abortion | ukwatch.net

Abortion: Their Morals and Ours

Ellie Keen — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:26:35 +0000

The right is seriously mobilising around the issue of abortion. Tory leader David Cameron has stated that he wants to bring the limit down to 20 or 21 weeks and Tory ex-minister Anne Widdecombe has been taking her “pro-life” road show around the country in an effort to rally the troops. This is not something a Tory has been confident enough to do on any issue for many years – though, thanks to local activists, these meetings did not happen without noisy protests outside.

It is clear that the right have been waiting for the opportunity to challenge the abortion law for some years. They have partly succeeded in focusing the debate about the time limit, currently set at 24 weeks, around the issue of viability and away from a women’s right to choose.

There have been regular stories in the press claiming that new scientific developments prove the need to bring the time limit down. The medical establishment has rejected this view. Last year’s inquiry into the abortion time limit by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee reported: “We have seen no good evidence to suggest that foetal viability has improved significantly since the abortion time limit was last set, and seen good evidence that it has not.”

The arguments about why a small minority of women might need to access an abortion at this stage in a pregnancy get little coverage and need to be constantly restated. It is a fact that some young women simply don’t realise they are pregnant, some go into denial until they can’t hide it, and, in the case of older women, some mistake missed periods for the menopause and don’t realise for some months that they are pregnant.

One other major reason that women need access to abortion at a later stage is the discovery of severe foetal abnormality. For example, one important test for impairments such as Down’s syndrome is amniocentesis. This cannot be carried out until 16 weeks, the results may take two to three weeks, and then the woman may need counselling and advice. If she decides to have an abortion it may be yet another week or two before this can be arranged.

The truth is the anti-abortionists are not concerned with any of this. They want to stop all abortions happening but they are faced with the fact that an overwhelming majority, 83 percent of the British population, support legal abortion. So they are left with trying to chip away at the time limit where they think they can make gains. If they win this time they will come back for more.

The anti-abortionists will have gained confidence from the defensiveness voiced by some pro-choice campaigners in recent months. Even David Steel, the man responsible for bringing the 1967 Abortion Act onto the statute book, has been quoted as saying that “everyone can agree there are too many abortions” and “there is a mood now which is that if things go wrong you can get an abortion, and it is irresponsible”. The implication is that women are frivolous about having abortions, and it repeats the myth that women use them as a form of contraception.

For socialists the key argument is that women are more than incubators: they have the right to control their own bodies. No woman should be forced to continue a pregnancy if she feels she cannot cope.

So there is no optimum or “normal” number of abortions to aim for. Every woman who needs one should be able to access one speedily and safely. When abortion was illegal no one knew how many took place. Many women never told anyone for fear of the law (see below) and so the pre-1967 numbers were based on speculation and the number of women who ended up in hospital with sometimes life threatening complications. Neither will it ever be known how many women went through with pregnancies simply because they didn’t want to take the physical or legal risk of a backstreet abortion.

Sex education

Today, far from being too easy to get an abortion, there is massive unevenness in access across the country, which is why any new amendments to extend and improve provision are to be welcomed. The 1967 act was never about giving women full choice. As David Steel himself said at the time, “We want to stamp out the backstreet abortions, but it is not the intention of the promoters of the bill to leave a wide-open door for abortion on request.” Politicians claimed that opening up abortion provision too much would encourage sexual activity.

Today the right still argue that access to sex education, contraception and abortion is too open, claiming it has led to Britain having the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Europe. Every year almost 50,000 young women under 18 fall pregnant in Britain – six times that of Holland, four times that of Italy and three times higher than in France. In the 1970s rates of teenage pregnancy were similar across Western Europe. The idea that this is because of too much sex education and the availability of contraception and abortion would be laughable if it didn’t have such tragic consequences.

The example of the US is telling. Over $1 billion has been spent on abstinence programmes in schools yet the rates of teenage pregnancies are the highest in Western industrialised countries. Britain comes second.

One way Holland has achieved the lowest rate of teenage pregnancies across Western Europe is by having compulsory sex education in schools from the age of five and continued explicit and supportive sex education from then on. In contrast, comprehensive sex education is still not a required part of the curriculum in Britain, making provision uneven. What is needed is more openness about sex, and systematic and sympathetic sex education in schools from a young age.

