Abortion

Why are politicians reluctant to condemn sex-selective abortion?

Women have faced increasing attacks on their rights in recent years. Moves to accommodate gender ideology have resulted in women-only spaces being opened to male-bodied individuals. In the medical sphere, dystopian terms like ‘menstruators’, and ‘birth parents’ have even been coined to appease activists. These kinds of stories hit the headlines and often receive a wide backlash. But an even more acute threat to women receives comparably little attention. Gendercide – the abortion of preborn babies based on sex – continues to occur in countries across the globe, with girls overwhelmingly the target. Sex-selective abortion is often against the wishes of mothers, who are coerced into termination by family members

Pro-choice activists shouldn’t celebrate Roe v Wade

A striking curiosity of American life is that the names of legal cases can insinuate themselves into everyday dialogue. None more so, of course, than Roe v Wade, the 1973 decision where a majority-liberal Supreme Court extracted from the Constitution’s protection of life, liberty and property a constitutional right to abortion: absolute in the first trimester, qualified in the second, and, in rare cases, even in the third. In a 1992 fine-tuning exercise, the rule was re-written as a right to abortion unless and until the foetus was viable at about 24 weeks. But the principle remains. Southern and rural states always saw Roe v Wade as a liberal aberration.

Will Northern Ireland end discriminatory abortions?

There are two contemporary preoccupations that are effectively at odds in the abortion laws of Britain and Northern Ireland. One principle is that a woman’s right to have an abortion must always be accommodated and celebrated. The other is that the diversity we are also expected to celebrate includes disability. Unfortunately, the first trumps the second when it comes to the abortion laws of Britain, which were extended to Northern Ireland behind the backs of its elected representatives in 2019, when the Northern Ireland Assembly wasn’t functioning. As a result, in Northern Ireland as in Britain, it is legal to kill a foetus right up to birth if it –

Why is coronavirus being used to try to change abortion laws?

Never let a good crisis go to waste, seems to be the approach of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service to the coronavirus pandemic. It has been promoting a couple of amendments to the Coronavirus Bill – two out of 14 – to allow women to take abortifacient pills at home rather than travel to a clinic to obtain the approval of two doctors, as required by law. At present, a pregnant woman in the first three months of pregnancy would take one of the pair of pills triggering the abortion in a clinic. The amendments, proposed by Liz Barker and Natalie Bennett in the Lords would have had the effect,

A woman’s lot is not a happy one in Kim Jiyoung’s Born 1982

‘Buy pink baby clothes,’ Kim Jiyoung, the protagonist of this bestselling South Korean novel is told at the obstetrician’s surgery. Jiyoung’s mother responds: ‘It’s okay, the next one will be a boy.’ There are multiple births in this book. Births of girls are always met with disappointment, while those of sons are celebrated. When Jiyoung is born in 1982, ‘abortion for medical problems had been legal for ten years … aborting females was common practice as if “daughter” was a medical problem’. Her younger sister is ‘erased’, and erasure is a thread that runs through this novel: the aborting of female foetuses, the silencing of female voices, society’s lack of

Northern Ireland, gay marriage and the great liberal power-grab

Yesterday, the Welsh government announced new guidelines to make school uniforms gender-neutral, which would mean an end to trousers being advertised for boys and skirts for girls. You can imagine the outrage if the UK government now tried to over-ride that decision, saying it was a load of silly nonsense. The rumblings in Cardiff would bring down a building or two: how dare you interfere with the decisions of Wales’ democratically-elected government, would come the cries. And they would have a point. When the Welsh voted – very narrowly – for devolution in 1997 that was that. Many areas of governance were handed over to the Welsh and they were

The tragedy of Britain’s abortion epidemic

News comes through this morning of a big death toll: 200,000 over the past 12 months. What’s more, it has happened right beneath our noses – in Britain. Not that these are recognised as the deaths of humans, because the people in question are not accorded human rights. They are, to use the fashionable term among US abortion campaigners, mere ‘clusters of cells’. I guess we could all be called by that euphemism – all of us, from Donald Trump to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are in a sense clusters of cells. But it is as strained a description of a 12 week-old foetus as it is of an adult – by

