Whose choice?
“Abortion must be a key to a new world to women, not a bulwark for things as they are, economically nor biologically. Abortion should not be either a perquisite of the legal wife only, nor merely as a last remedy against illegitimacy. It should be available for any woman, without insolent inquisitions, nor ruinous financial charges, nor tangles of red tape. For our bodies are our own.”
F. W Stella Browne (1935)
Forty years since the Abortion Act, and with the legal time limit for abortion now the subject of furious debate across the media and in parliament, Anthea Irwin explains why socialists defend a woman’s right to choose, and why we still have a lot yet to win.
October 2007 and March 2008 mark the 40th anniversary of the vote on and
enactment of the bill, introduced by David Steel, that led to safe, legal
abortion in the UK. While pro-choice voices continue to make the point that
the 40-year-old legislation does not go far enough, those in opposition are
seeking ways to overturn or at least undermine it.
Whose terms?
Before beginning to explore the issue, it is important to clarify our terms
of reference. The debate is often framed by anti-choice campaigners as a
simple binary opposition of those who oppose abortion and those who support
it. This is misguided, and misguiding for those who come into contact with
it.
The struggle for a woman’s right to choose is about precisely that:
the right of every woman to have control over her own life and be enabled
to make choices. The choice, when she finds herself pregnant, to continue
with the pregnancy or terminate it, without having to gain the consent of
two doctors. The opportunity to make informed choices about sex and relationships
based on education and access to contraception. The possibility to make real
choices about her own life and the lives of any children she has, choices
that are not constrained by economic inequality, but supported with proper
access to housing, education, employment and childcare.
The struggle for a woman’s right to choose does not claim that the
choice to terminate a pregnancy is an easy one to make; it claims that that
choice should be the woman’s to make.
When the terms are clarified it’s clear that the struggle for a woman’s
right to choose still has a way to go. It is also clear that it fits seamlessly
into the SSP’s broader vision of a better, fairer society.
How far have we come?
The Abortion Act of 1967 was a welcome breakthrough that largely drew a line
under back street abortions. Because of it, abortions in the UK are not among
the 40 per cent of abortions worldwide that the World Health Organisation
tell us are still performed in unsafe conditions and UK women are not among
the 68,000 women who still die each year due to these unsafe abortions.
Yet, while saying abortion is legal in the UK is true up to a point, there
are many nuances in the law which mean access to abortion is far from being ‘on
demand’ for a woman and as such her right to choose has not been fully
met.
Whose decision?
As it stands, the final decision about whether or not to terminate a pregnancy
is not the woman’s to make. She is legally required to gain the consent
of two doctors. Doctors, on the other hand, are not legally required to declare
their conscientious legal objection to abortion, particularly problematic
given that around 10 per cent of doctors are opposed to it.
Although professional guidelines require that a doctor who is not prepared
to sign refers the woman to another doctor immediately, there are many documented
cases of this being unnecessarily delayed or not happening at all.
Doctors themselves have always been among the many voices calling for an
end to this paternalistic practice; a motion passed by a vote of 67 per cent
at the British Medical Association conference in June 2007 called for the
removal of both the two signature requirement and the need for women to meet
medical criteria for abortion.
Equal access?
There is also no law requiring the NHS to provide abortion services. One
of the Department of Health’s many ‘targets’ relates to
abortion. It says that a woman seeking a termination should not be delayed
more than three weeks, but in an under-funded Health Service the target is
often not met: there are no published government figures on waiting times,
but research conducted by the All-Party Pro-Choice and Sexual Health group
showed that 27 per cent of Primary Care trusts did in fact delay women beyond
three weeks. Such a ‘postcode lottery’ is unacceptable.
The motion passed at the BMA conference also states that suitably trained
and experienced nurses and midwives should be allowed to carry out both medical
and surgical abortions and that, as long as safety is ensured, premises do
not need to be approved to carry out first trimester abortions. This, if
taken on board by government, would go at least some way to combating delays.
Stating that ‘abortion is legal in the UK’ also overlooks the
fact that legal abortion does not extend throughout the whole of the UK.