Of course, some teenagers choose to become parents and they should not be demonised. But society needs to make it as easy as possible to avoid unwanted pregnancy, and attempting to repress natural sexual behaviour will not do that.

We are a long way from the crushing morality of the 1950s, when any women who got pregnant outside of marriage faced stark choices: illegal and dangerous abortion, have the baby and then feel there was no alternative but to give it up for adoption, or keep the child and face society’s opprobrium. It is hard to convey the stigma that went with being an “unmarried mother” – a pejorative description which used to be commonplace. The term “unmarried father” was never used.

Happily, today millions of us have relationships and babies without feeling the same pressure to marry or conform, and no serious section of the ruling class can argue that women should be pushed back into the home. Women are now a permanent part of the workforce and women’s paid work is vital to the economy.

Yet despite all the advances and changes in women’s lives, ideas about the family, and a woman’s role, still persist. We are told that the family is a vital cornerstone of society, and women’s role within it as child bearer is central. Such ideology still plays an important part in shaping expectations and consciousness. It helps ensure that people continue to see it as natural that the family carries the bulk of the economic burden of bringing up the next generation.

This lies behind the moral panic about single mothers and working class families that politicians still regularly whip up. If you have a baby on your own it will be financially difficult, unless you have a very highly paid job and good maternity leave. But the state makes you go through hoops to get assistance. You are seen as feckless and undeserving, and in some way hardship is still judged as an appropriate state for you.

Women can’t win. If they have children young they will struggle to be financially secure but will get little support. If they wait to have a baby until financially stable later in life they will receive little sympathy if they then face problems with fertility as they have tried to “buck their biology”. When women do have children they can only stay at home without criticism if they are not a “burden” on the state. Any single parent on benefits will, from October, be forced to look for work when the youngest child is 12 rather than 16 as in the past. New Labour wants to bring this threshold down to seven years by 2010. This completely ignores the reality of the lack of affordable and flexible childcare that means some low paid workers can’t afford to leave the house to work.

In contrast, middle or upper class women can make other choices. They can leave their children with nannies or send them to boarding school at a tender age and not be accused of neglect. Imagine if Madeleine McCann’s parents had been manual workers rather than doctors and had been staying on a package deal in Benidorm, leaving their children locked in a flat while they went to a pub. I believe the media would then have taken a very different stance. Instead of sympathy and global support we would have witnessed at best a wave of vitriol about selfishness and irresponsibility, and possibly even the prospect of legal charges.

But the other side of this is that women today have more economic independence and are more sexually liberated than 40 years ago.

Whatever the state or politicians say about our lives we are not going to go back to a time when our lives were totally restricted and repressed. Women are not going back in the box. The enthusiasm for the pickets against Anne Widdecombe’s rallies and the success of the 300-strong Abortion Rights meeting in London in January show that. Veteran activists are being reinvigorated, but most importantly a new layer of young women are getting involved in the campaign to defend and extend abortion rights. Many are hearing these arguments for the first time.

There is no time to lose. Every trade unionist and activist needs to raise the issue of abortion rights at work, in the trade unions and at college. During the last serious battle to defend abortion rights the bigots were pushed back by the collective strength of the trade union movement. We need to be prepared to make such a mobilisation again.

But by taking on the wider arguments about women’s oppression, morality and class we can do more than stop the current attacks. Already there are thousands of women, and men, who are angry about women’s position in society, about the rise of raunch culture, unequal pay and the lack of childcare. Right now we have a real opportunity to win this new generation to socialist politics and the fight for women’s liberation.

Judith Orr is the author of Sexism and the System published by Bookmarks, £3. To join Abortion Rights go to www.abortionrights.org.uk.

Before abortion was legal

For the first 30 years of my life abortion was illegal in this country.

Almost as soon as I got involved in politics in the late 1950s, a friend came round to my flat and asked to stay with me for a few days. She had just had an abortion; the foetus had come away in the toilet. She had to borrow lots of money and was frightened she would be found out and imprisoned.

We sometimes had telephone calls from teenage girls giving false names and asking if they could come and stay. They were afraid they would be chucked out of their home or arrested after having abortions.

In the late 1970s I interviewed an old lady who had had an abortion as a young woman. She insisted I did not give her name or anything that could reveal her identity. Even though abortion was by then legal she was still worried that she might get into trouble.

I have friends who have told me horror stories after they realise I am in favour of a woman’s right to choose, but they always say I am the only person they have ever told and I must not tell anyone else.

