Abortion

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh

The skewed priorities of the BBC’s abortion investigation story

Did anyone else notice anything weird about the BBC’s coverage of the story last week about the 14 NHS trusts that a government health watchdog found to be breaking the law in providing abortions? Those 14 clinics used pre-signed abortion referral forms to authorise abortions, which flouts the bit in the Abortion Act that requires two doctors to allow them. But for the BBC, as, inevitably, for The Guardian, the real scandal about the investigation was that it took place at all, at a cost of £1 million and with the result that the watchdog, the Care Quality Commission, the CQC, had to delay or cancel pre-planned investigations in order

Thursday

Alex Massie

Department of Probability: Fornication Desk

We are indebted to Michelle Mulherin, Fine Gael TD for Mayo, for offering this gem during a Dail debate on Ireland’s abortion laws: “In an ideal world there would be no unwanted pregnancies and no unwanted babies. But we are far from living in an ideal world,” Deputy Mulherin said. “Abortion as murder, therefore sin, which is the religious argument, is no more sinful, from a scriptural point of view, than all other sins we don’t legislate against, like greed, hate and fornication. The latter, being fornication, I would say, is probably the single most likely cause of unwanted pregnancies in this country.” That “probably” is lovely. Alas, Deputy Mulherin

Thursday

Alex Massie

Did Mitt Romney Really Change His Mind on Abortion?

Poor Mitt Romney. Once upon a time he aspired to run Massachussetts, a state which backs legal abortion; now he aspires to lead a Republican party which will not willingly be led by a politician who calls himself “pro-choice”. No woder Romney’s abortion “journey” has been a remarkable one that, in the end, causes as many problem for him as it solves. His “conversion” story is humiliating since it can’t possibly reassure those it is meant to convince; it also undermines Romney’s credibility with voters who don’t actually care very much about these issues. Yet, in the end, faced with an inconvenient history and compelled to dwell, repeatedly, on difficult

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Rick Santorum: As Electable As George Wallace

On the other hand, Jonathan Chait makes an argument that, though “electability” is notionally Mitt Romney’s greatest strength, there’s reason to suppose he’s no more electable than Rick Santorum. It’s true that Santorum, as yet unpummelled on the national stage, can conceivably reach downscale voters for whom Romney’s Bain Capital background is a significant problem. As Chait puts it: As hard a time as Santorum would have closing the sale among certain moderate quarters, I don’t think it’s sunk in quite how poisoned Romney’s image has become among downscale voters. Coverage of Romney’s wealth, corporate history, and partially released tax situation coincided with, and almost certainly caused, a collapse in

Thursday

James Forsyth

Abbott quits abortion talks, but will her contributions be missed?

Diane Abbott has, the BBC reports, walked away from the all-party talks on abortion because of the government’s proposals on counselling services. But others involved in the talks claim that Labour’s public health spokeswoman was not a particularly active participant. Abbott, who is not always the easiest of people to work with, had already irritated some of those involved in these talks. In the first meeting she, allegedly, took the opportunity to rest her eyes. She then apparently turned up half an hour late for the second meeting before missing the third one completely. When I put these claims to Abbott’s office, they said that they doubted they were true but

Saturday

James Forsyth

What does it say about our society that abortion will now be advertised on TV?

The news that for-profit abortion providers are soon to be allowed to advertise on television suggests there is something very wrong with our society. Abortion may well at times be the least worst option. But even those of us who accept this should feel deeply uncomfortable with it being actively promoted on television. The fact that these providers want to advertise on television is revealing of a certain lack of moral seriousness about the work they do. This news is also revealing of how far we have come since the Abortion Act 1967. I doubt that the parliamentarians who voted that legislation through envisaged that 45 years later, what are

Thursday

The Spectator

Who cares about abortion?

Thanks to Nadine Dorries’ amendment to the Health and Social Care bill, abortion rights have been discussed a great deal this week – both inside and outside of Parliament. In her cover article for this week’s Spectator (out today), Mary Wakefield says that this debate has revealed a “strange and unpleasant consensus… that abortion is not just a necessary evil, but a jolly good thing.” In the piece, Mary asks “Why are we so keen on abortion?”: “The fact is that unless you’re a fan of infanticide you’ve got to agree that somewhere along the slippery ascent from that little Alka-Seltzer of pluripotent cells to the birth of an actual

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

So much was missing from today’s abortion debate

The anti-abortion lobby is unfortunate to have been lumped this week with Nadine Dorries as its unofficial spokesperson. Nadine is actually PRO-abortion, for starters, as she never seems to tire of pointing out. She does, however, possess many of the unpleasant characteristics associated with pro-lifers: she’s preachy, brimming with self-righteous zeal, and incapable of seeing her opponents’ point of view. She didn’t deserve to be barracked in the House of Commons today, perhaps, but the obnoxious way in which she argued for her amendment sealed its fate. It didn’t help, of course, that pro-life organisations steered well clear of Dorries and her amendment, which, in case you didn’t know, sought

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron Dorries exchange the most memorable moment of a quiet PMQs

The first PMQs of the new parliamentary term was a bit of a damp squib. Ed Miliband avoided the issue of the economy, presumably because he feared being hit by a slew of quotes from the Darling book. So instead we had a series of fairly unenlightening exchanges on police commissioners and the NHS. Labour has clearly chosen to try and attack the coalition from the right on law and order and security. There were a slew of questions from Labour backbenchers on whether the coalition’s anti-terrorism legislation was too soft. But I suspect that this PMQs will be remembered for the Cameron Nadine Dorries exchange. Dorries, irritated by how