Abortion

I wonder at times how some of my fellow hacks in America get out of bed in the morning. The leak of a draft of a Supreme Court decision on abortion rights last week prompted what can only be called a collective nervous breakdown. ‘My teeth have been chattering uncontrollably for an hour,’ New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister vented. ‘Bodies/minds are so weird. Like, not euphemistically – actually chattering. Audibly. And full shaking body. Though otherwise wholly, rationally, well and truly expecting it.’ Well, I wouldn’t say wholly rational, Rebecca, but you do you. The terrifying ruling would send the abortion issue back from a single court to democratic debate

Notice anything about the coverage of the new Texas abortion law in Britain? I mean, quite apart from the fact that we’re obsessing about it in a way that confirms that culturally, Britain is more or less an offshore US state (the US is another country, no?). But on the actual issue, Texas has changed its abortion law to ban the procedure if there is ‘a detectable fetal heartbeat’ — in effect, after six weeks. The US Supreme Court has just upheld this in a very tight 5-4 vote. The justices are also due to hear an appeal against a 2018 Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks. South

Women have faced increasing attacks on their rights in recent years. Moves to accommodate gender ideology have resulted in women-only spaces being opened to male-bodied individuals. In the medical sphere, dystopian terms like ‘menstruators’, and ‘birth parents’ have even been coined to appease activists. These kinds of stories hit the headlines and often receive a wide backlash. But an even more acute threat to women receives comparably little attention. Gendercide – the abortion of preborn babies based on sex – continues to occur in countries across the globe, with girls overwhelmingly the target. Sex-selective abortion is often against the wishes of mothers, who are coerced into termination by family members

There are two contemporary preoccupations that are effectively at odds in the abortion laws of Britain and Northern Ireland. One principle is that a woman’s right to have an abortion must always be accommodated and celebrated. The other is that the diversity we are also expected to celebrate includes disability. Unfortunately, the first trumps the second when it comes to the abortion laws of Britain, which were extended to Northern Ireland behind the backs of its elected representatives in 2019, when the Northern Ireland Assembly wasn’t functioning. As a result, in Northern Ireland as in Britain, it is legal to kill a foetus right up to birth if it –

News comes through this morning of a big death toll: 200,000 over the past 12 months. What’s more, it has happened right beneath our noses – in Britain. Not that these are recognised as the deaths of humans, because the people in question are not accorded human rights. They are, to use the fashionable term among US abortion campaigners, mere ‘clusters of cells’. I guess we could all be called by that euphemism – all of us, from Donald Trump to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are in a sense clusters of cells. But it is as strained a description of a 12 week-old foetus as it is of an adult – by

In a UK first last year, doctors at University College London operated on two unborn babies with spina bifida, a birth defect characterised by a gap in the spinal cord which can cause paralysis of the legs and incontinence. Around 1,000 foetuses a year develop spina bifida in the UK; of these, 80 per cent or so are subsequently aborted. The number of pregnancies terminated each year can be expected to drop with the arrival of this new surgery which will be made available on the NHS. And yet, far from rejoicing, pro-life advocates have been whipped into a frenzy over it. The reason? While foetuses – aged between 20 and 26 weeks

Alabama’s near-total abortion ban, signed into law on Wednesday by governor Kay Ivey, is a real moment of hope. The principle on which it grounds itself is simple enough; as Ivey put it: ‘Every life is precious.’ In those four words lies a remedy for the hatreds that divide humanity. True, pro-lifers have their own doubts over the bill: is it too tactical, by conceding very narrow medical exemptions? Is it not tactical enough, because it will be overturned in the courts and meanwhile alienate the middle ground? But whatever the merits of these criticisms, the Alabama ban is still a landmark. A body of legislators in the world’s superpower has affirmed that

A rare joy of living through the forging of a new orthodoxy is watching as the old orthodoxy becomes daring and scandalous. Assumptions once axiomatic grow beguiling, then bemusing, and eventually base, and a delicious tang of danger is lent to the stalest of views. What was mainstream now finds itself in dissent and on the road to blasphemy. Freedom of conscience is such an idea, so blandly obvious until recently but now a deadly weapon in hate’s ever-expanding arsenal. For while it is perfectly reasonable that individuals be free to think, what if they think the wrong things?  Fortunately for us, we have people like Lauren McDougall. She is

There was an interesting article in the Guardian today about one of the less discussed aspects of miscarriage: the language employed about it by the NHS. “How dare they call my lost baby a “product of conception”’ was the headline for Katy Lindemann’s moving piece about her miscarriage, where she describes how “a baby” – as her unborn child was described when still gestating – was, after dying in the womb and being surgically removed, referred to as the “retained products of conception”. She notes: “From the outset of your antenatal care, the NHS refers to “your baby”’ but not when he or she dies. And she goes on to