It is terrible that people are still frightened of the law, even though it no longer applies.

Mary Phillips

Pro-Death

Tim Holmes — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:36:33 +0000

Who carries the greatest responsibility for the deaths of unborn children in this country? I accuse the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, His Eminence Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor. I charge that he is partly to blame for our abnormally high abortion rate.

Let me begin with a point of agreement. “Whatever our religious creed or political conviction,” Murphy-O’Connor writes, the level of abortion in the UK “can only be a source of distress and profound anguish for us all.”(1) Quite so. But why has it climbed so high? Is it because of the rising tide of liberalism? The absence of abstinence? Strange as it may seem, the evidence suggests the opposite.

Last week the cardinal sacked the board of a hospital in north London(2). It had permitted a GP’s surgery to move onto the site and the doctors there, horror of horrors, were helping women with family planning. Though it is partly funded by the NHS, St John and St Elizabeth’s is a Catholic hospital, which forbids doctors from prescribing contraceptives or referring women for abortions. The cardinal says he wants the hospital to provide medical help that is “truly in the interests of human persons”(3).

Murphy-O’Connor has denounced contraception and abortion many times before. That’s what he is there for: the primary purpose of most religions is to control women. But while we may disagree with his position, we seldom question either its consistency or its results. It’s time we started. The most effective means of preventing the deaths of unborn children is to promote contraception.

In the history of most countries which acquire access to modern medical technology, there is a period during which the rates of contraception and abortion rise simultaneously. Christian fundamentalists suggest that the two trends are related, and attribute them to what the Pope calls “a secularist and relativist mentality”(4). In fact it’s a sign of demographic transition. As societies become more prosperous and women acquire better opportunities, they seek smaller families. During the early years of transition, contraceptives are often hard to obtain and poorly understood, so women will also use abortion to limit the number of children they have. But, as a study published in the journal International Family Planning Perspectives shows, once the birthrate has stabilised, the use of contraceptives continues to increase and the rate of abortion falls. In this case one trend causes the other: “rising contraceptive use results in reduced abortion incidence”(5). The rate of abortion falls once 80% of the population is using effective contraception(6).

A study published in the Lancet shows that between 1995 and 2003 the global rate of induced abortions fell from 35 per 1000 women each year to 29(7). This period coincides with the rise of the “globalized secular culture” the Pope laments(8). When you look at the broken-down figures, it becomes clear that (except in the countries of the former Soviet Union) the incidence of abortion is highest in conservative and religious societies. In the largely secular nations of western Europe, the average rate is 12 abortions per 1000 women. In the more religious southern European countries, the average rate is 18. In the United States, where church attendance is still higher, there are 23 abortions for every 1000 women(9), the highest level in the rich world. In Central and South America, where the Catholic Church holds greatest sway, the rates are 25 and 33 respectively. In the very conservative societies of East Africa, it’s 39(10). One abnormal outlier is the UK: our rate is 6 points higher than those of our western European neighbours(11).

I am not suggesting a sole causal relationship here: the figures also reflect the regions’ changing demographies. But it’s clear that religious conviction does little to reduce the abortion rate and plenty to increase it. The highest rates of all – 44 per 1000 – occur in the former Soviet Union. Under communism, contraceptives were almost impossible to obtain. But, thanks to better access to contraception, this is also where the fastest decline is taking place: in 1995 the rate was twice as high. There has been a small rise in the level of abortion in western Europe, attributed by the Guttmacher Institute in the US to “immigration of people with low levels of contraceptive awareness.”(12) The explanation, in other words, is consistent: more contraception means less abortion.

There is also a clear relationship between sex education and falling rates of unintended pregnancy. A report by the United Nations agency Unicef notes that in the Netherlands, which has the world’s lowest abortion rate, a sharp reduction in unwanted teenage pregnancies was caused by “the combination of a relatively inclusive society with more open attitudes towards sex and sex education, including contraception.”(13) In the US and UK, by contrast, which have the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the developed world, “contraceptive advice and services may be formally available, but in a ‘closed’ atmosphere of embarrassment and secrecy.”(14)

A paper published by the British Medical Journal assessed four programmes seeking to persuade teenagers in the UK to abstain from sex. It found that they “were associated with an increase in number of pregnancies among partners of young male participants”(15). This shouldn’t be surprising. Teenagers will have sex whatever the grown-ups say, and those who are the least familiar with contraceptives are the most likely to become pregnant. The more effectively religious leaders and conservative newspapers anathemise contraception, sex education and pre-marital sex, the higher the abortion rate will go. The cardinal helps to sustain our appalling level of unwanted pregnancies.

