstances, including profound "denial" associated with trauma such as rape and incest, catastrophic life circumstances such as domestic violence or a crisis with an existing child, as well as chronic delays of up to eight weeks by the NHS.
Professor Wendy Savage of the Doctors for Woman's Choice on Abortion warns that restricting abortion would not reduce the number of terminations but would help to create a market for back-street abortions.
The anti-abortion lobby's decision to rip open the debate after 18 years of relative silence may actually work in favour of the pro-choice activists, who plan to use the opportunity to drag the 1967 Abortion Rights Act into the 21st century.
Backed by public opinion, doctors and scientists, they want to strengthen the Act by removing the "condescending" requirement of two doctors' permission for abortion, extend the law to cover women in Northern Ireland and end the NHS "postcode lottery" of delays and inadequate services.
"But first, we must ensure that the current 24-week upper time limit for abortion is not reduced in any way," cautions Abortion Rights activist and trade unionist Marian Brain, who herself had a late abortion as a teenager.
"Any reduction would have a devastating impact on the poorest and the most vulnerable women in society, in particular, teenagers. Pro-choice MPs must table counter-amendments to preserve and strengthen current laws."
Brain dismisses the anti-choice lobby as "a bunch of hypocrites," arguing: "Many of the politicians calling themselves 'pro-life' are the same people mounting attacks on single parents and moan about money being spent on welfare.
"They don't care about the child once he or she is born - just look at the level of child poverty in Britain."
Indeed, Widdecome has, in the past, voted for legislation to cut benefits for lone parents. She believes that people on benefits have no "sense of individual pride" and yearns for the days when "being on the dole was a matter for stigma."
The staunch Catholic has particularly targeted single mothers for having children outside marriage.
"In our day, to become pregnant before marriage was a disaster. Now, the state supplies the roof and the state is the breadwinner," she said in an interview with the Daily Mail last year.
Far from being a "breadwinner," the state has increasingly neglected the poorest and most vulnerable in society, thanks to 18 years of Tory rule followed by over a decade of new Labour.
In today's Britain, single mothers make up the majority of the poor and an estimated 3.5 million children live below the official poverty line. British childcare provision is ranked worst in Europe and a nationwide maternity care survey in January highlighted the appalling treatment of mothers and babies in overstretched NHS wards.
Furthermore, Britain has the highest level of teenage pregnancies in Western Europe and the government is set to miss its target to halve the number by 2010.
Brain blames this on a lack of social support and poor sex education, as well as the "appalling" sexualisation culture perpetuated by the media and retailers.
'Many politicians call themselves "pro-life" but are mounting attacks on single parents.'
Some merchandise aimed at children as young as six are shockingly sexual - cropped tops, thongs and T-shirts saying "Babe" and "Porn Star" on them. Recent campaigns by concerned mothers have forced Tesco to pull the plug on a pole-dancing toy kit and compelled Woolworths to withdraw a bed-range for six-year-olds casually called "Lolita."
Brain believes that, if anti-abortionists were serious about reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies, they would focus on these social and economic inequalities, not "put the guilt trip on women who, for whatever reason, choose abortion."
She notes that, if she had gone through with her pregnancy at the age of 19, she would have ended up a destitute single mother sniffed at by the likes of Widdecome as "immoral" freeloaders.
Recalling the experience, Brain says: "It was an unpleasant experience. But I knew I had to do it or I would end up a single mother with no degree and little financial or social support.
"I come from a big working-class family in Birmingham. My dad died when we were young and my mum had to bring up eight children single-handedly.
"I wasn't in a stable relationship with the father, who was registered with blindness, and I wasn't ready, psychologically or financially, to bring up a child on my own."
Brain notes that she was worried that the burden would fall on her mum.
"I couldn't do that to her. She was already struggling to bring us up."
Pro-choice campaigners are also angry about a clause in the current Abortion Rights Act which allows anti-choice GPs to deny women treatment.
"As well as a postcode lottery treatment and chronic delays in the system, women have to deal with anti-abortion doctors, who deliberately delay procedures and put spanners in the works," Brain says angrily.
This is reflected by women who have recounted their stories about abortion on the Pro-Choice Majority website. Most of them blame NHS delays and anti-abortionist GPs for having a late abortion.
Cath Elliott, from Norwich, who had an abortion at 12 weeks, writes: "My doctor was very anti-abortion, which he made clear by the way he treated me.
"The first time I went to him I was two weeks pregnant, but, because of his delaying tactics, I had to wait another 10 weeks before I got the abortion," Elliott writes.
Annette, from north-west England, had her abortion at 17 weeks. She contacted her local NHS when she was nine weeks pregnant but was turned away because the hospital had reached its "quota" on abortions.
Of all the women sharing their experience on the website, only Lucy has had an abortion as late as 24 weeks and that, she says, is because her GP "misinformed" her.
"He said I had miscarried at nine weeks, which I hadn't," she recalls, adding that staff at her local clinic were so unhelpful that she had to "resort to Yellow Pages for help."
Those who went through an abortion in the first 12 weeks of their pregnancy often cite psychological or financial difficulties, unstable relationship with the father or studies.
Brain urges MPs to resist any weakening of the abortion laws and seek to remove all current obstacles to make the service more widely accessible and fairer.
"My union, the CWU, has a very strong pro-choice policy and we have put motions to the TUC women's conference in the past," she says proudly.
"The Abortion Rights Act, along with other equality legislation, has enabled women to have a better quality of life and be more economically independent. We must defend these rights and seek to extend them further."
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