In Northern Ireland abortion is still effectively illegal. When the law was
changed in 1967, Northern Ireland had its own parliament, and when direct
rule returned Westminster never extended the law to Northern Ireland. Based
on legislation previous to that of 1967, abortion in Northern Ireland is
allowed where there is danger to the life of the woman, but this only covers
around 5 per cent of women from Northern Ireland who wish to have abortions.
The other 95 per cent must travel to England which is cost inhibitive and
stressful.
The issue was back on the agenda in 1984, but the Northern Ireland Assembly
voted against the introduction of the Abortion Act, or any similar legislation.
The beginning of the ‘Peace Process’ allegedly heralded a shift
in political focus onto the development of infrastructure to improve conditions
for people in their daily lives. The reform of abortion law should be part
of this.
The anti-choice lobby.
While pro-choice campaigners argue that abortion legislation has not gone
far enough, and see abortion in the context of wider life choices and human
rights, anti-choice campaigners allow their narrow focus to threaten wider
life choices and human rights. When Amnesty International adopted what the
Pro-Life organisation labelled a ‘pro-abortion’ stance (it was
in reality a stance akin to a woman’s right to choose that focused
on the maintenance of women’s human rights in the face of rape and
other acts of violence), prominent members of Pro-Life withdrew their membership
of and support for Amnesty.
When the Roman Catholic bishop of East Anglia, Michael Evans, resigned from
Amnesty, his excuse was, “appalling violence must not be answered by
violence against the most vulnerable and defenceless form of human life in
a woman’s womb.”
This tactic of emotionalising the argument and using ‘human’ words
to refer to the foetus is a common one. The most shocking and manipulative
example of late was Cardinal Keith O’Brien’s likening of the
abortion rate to the equivalent of “two Dunblane massacres every day”.
Time limit is the aspect of the debate that most regularly gains media attention,
yet arguably it clouds the key issues. Not only were the headline-grabbing
claims that foetuses were ‘walking’ and ‘smiling’ in
the womb an incorrect and overly emotive use of language; they missed the
point. 90 per cent of abortions in the UK are carried out within the first
12 weeks; less than 1 per cent are carried out between 21 and 24 weeks. A
reduction in the time limit imposed on abortion would be unlikely to lessen
the total number of abortions carried out. What it would do is restrict a
woman’s right to choose yet further and victimise the most vulnerable
women.
The struggle in Parliament.
MPs opposed to abortion have either not seen these figures or do not wish
to acknowledge them. Conservative MP Nadine Dorries’ bill to reduce
the time limit on abortions in the UK, debated on 31 October 2006, discarded
the old ‘viability’ arguments - probably because of the extreme
rarity of babies born within the current ‘time limit’ surviving
- in favour of the more emotive question of the extent to which a foetus
can feel sensation.
The introduction of four-D ultrasound images of foetuses ‘walking’ and ‘smiling’ in
the womb may have gained some ground for the argument that a foetus is just
like a born-at-term baby, but Donald Peebles, of the Department of Obstetrics
and Gynaecology at University College London, argues that the “temptation
to associate these movements - sucking a thumb, gasping as if talking - with
adult movements, to think it is sucking its thumb because it is happy” is “extraordinarily
dangerous”. The scientific viewpoint is that it is a baby’s contact
with the social world that develops its consciousness, and therefore its
ability to feel pain.
Also within the past year we have seen bills calling for the removal of confidentiality
for young women under 16 who seek abortion advice (submitted by Angela Watkinson
Conservative MP) and calling for compulsory abortion counselling about related ‘mental
health problems’ and ‘medical risks’, as well as a ‘cooling
off’ period of ten days between a woman seeking an abortion and having
it performed (submitted by Nadine Dorries). All three bills were defeated
by approximately a two thirds majority.
More recently, anti-abortion MPs have planned to submit amendments to the
government’s Human Tissue and Embryos Bill aiming to reduce the abortion
time limit and make access to abortion more difficult for women. The fact
that the initial bill is not directly about abortion may mean that the potentially
obscure wording of amendments makes for a situation where MPs are voting
for an anti-choice stance without realising that they are doing so.
On the other hand, consideration of the bill is an opportunity to reopen
the abortion debate and push for the necessary extensions to provide women
with a right to real choice.
