See here.
Meanwhile, marvel at this scandalous abuse of Parliament for monetary gain by the very interests that once most opposed the 1967 Act, insisting, from their professional knowledge of dealing with what would have been the consequences, that the evil it was designed to remedy was as rare as hen's teeth. But, of course, it was never really about that. It was about money. And look who is now raking in the money.
Everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone, should read my friend Ann Farmer's Prophets and Priests: The Hidden Face of the Birth Control Movement (London: The Saint Austin Press, 2002; ISBN 1 901157 62 8). Ann is yet another of us homeless asylum-seekers from New Labour. Well, until now, I hope.
The war against fertility is, and has always been, the war against the working class, the war against the poor at home and abroad, the war against the electoral base of the Left, the war against the social provisions for which the Left exists, and, above all, the war against women.
Furthermore (this bit is Lindsay, not Farmer - but I'm sure that she would agree with it), the idea of fertility as a medicable condition, requiring powerful drugs or even surgical interventions to prevent a woman's body from doing exactly what it does naturally, is basically and ultimately the idea that femaleness itself is such a condition, a sort of XX Syndrome.
I can think of nothing that is actually more misogynistic than that, although some things are equally so, notably the view that the preborn child is simultaneously insentient and a part of the woman's body. Is it the whole of a woman's body that is insentient, or only the parts most directly connected with reproduction?
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Who do you want to go back to back street abortions?
ReplyDeleteI don't. I want action against poverty, sexual promiscuity, exclusion of people with disabilities, pornography, and everything else that gives rise to abortion.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, as Peter Hitchens writes on his blog this week:
"There is no reliable information about the true state of affairs before abortion was legalised in Britain 40 years ago. Whose word would you trust on this matter? Pro-abortion propagandists talk of tens of thousands of bloody back-street abortions, and in the 1960s estimated these at anywhere up to 250,000 a year. How did they know?
At the time that the Bill was going through Parliament, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said of such claims:'These are without any secure factual foundation of which we are aware. The incidence of criminal abortion varies widely from city to city . . . in the experience of many gynaecologists working outside large cosmopolitan cities the occurrence is relatively uncommon and, when it does happen, the abortion is more often induced by the woman herself than by some other person.' The report said there were, on average, 50 fatal abortion attempts each year in England and Wales. Of these, 30 followed criminal acts. 'If there are 100,000 criminal (including self-induced) abortions being performed annually this means that they are attended by a mortality rate of only 0.3 per 1,000. The risks of criminal abortion are established to be high, so the known number of deaths suggests that the total number of such cases must be considerably less than that alleged.' The only alternative explanation for the lack of fatalities, said the doctors, was that criminal abortions in back streets must be safer than legal ones in hospitals. Not very likely, is it?"
Quite.