But while his church causes plenty of suffering in the rich nations, this doesn’t compare to the misery inflicted on the poor. Chillingly, as the Lancet paper shows, there is no relationship between the legality and the incidence of abortion. Women who have no access to contraceptives will try to terminate unwanted pregnancies whatever the consequences might be. A report by the World Health Organisation shows that almost half the world’s abortions are unauthorised and unsafe(16). In eastern Africa and Latin America, where religious conservatives ensure that terminations remain illegal, they account for almost all abortions. Methods include drinking turpentine or bleach, shoving sticks or coat hangers into the uterus(17) and pummelling the abdomen, which often causes the uterus to burst, killing the patient(18). The WHO estimates that between 65 000 and 70 000 women die as a result of illegal abortions every year, while five million suffer severe complications. These effects, the organisation says, “are the visible consequences of restrictive legal codes.”(19) I hope David Cameron, who has just announced that he wants to place restrictions on legal terminations in the UK(20), knows what the alternatives look like.

When the Pope tells bishops in Kenya, the global epicentre of this crisis, that they should defend traditional family values “at all costs” against agencies offering safe abortions(21), or when he travels to Brazil to denounce the government’s contraceptive programme(22), he condemns women to death. When George Bush blocks US aid for family planning charities that promote safe abortions, he ensures, paradoxically, that contraceptives are replaced with backstreet foeticide(23). These people spread misery, disease and death. And they call themselves pro-life.

References:

1. Cardinals Cormac Murphy-O’Connor and Keith O’Brien, 22nd October 2007. Open Letter on the occasion of the 40th Anniversary of the 1967 Abortion Act from the
Presidents of the Catholic Bishops’ Conferences of Scotland and England and Wales. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00222/Open_Letter_Aborti…

2. Riazat Butt, 22nd February 2008. Archbishop orders Catholic hospital board to resign in ethics dispute. The Guardian.

3. ibid.

4. Catholic News Agency, 19th November 2007. Defend marriage and family life at all costs, Benedict XVI tells Africans.
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=11014

5. Cicely Marston and John Cleland, March 2003. Relationships Between Contraception and Abortion: A Review of the Evidence. International Family Planning Perspectives, Volume 29, Number 1. http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/2900603.html

6. ibid.

7. Gilda Sedgh et al, 13th October 2007. Induced abortion: estimated rates and trends worldwide. The Lancet vol 370, pp 1338–45.

8. Catholic News Agency, ibid.

9. The Guttmacher Institute, May 1999. Abortion in Context: United States and Worldwide. http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/ib_0599.html

10. Gilda Sedgh et al, ibid.

11. Office of National Statistics and Department of Health, June 2007. Statistical Bulletin:
Abortion Statistics, England and Wales: 2006. http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/Publicati…

12. Hannah Brown, 17 November 2007. Abortion round the world. British Medical Journal. doi:10.1136/bmj.39393.491968.94

13. UNICEF, July 2001. A league table of teenage births in rich nations. Innocenti Report Card No.3. UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Florence. http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/repcard3e.pdf

14. ibid.

15. Alba DiCenso et al, 15th June 2002. Interventions To Reduce Unintended Pregnancies Among Adolescents: Systematic Review Of Randomised Controlled Trials. British Medical Journal 324:1426.

16. World Health Organisation, 2007. Unsafe abortion. Global and regional estimates of
the incidence of unsafe abortion and associated mortality in 2003. Fifth edition.
http://www.who.int/reproductive-health/publications/unsafeabortion_2003/...

17. Andy Coghlan, 21st October 2007. Family planning lowers abortion rates. New Scientist.

18. World Health Organisation, ibid.

19. World Health Organisation, ibid.

20. James Chapman, 25th February 2008. Cameron: Cut the abortion limit to 21 weeks. Daily Mail.

21. Catholic News Agency, ibid.

22. Tegan Fleming, 21st June 2007. Contraception spree: Brazilian government lowers birth control costs for the poor. Pharmacy News.

23. See http://www.globalgagrule.org/