This letter appears in this week's New Statesman:
Helen Lewis's column about abortion time limits (Out of the Ordinary, 26 June) was a textbook example of how you have to keep your wits about you when reading feminist scare stories. We were told that "most members of the cabinet" supported lowering the time limit on terminations from the current 24 weeks to 20, or even 12 weeks.
The clear implication was that this as part of a growing attack on women's rights and thus unacceptable. What we were not told was that Britain had almost the highest time limit in Europe – only Cyprus exceeds it, with 28 weeks.
Countries that manage with a 12-week limit include Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany and Italy. Slovenia has a 10-week limit, and women do not seem to be taking to the streets of Ljubljana.
Will Lewis revisit this subject soon, to tell us what agitation was under way in those countries for a doubling of the limit, and what unbearable privations women in those countries suffered as a result of their current systems?
Would she explain what it was about a British pregnancy that required twice the limit for the termination of a French one – or, as I understand it, an even higher limit than that?
James Gourley
Faversham, Kent
In stating the views of the late John Smith and Charles Kennedy, of the very much alive Alex Salmond and George Galloway, of Tim Farron and of several of the most left-wing Labour MPs, and of 2015's loyal Labour voters from the old Irish strongholds to the newer Pakistani strongholds, James Gourley might have added that the Czech Republic, with a 12-week limit on abortion, was probably the most secular country in the world. Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark and France, also with 12-week limits, are all less religious than the United Kingdom is. As is Slovenia, with a 10-week limit.
Moreover, most, if not all, of those countries are also rather less belligerent. Abortion more-or-less on demand is a neoliberal concept, so to speak, and it is thus a feature of the American Empire as surely as it was not a feature of the old American Republic. That is why we have it here. It is part and parcel of that which is "neo" in everything that neoconservatives seek, not merely to conserve, but to spread across the whole wide earth by the force of arms.
In stating the views of the late John Smith and Charles Kennedy, of the very much alive Alex Salmond and George Galloway, of Tim Farron and of several of the most left-wing Labour MPs, and of 2015's loyal Labour voters from the old Irish strongholds to the newer Pakistani strongholds, James Gourley might have added that the Czech Republic, with a 12-week limit on abortion, was probably the most secular country in the world. Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark and France, also with 12-week limits, are all less religious than the United Kingdom is. As is Slovenia, with a 10-week limit.
Moreover, most, if not all, of those countries are also rather less belligerent. Abortion more-or-less on demand is a neoliberal concept, so to speak, and it is thus a feature of the American Empire as surely as it was not a feature of the old American Republic. That is why we have it here. It is part and parcel of that which is "neo" in everything that neoconservatives seek, not merely to conserve, but to spread across the whole wide earth by the force of arms.
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