Abortion

Saturday

Hannah Tomes

Why do we only care about American abortion rights?

In the week since Roe vs Wade was overturned, you’ve hardly been able to switch on the news or open a paper without hearing British politicians and commentators decrying the decision. Almost every woman I know was furious after hearing the news; I’m sure I wasn’t alone in failing to hold back a few tears of frustration at this eroding of established rights. But while we might feel – deeply, viscerally – for our cousins across the pond, we often forget about the difficulties women in our own country still face. Until October 2019, women in Northern Ireland who needed abortions were either forced to travel outside the province or

Thursday

Prue Leith

I’m proud of my son Danny Kruger, but I don’t agree with him on abortion

Most of the time I have an easy time of it on social media, with tweeters being nice about my colourful attire, liking my cooking hacks or flowers. But this week I had a dose of toxic hate. My son, the MP Danny Kruger, was unwise enough to join a debate in the Commons, saying he didn’t think women should have complete ‘bodily autonomy’ in the case of abortion as there’s another body – the baby’s – involved. I don’t agree with him, any more than I agree with his stance on assisted dying. He’s anti, I’m in favour. But that’s fine. I still love and admire him. There’s more to him that the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The law of unintended consequences

When I awoke the other morning and switched on my radio, the airwaves were alive with the sound of furious, transgressed women. Nobody else got a look in. What have we done to get their goat this time, I wondered, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. Nothing, it transpired. It was all in the USA, where a Supreme Court decision removed the constitutional right for women to have abortions and left it to the 50 states to decide instead. This last part was largely overlooked, incidentally: in essence the women were howling about decentralised democracy and what an awful thing it is. Democracy is sexist. Democracy is especially sexist

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

A breakthrough on abortion is there if Biden reaches for it

The US Supreme Court has not banned abortion. The point made by its ruling – a pretty reasonable one – was that such issues should be decided by elected politicians, not by appointed judges. ‘It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,’ wrote Justice Samuel Alito in his majority opinion. In other words: stop confusing the job of the court with the job of the legislature. If you want to protect women’s rights in the United States, pass a law to do so. But Congress has not passed such a law. As a result, millions of women are losing access

Dot Wordsworth

Does Meghan Markle know what ‘guttural’ means?

When the Duke of Sussex heard about the Supreme Court judgment revoking the ruling in Roe vs Wade, ‘His reaction last week was guttural, like mine,’ said his wife Meghan Markle. ‘Men need to be vocal in this moment,’ she told Vogue magazine. If we are to take her at her word, the Duchess of Sussex was saying that Prince Harry vocalised his reaction by growling. This sounds quite unlikely. But she added that her reaction was the same. It is impossible not to wonder whether she meant that theirs was a gut reaction. Of course one can say gut reaction, but it is impossible to say a reaction is

Tuesday

Sam Ashworth-Hayes

America’s abortion debate isn’t coming to Britain

Politicians are lining up to condemn the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. Activists are warning us that this is the start of a fresh assault on abortion rights in Britain. What starts in the core spreads to the periphery; a new wave of pro-life policies will soon be here. What’s less clear is where this wave is meant to come from, given that every major British party is opposed to the Supreme Court decision. Once again, Westminster politics has mistaken Britain for America. The Conservative party may be in hoc to a blonde tousle-haired populist, but it isn’t quietly stacking the judiciary with pro-life justices in order

Sunday

Andrew Tettenborn

It’s time to trust democracy again after Roe v. Wade

Progressive outrage greeted this week’s US Supreme Court majority decision which overturned Roe v. Wade. ‘Extreme ideology,’ thundered Joe Biden. It was ‘a huge blow to women’s human rights’ according to Michelle Bachelet at the UN; a case of ‘back to the Middle Ages,’ in the view of one melodramatic performer at Glastonbury. These are understandable views. But they are still misguided. Some background can help. Before January 1973 abortion in America was a state law matter. Some states were restrictive, some liberal: it all depended on public opinion and local politics. Roe v. Wade changed all that. It determined that the US Constitution implicitly protected the right to abortion almost absolutely up

Thursday

Andrew Sullivan

The fire and fury of America’s abortion debate

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

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

Why progressives can’t tolerate Christians

For decades, Christians have talked about feeling persecuted in advanced secular and liberal democracies. They’ve often sounded a bit hysterical. It’s true that governments and societies have moved towards a kind of post-Christianity. The world in which we live has adopted some of the gentler stuff about love and ignored the challenging stuff about sex. Devout Catholics, Anglicans and Evangelicals can therefore be made to feel a bit weird and out of place. But persecuted? Not really. Christians are on the whole free to live according to their faith without harassment, which is very unlike the situation in some Muslim counties — or China. Look at the vicious reaction to