We need to talk.
Clearly language is an issue where abortion is concerned. Emotive language
is used to sway the argument; obscure language can be used to cloud it. But
both of these form part of the political and religious arguments surrounding
abortion. Just as important is what is not said. With figures that suggest
that one in three women will have an abortion at some point in their life,
and the documented gains of the struggle for a woman’s right to choose,
why is it that, in everyday discussion, the subject remains largely taboo?
Legislation can achieve much, but ‘legal’ does not entail ‘accepted’ or ‘normal’.
The struggle for a woman’s right to choose needs to take place on two
levels: the political one to ensure legislation becomes more supportive of
women and not less, that she is finally afforded the full right to choose;
but also the personal one where we talk and listen and allow abortion to
form part of the discourse of women’s experience.
Abortion Law in the UK: Timeline
•The first references to abortion in English law appeared in the 13th
Century.
The law followed Church teaching that abortion was acceptable until ‘quickening’,
which, it was believed, was when the soul entered the foetus. The legal situation
remained like this for centuries.
•1803: The Ellenborough Act - abortion after ‘quickening’ (i.e.
when movement is felt at 16-20 weeks) carried the death penalty. Previously
the punishment had been less severe.
• 1837: The Ellenborough Act was amended to remove the distinction between
abortion before and after quickening.
• 1861: The Offences Against the Person Act: performing an abortion or trying
to self-abort carried a sentence of life imprisonment.
• 1929: Infant Life Preservation Act: this created a new crime of killing a viable foetus (at that time fixed at 28 weeks) in all cases except when the woman’s life was at risk. However, it was not clear whether it would be legal to terminate for the same reason before 28 weeks.
•l1934: The Conference of Co-operative Women passes a resolution calling for the legalisation of abortion.
•l 1936: The Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA) was established; its
aim was to campaign for the legalisation of abortion.
• 1938: Dr. Alex Bourne was acquitted of having performed an illegal abortion,
his argument being that the law allowed abortion when the women’s physical
or mental health was in danger. (He had performed the procedure on a 14 year
old girl who had been gang raped). This set a case-law precedent.
• 1939: The Birkett Committee, which had been set up by the Government in 1936, recommended clarification that doctors could perform an abortion to save a woman’s life. World War II interrupted any implementation of its findings.
• 1967: The Abortion Act (sponsored by David Steel, MP) became law, legalising abortion under certain conditions; it came into effect on 27 April 1968.
• 1975: The National Abortion Campaign (NAC) was established to protect the 1967 Act and campaign for its improvement.
• 1990: The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill introduced specific
time limits on abortion, restricting access to abortion to within 24 weeks
of pregnancy; it came into effect on 1 April 1991.
• thanks to www.abortionrights.org.uk
Vera Drake: abortion is a class issue
Vera Drake, Mike Leigh’s award winning film set in 1950, follows Vera,
a working class woman who, out of compassion and practicality, performs abortive
procedures on young and vulnerable women. The legislation of the time means
that such women have no alternative.
The film sets up a contrast between Vera’s voluntary acts and a young
woman from one of the families Vera cleans for who, for a significant sum,
accesses the considerably more hygienic Harley Street version of the procedure.
This is not the only contrast however. It transpires Vera’s friend
and colleague who co-ordinates matters is undermining Vera’s compassion
by secretly claiming payment from the women. It is the same ‘friend’ who
gives the police the information they need to charge Vera and devastate her
life and the lives of her family.
So the film explores not just the issue of unequal access to services based
on class, but also the general point that the capitalist system allows for,
indeed invites, women to be objectified and their vulnerabilities to be profited
from. And language is a key theme. The act that Vera performs so skilfully
and compassionately is one that she cannot voice: all she can say is that
she “helps young girls out”.
The struggle for a woman’s right to choose has come a long way since
1950. But class differences still leave working class women with less ‘right
to choose’ than middle class women; the system we live in with its
Health Service ‘postcode lottery’ and remnants of paternalism
does not meet the needs of vulnerable women; and we have yet to reach a point
where we can speak freely about abortion and many other issues affecting
women today.
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