Though Cowards Flinch

I’ve been thinking, with all the good work of the Left on the subject of abortion, maybe we’re tackling the wrong issues. Let me just slip my tongue into my cheek and off we go…

Perhaps we should instead follow China’s “one child rule” – but our excuse shouldn’t be overpopulation. No. Instead, we should institute a “one child rule” for all the illiberal or religiously bigoted scumbags who are against abortion. We should institute compulsory sterilisation on all public representatives who propose shortening the length of time wherein a woman may have an abortion.

Absolutely anyone who calls himself or herself liberal or a socialist and still votes to shorten the abortion time limit, or votes to restrict access to abortion, should be taken out and given a blindfold and a nice cigarette to smoke, with a brick wall to lean against in the sunshine. No less than nine Labour MPs voted against the second reading of the HFE Bill, one of whom was a member of the Socialist Campaign Group. Six Liberal MPs voted against the Bill also. Why would the left even bother associating with such people?

One would think, after the defeat of the Thatcher years, when abortion was narrowed frim 28 to 24 weeks of a pregnancy, we’d be all geared up and ready to go. The following things should be on our agenda:

1. Repealing Thatcher’s amendment to the 1967 Abortion Act.

2. Extending the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland.

3. Getting rid of the “two doctors” clause in Abortion law.

4. Making refusal to terminate a pregnancy on the part of a doctor an offence warranting summary disciplinary action.

Instead, we’re mired down in trying to combat the fruitcake right wing. Apparently Abortion Rights have even been trying to prevent left wing MPs proposing pro-choice amendments.

An excellent post detailing all the proposed amendments to the HFE Bill, limiting abortion to certain lengths of time and amendments which demanded the imposition of certain insidious types of counselling upon women who are thinking about abortion can be found at Liberal Conspiracy. Meanwhile, the half-illiterate thoughts of one Newark upon Trent CLP member, who is one hundred percent against abortion, can be found here, where myself and top chick Stroppybird have registered our thoughts.

The arguments advanced by this chap, and they bear that name by courtesy rather than actuality, are unbelievable. Apparently since only 1 in 5 foetuses aborted between 20 and 24 weeks are likely to be born disabled, that somehow makes it alright to lower the abortion limit. Well, I hate to ask this, are disabled foetuses somehow worth less than normal ones? I don’t think so – but I think that any decision to abort should rest with the mother, whose body it is. I think that abortion should be legal up until the point where there are going to be zero back street abortions.

All the sentimental moralising about how mothers can feel their baby kick at 16-18 weeks is a preposterous attempt at emotional blackmail and the peddler of this stuff on that website can go to hell, taking his ‘Catholic faith’ with him for all I care.

No doubt most active bloggers will be aware of the nonsense surrounding Conservative MP Nadine Dorries and her recent fallacious presentation to the Science and Technology Select Committee, amply backed up by the mendacious comments upon her blog, which I refuse to link to. In justification of a lower abortion time limit she showed a picture of a foetus well below 24 weeks old gripping the finger of a surgeon who was operating upon it. The picture, it turns out, was a fraud and the baby was, at the time, under anaesthetic as the surgeon readily admitted.

When challenged upon this, Dorries, among other things, got rid of the comments section of the relevant blog articles, claimed that the surgeon had been ‘got to’ by pro-abortionists and basically claimed she was being persecuted. It reads like a bad joke at times, it really does. Yet remarkably Dorries has not stood alone on the abortion time limits issue: Labour MPs such as Claire Curtis-Thomas have been right there beside her. The madness has not been restricted to such Cornerstone Group (of Faith, Flag and Fascism) worthies as Edward Leigh and Ann Winterton.

A lot of this has gone largely unremarked upon in the mainstream media (i.e. outside of political programmes) beyond cursory comments on successive protests outside Westminster by scientists, by pro-lifers and so on. Radio 4 has picked up on some of the debates in Parliament, but as it isn’t a partisan issue and as there is a free vote on some of the elements to the HFE Bill, there’s not a lot of political mileage to be made out of it. As a result, abortion continues to be one of the least talked about issues facing our society.

When the alternative is the American model of pro-life / pro-choice, I’m not entirely sure that’s a bad thing of course.

The silence of the mainstream media opens a new danger however; the casual prejudice of the Tories with regard to ‘father figures‘ goes mostly unchallenged. MPs escape with peddling falsehoods. Religion continues to be treated as a valid way of exempting oneself from having to advance a rational argument without excessive emoting, such as Dorries’ picture, mentioned earlier.

And this is the 21st century approach to women’s rights?