Barometer | 13 June 2019

What’s in a name? If Jeremy Hunt wins the Conservative leadership election both prime minister and leader of the opposition will have the same forename. Has this happened before? — Between 18 July 1992 and 12 May 1994, John Major was PM and John Smith leader of the opposition. — Between 14 February 1963 and 18 October 1963, Harold Macmillan was PM and Harold Wilson leader of the opposition. — Jeremy would become one of only three forenames which have been held by leaders of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal parties. The other two are William (Hague/Adamson/Gladstone) and John (Major/Smith/Russell, 1st Earl of Russell). Life choices Jeremy Hunt said he

Why aren’t aborted foetuses given painkillers?

In a UK first last year, doctors at University College London operated on two unborn babies with spina bifida, a birth defect characterised by a gap in the spinal cord which can cause paralysis of the legs and incontinence. Around 1,000 foetuses a year develop spina bifida in the UK; of these, 80 per cent or so are subsequently aborted. The number of pregnancies terminated each year can be expected to drop with the arrival of this new surgery which will be made available on the NHS. And yet, far from rejoicing, pro-life advocates have been whipped into a frenzy over it. The reason? While foetuses – aged between 20 and 26 weeks

Alabama’s abortion ban is a moment of hope

Alabama’s near-total abortion ban, signed into law on Wednesday by governor Kay Ivey, is a real moment of hope. The principle on which it grounds itself is simple enough; as Ivey put it: ‘Every life is precious.’ In those four words lies a remedy for the hatreds that divide humanity. True, pro-lifers have their own doubts over the bill: is it too tactical, by conceding very narrow medical exemptions? Is it not tactical enough, because it will be overturned in the courts and meanwhile alienate the middle ground? But whatever the merits of these criticisms, the Alabama ban is still a landmark. A body of legislators in the world’s superpower has affirmed that

The real reason pro-life students aren’t welcome at Glasgow university

A rare joy of living through the forging of a new orthodoxy is watching as the old orthodoxy becomes daring and scandalous. Assumptions once axiomatic grow beguiling, then bemusing, and eventually base, and a delicious tang of danger is lent to the stalest of views. What was mainstream now finds itself in dissent and on the road to blasphemy. Freedom of conscience is such an idea, so blandly obvious until recently but now a deadly weapon in hate’s ever-expanding arsenal. For while it is perfectly reasonable that individuals be free to think, what if they think the wrong things?  Fortunately for us, we have people like Lauren McDougall. She is

The dishonesty of the abortion debate

There was an interesting article in the Guardian today about one of the less discussed aspects of miscarriage: the language employed about it by the NHS. “How dare they call my lost baby a “product of conception”’ was the headline for Katy Lindemann’s moving piece about her miscarriage, where she describes how “a baby” – as her unborn child was described when still gestating – was, after dying in the womb and being surgically removed, referred to as the “retained products of conception”. She notes: “From the outset of your antenatal care, the NHS refers to “your baby”’ but not when he or she dies. And she goes on to

Naz Shah needs to make up her mind about abortion

There are a couple of things I just don’t get. Maybe someone of liberal mind can explain them. Didn’t equalities minister Penny Mordaunt back in July throw her weight behind Theresa May’s promise to make it much easier to reassign your own gender? Of the current process (which requires you, for example, to provide medical evidence before being allowed to redefine yourself as a woman) she said: ‘It is overly bureaucratic and it’s highly medicalised with people making decisions about you who have never met you.’ In other words, it’s your life and your decision as to which gender you wish to identify with – the state should keep its nose

