Something Else

Rod Liddle (hardly a Vatican mouthpiece) writes:

The intention behind David Steel’s [Abortion] Bill of 1967 was to prevent the maiming of women by back-street abortionists, and the following year 22,000 women in England and Wales availed themselves of this vibrant new opportunity. The latest available figures show that 193,700 abortions were carried out in 2006.

Clearly, something has changed. You might argue that abortion has become what it was never intended to be, a primary source of contraception for the ignorant, the lazy or the stupid. It is not the terror of sinister men with wire coat-hangers which drives women towards the smart and kindly clinics, but — in the main — sheer forgetfulness, the deregulation of sexual intercourse, allied to the broader point that for the bulk of the country, abortion — like single-parenthood, divorce, etc — has lost any vestige of stigma. What are you doing today, Chantrelle? Oh, I thought I’d watch Jeremy Kyle for a bit and then pop down for a quick abortion. The deep depression into which Chantrelle may well sink after her brief operation was not something which she anticipated. Nor, clearly, is it something imposed by the disapprobation of society — because, in the main, there is no such disapprobation. It must be something else, then.

The ground is shifting.