What America gets right about the abortion debate

There are two things non-Americans can almost never understand about America and should probably never speak about. The first is guns. If you have a British accent and arrive in America, or talk about America, you should be very careful before opining on the Second Amendment.

It isn’t a precise analogy, but you might compare it to an American arriving in Britain and suddenly talking about the rights and wrongs of hereditary monarchy. There are lots of reasons why countries end up with the institutions they have. And though Her Majesty the Queen is clearly responsible for fewer fatalities each year than America’s right to bear arms, the Second Amendment is as much a centrepiece of American democracy as the monarchy is of our own. Outsiders might find it barmy, and aspects of the Second Amendment maybe are (notably some of the arms that people are now able to bear). But that is the settlement Americans have – and it is probably for the best for outsiders to keep their wonderment to themselves.

The other issue that outsiders find most unfathomable about America is the culture war about abortion. There is a reason for that. In countries like our own the abortion debate is essentially over – though abortion has come a long way since it was first made legal in Britain. In 2020 there were almost 225,000 abortions in England, Scotland and Wales. That is the highest number on record, exceeding even the previous peak of 2019. That 2020 figure is almost ten times the number carried out in the year after abortion became legal in this country.

Back then most of the cases were justified on the grounds of risk to the physical or mental health of the mother.