Monday

Melanie McDonagh

We could learn a thing or two from Swiss democracy

There was another referendum in Switzerland over the weekend. This one was about protecting the young from the evils of tobacco by banning advertising anywhere children might see it. This strikes me as a good deal more liberal than the measure from New Zealand’s mildly fascistic Jacinda Ardern, who insists that young people must never smoke at all, ever, or indeed the situation here where none of us is allowed actually to see a cigarette packet in case it gives us ideas. But it’s not just cigarette advertisements that the Swiss were voting on. There are other referendums on animal (and human) experiments in research as well as a couple

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Suchet makes Poirot sound like craft beer: Poirot and More, at Harold Pinter Theatre, reviewed

Producers are getting jittery again. Large-scale shows look risky when a single infection can postpone an entire show. Hence Poirot and More in the West End. This is a conversation piece in which David Suchet talks about his career as Agatha Christie’s most celebrated nosy parker. Not much technical rehearsal is needed and Suchet relies on the support of a single performer, Geoffrey Wansell, who feeds him easy-peasy questions. Scrapping the production would hardly cost the earth. The pair are old friends but they seem to be at war in the costume department. Suchet looks like a Blair clone in a dark blue blazer and a white, open-necked shirt. Wansell’s

Sunday

William Nattrass

Poland’s abortion culture war is a battle for the country’s soul

This week it emerged that a hospital in the city of Białystok in Poland refused to grant an abortion to a pregnant woman, even though her baby had no chance of survival. The abortion was requested because of the woman’s psychological state after learning about the foetus’s prospects. Although two psychiatrists confirmed she had severe depression, the hospital said this did not meet the level of risk required for an abortion under Polish law, after a ruling by the Polish Constitutional Tribunal last year made it illegal for doctors to carry out abortions unless a woman’s life is at risk or if the pregnancy is the result rape or incest.

Saturday

Rachel Bovard

Abortion rights: the cracks are showing in Roe v. Wade

Crowds gathered outside of the Supreme Court this week as the Court prepared to hear arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the most consequential abortion case in a generation, which will decide if a 2018 Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks is constitutional. Pro-life groups rallied outside the Court, holding signs to ‘love them both’ while chanting ‘we are the pro-life generation and we will abolish abortion.’ The pro-abortion group Shout Your Abortion stood opposite them, allegedly swallowing abortion pills while chanting ‘abortion pills forever.’ Inside the court, the atmosphere was more serene. Stepping forward to open the arguments, Mississippi solicitor general Scott Stewart framed his

Thursday

Daisy Dunn

The astonishing stories behind today’s culture wars: Radio 4’s Things Fell Apart reviewed

Martin McNamara, the writer of Mosley Must Fall, a play on Radio 4 this week, must have had a jolt when he opened the papers to find old Oswald back in the news. Oxford University is said to have accepted £6 million from a trust set up by the fascist leader’s son, the racing driver Max, using funds passed down through the family. Cries of ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ have been echoing down the High in Oxford for many years now. If Mosley must fall, too, then this play may prove particularly timely. Although set in Whitechapel, east London, in 1936, the story consciously teeters over live issues, including immigration, the

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh

Britain’s abortion debate is horrendously one-sided

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

Wednesday

Jamie Gillies

Why are politicians reluctant to condemn sex-selective abortion?

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

Saturday

Andrew Tettenborn

Pro-choice activists shouldn’t celebrate Roe v Wade

A striking curiosity of American life is that the names of legal cases can insinuate themselves into everyday dialogue. None more so, of course, than Roe v Wade, the 1973 decision where a majority-liberal Supreme Court extracted from the Constitution’s protection of life, liberty and property a constitutional right to abortion: absolute in the first trimester, qualified in the second, and, in rare cases, even in the third. In a 1992 fine-tuning exercise, the rule was re-written as a right to abortion unless and until the foetus was viable at about 24 weeks. But the principle remains. Southern and rural states always saw Roe v Wade as a liberal aberration.

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh

Will Northern Ireland end discriminatory abortions?

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 –

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

Why is coronavirus being used to try to change abortion laws?

Never let a good crisis go to waste, seems to be the approach of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service to the coronavirus pandemic. It has been promoting a couple of amendments to the Coronavirus Bill – two out of 14 – to allow women to take abortifacient pills at home rather than travel to a clinic to obtain the approval of two doctors, as required by law. At present, a pregnant woman in the first three months of pregnancy would take one of the pair of pills triggering the abortion in a clinic. The amendments, proposed by Liz Barker and Natalie Bennett in the Lords would have had the effect,

Saturday

Claire Kohda

A woman’s lot is not a happy one in Kim Jiyoung’s Born 1982

‘Buy pink baby clothes,’ Kim Jiyoung, the protagonist of this bestselling South Korean novel is told at the obstetrician’s surgery. Jiyoung’s mother responds: ‘It’s okay, the next one will be a boy.’ There are multiple births in this book. Births of girls are always met with disappointment, while those of sons are celebrated. When Jiyoung is born in 1982, ‘abortion for medical problems had been legal for ten years … aborting females was common practice as if “daughter” was a medical problem’. Her younger sister is ‘erased’, and erasure is a thread that runs through this novel: the aborting of female foetuses, the silencing of female voices, society’s lack of