Letters | 7 June 2018

A debate that won’t happen Sir: ‘Westminster is overdue an abortion debate’ (Leading article, June 2). Yes, but there is little point in a debate without the possibility of changing the law. Governments will not take up this issue, regarding it as a matter of individual conscience. In 1967 the Abortion Act was the result of David Steel’s private member’s bill. But, crucially, the Labour administration gave that bill government time in Parliament. Since then, every attempt to change the law in the light of medical advances concerning the viability of the foetus — even when a majority in the Commons seemed to favour change — has been easily ‘talked

Life matters

Predictably enough, there have been no calls this week for the Irish referendum on abortion to be re-run, no complaint from Ken Clarke about the ‘-tyranny of the majority’, no moaning that the campaign had been in any way unfair. Neither should there have been. The Irish people have made a fair and democratic choice and the result should be respected. Less respect seems to have been forthcoming, however, for the views of the Northern Irish on abortion. On the contrary, no sooner was the result from south of the border announced than the calls began for the government in Westminster to impose its will on Northern Ireland and liberalise

Damian Thompson

Papal surrender

Just before Ireland voted overwhelmingly to end the country’s constitutional ban on abortion, Catholics in the fishing village of Clogherhead could be seen storming out of Sunday mass halfway through the service. Why? Their parish priest had come on too strong. He had not only ordered them how to vote but also supplied grisly details of an abortion procedure. Presumably some of them voted to repeal the eighth amendment. The ‘Yes’ campaign couldn’t have won its two-thirds majority without the support of practising Catholics. Very few of these, we can assume, were militantly pro-choice. Instead, they were reassured by promises that any future law would be limited in its impact

Shami Chakrabarti can’t have it both ways on Northern Ireland

Never one to shy away from a platitude, the shadow attorney general, Shami Chakrabarti, has declared that the PM must reform abortion law in Northern Ireland on the basis that women there “have been let down by privileged women and men for too long” and that, so far as Theresa May is concerned, “the test of  feminists is whether they stick up for all women”. So far as this woman is concerned, I’ve been trying to work out the logic of these observations in terms of the abortion question and failing, so let’s just give up and cut to the chase. Abortion is a devolved issue in Northern Ireland and

Ireland’s referendum shows that some people only like democracy when it gives them what they want

So referendums are good now? The turnaround has been astonishing. The very people who have spent the best part of two years in moral meltdown at the fact that Britons were given a referendum on membership of the EU are now beside themselves with joy over the abortion referendum in Ireland. ‘You know who loved referendums? HITLER’, they said endlessly about the EU referendum, seeming to suffer from a bad bout of the Ken Livingstone Hitler Tourette’s. Yet now they’ve magically forgotten that all referendums are basically acts of fascism and are hailing the Irish people’s mass vote for the right of women to secure an abortion as a wonderful

Melanie McDonagh

What really happened in Ireland’s abortion referendum

The Irish prime minister, Leo Varadkar, had declared that there would not be celebrations if and when the Yes side won in yesterday’s referendum on liberalising the abortion laws. But there’s a decidedly celebratory aspect to his side, now it turns out that nearly 70 per cent of voters voted for change. ‘Democracy in action,’ is what he now says. ‘It’s looking like we will make history.’ Or as Miriam Lord, the Irish Times’ sketchwriter, says with the unconcealed partisanship that characterised that paper’s approach to the poll, and incidentally channelling When Harry Met Sally: ‘Yes, Yes, Yes; a resounding, emphatic Yes. Suffocating old certainties, unrepresentative lobby groups and celibate

The abortion referendum is Ireland’s Brexit moment

Is the abortion referendum going to be Ireland’s Brexit moment? Despite the financial crisis, a clerical scandal and a vote on gay marriage, the country had managed to steer itself relatively harmoniously along. Yet just as the EU referendum brought to the surface deep tensions across Britain, this week’s vote is in danger of doing the same to Ireland. From the outside, a decisive vote in favour of repealing the clause in Ireland’s constitution that gives the unborn equal rights with the already born might have been just another chapter in Ireland’s journey towards European secular modernity. But a fiercely-fought referendum battle has instead weaponised every single divide that was lurking