Mehdi
Hasan writes:
Listening to fellow pundits on the left react
with rage and disbelief to the support by the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt,
for halving the abortion time limit to 12 weeks, I was reminded of the late
Christopher Hitchens. “[A]nyone who has ever seen a sonogram or has spent even
an hour with a textbook on embryology knows that emotions are not the deciding
factor [in abortions],” wrote the Hitch in his column for the Nation magazine
in April 1989. “In order to terminate a pregnancy, you have to still a
heartbeat, switch off a developing brain . . . break some bones and rupture
some organs.”
It is often assumed that the great contrarian’s
break with the liberal left came over Iraq in 2003. His self-professed pro-life
position, however, had provoked howls of anguish in progressive circles 14
years earlier. It has long been taken as axiomatic that in order to be
left-wing you must be pro-choice. Yet Hitchens’s reasoning was not just solid
but solidly left-wing. It was a pity, he noted, that the “majority of feminists
and their allies have stuck to the dead ground of ‘Me Decade’ possessive
individualism, an ideology that has more in common than it admits with the
prehistoric right, which it claims to oppose but has in fact encouraged”.
Abortion is one of those rare political issues on
which left and right seem to have swapped ideologies: right-wingers talk of
equality, human rights and “defending the innocent”, while left-wingers
fetishise “choice”, selfishness and unbridled individualism.
“My body, my life, my choice.” Such rhetoric has
always left me perplexed. Isn’t socialism about protecting the weak and
vulnerable, giving a voice to the voiceless? Who is weaker or more vulnerable than
the unborn child? Which member of our society needs a voice more than the mute
baby in the womb?
Yes, a woman has a right to choose what to do
with her body – but a baby isn’t part of her body. The 24-week-old foetus can’t
be compared with an appendix, a kidney or a set of tonsils; it makes no sense
to dismiss it as a “clump of cells” or a “blob of protoplasm”. However, my
motive for writing this column is not merely to revisit ancient arguments, or
kick off a philosophical debate on the distinctions between socialism (with its
emphasis on equality, solidarity and community) and liberalism (with its focus
on individual freedom, autonomy and choice), but to make three points to my
friends on the pro-choice left.
First, you do realise that the UK is the
exception, not the rule? Jeremy Hunt’s position is the norm across western
Europe: 12 weeks is the limit in France, Germany, Italy and Belgium. Then
there’s how 91 per cent of British abortions are carried out in the first 13
weeks. You may disagree with a 12-week cut-off but to pretend it is somehow
arbitrary, or extreme, or even unique is a little disingenuous.
Second, you can’t keep smearing those of us who
happen to be pro-life as “anti-women” or “sexist”. For a start, 49 per cent of
women, compared to 24 per cent of men, support a reduction in the abortion
limit, according to a YouGov poll conducted this year. “Polls consistently show
. . . that women are more likely than men to support a reduction,” says
YouGov’s Anthony Wells.
Then there is the history you gloss over: some of
the earliest advocates of women’s rights, such Mary Wollstonecraft, were
anti-abortion, as were pioneers of US feminism such as Susan B Anthony and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton; the latter referred to abortion as “infanticide”. In
recent years, some feminists have recognised the sheer injustice of asking a
woman to abort her child in order to participate fully in society; in the words
of the New Zealand feminist author Daphne de Jong: “If women must submit to
abortion to preserve their lifestyle or career, their economic or social
status, they are pandering to a system devised and run by men for male
convenience.”
Third, please don’t throw faith in my face.
Hitchens, remember, was one of the world’s best-known atheists. You might
assume that my own anti-abortion views are a product of my Muslim beliefs. They
aren’t. (And the reality is that different schools of Islamic law have
differing opinions on abortion time limits. The Iranian ayatollah Yousef
Saanei, for instance, has issued a fatwa permitting termination of a pregnancy
in the first trimester.)
To be honest, I would be opposed to abortion even
if I were to lose my faith. I sat and watched in quiet awe as my two daughters
stretched and slept in their mother’s womb during the 20-week ultrasound scans.
I don’t need God or a holy book to tell me what is or isn’t a “person”. (Nor,
for that matter, do I take kindly to some feminists questioning my right to
have an opinion on this issue on account of my Y-chromosome.)
Nevertheless, I’m not calling for a ban on
abortion; mine is a minority position in this country. I’m not expecting most
readers of the New Statesman to agree with me, either. What I would like is for
my fellow lefties and liberals to try to understand and respect the views of
those of us who are pro-life, rather than demonise us as right-wing
reactionaries or medieval misogynists.
One of the biggest problems with the abortion
debate is that it’s asymmetric: the two sides are talking at cross-purposes.
The pro-lifers speak about the right to life of the unborn baby; the
pro-choicers speak about a woman’s right to choose. The moral arguments, as the
Scottish philosopher Alasdair Macintyre has said, are “incommensurable”.
Another problem is that the debate forces people
to choose sides: right against left, religious against secular. Some of us,
however, refuse to be sliced and diced in such a simplistic and divisive
manner. I consider abortion to be wrong because of, not in spite of, my
progressive principles. That I am pro-life does not make me any less of a
lefty.
There are few issues that unite Jeremy Hunt,
Christopher Hitchens and me. I’m not ashamed to say that abortion is one of
them.
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