Abortion overreach will backfire on women
One of the many, many reasons I prefer living in the UK to the US is the former's more clement weather, which reflects the country's calmer politics. By contrast, America's storms and wildfires feel like a metaphor for its political debates, not least on abortion. So it's apt that, just as a heatwave arrives in this country, the British left loses its mind over abortion.
Last week MPs voted to support an amendment, proposed by the Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi, which argues that women who obtain an abortion should never be prosecuted, even if it's after the legal 24-week limit. This sounds good in theory (abortion should not be criminalised, yes, agreed) but is in fact completely nuts. The law already allows late-term abortions in extreme circumstances, but now a woman could have an abortion the day before her due date for any reason she fancied. Now, very few women will do this, and in fact very few ever have, and the harrowing stories that have been used to justify this vote largely took place during the Covid lockdown, when women were buying abortion pills in the post and couldn't see doctors to find out how far along they were in their pregnancy. So: not a widespread problem, and one that could be resolved by re-examining how the Crown Prosecution Service deals with these sad cases.
• `Read more: MPs vote to decriminalise abortion
Instead, MPs have decided to chuck out the UK's heretofore liberal but pragmatic approach in favour of something far more radical that most people don't want: 87 per cent of the British public are in favour of legalised abortion, but more than half draw the line at the abortion of a healthy baby over the six-month limit. Antoniazzi's amendment upends the delicate compromise that existed until now.
Sensing their moment has come, politicians on the right are already arguing that the time limit here should be cut, in line with most of Europe. Meanwhile, some on the left are arguing the amendment doesn't go far enough. Stella Creasy proposed a further amendment, which was written by the part-time tax barrister, occasional fox murderer and full-time tweeter Jolyon Maugham, that would have made it impossible even to prosecute those who coerced women into late-term abortions. This was considered so extreme it was rejected by every abortion provider in the country, and also, wisely, by MPs. Undaunted, Creasy, who seems to believe she represents Washington DC rather than Walthamstow, implied that rejecting her amendment was on a par with the overturning of Roe v Wade. By way of evidence, she reeled off voguish American clichés ('the Donald Trump playbook', 'women's bodies as battlefields') which always suggest the speaker is so high on progressive platitudes they have turned off their brain.
If Creasy and her ilk want to take lessons from America, they should look at what happened last week to what is euphemistically called 'paediatric gender healthcare'. On Wednesday the Supreme Court allowed red states like Tennessee to ban doctors from giving hormone treatments and body-altering surgery to gender-confused children. It is the latest blow for the gender movement in the US, and it was entirely caused by overreach by activists. Until about a decade ago, people who wanted to live as the opposite sex were seen as a niche adult demographic who should be treated with kindness. But activist groups destroyed that moderate status quo with their ludicrous arguments, such as that male rapists could be sent to women's prisons and there should be no age limit on body-altering surgery for children. The Biden administration blindly supported them until belatedly realising it was following the wilfully blind, and American politicians are now, at last, trying to undo some of the damage. None of this worked out well for trans people or the left.
Progressive overreach and reality denial will always cause a backlash, something Maugham should know, given his own flailing gender activism. Creasy, too, has argued that 'some women are born with penises', suggesting a strong disconnect between her beliefs and actual biology. I'm not sure when Labour politicians decided to follow their Democrat counterparts in defending the most extreme version of a social shift, but they need to get a grip. One reason US feminists lost the abortion argument is they insisted abortion was no big deal and derided Hillary Clinton for describing it as something that should be 'safe, legal and rare', saying that last word was 'stigmatising'. It turned out that it's a lot more stigmatising to pretend getting an abortion is just a jolly lark that should come with a loyalty card.
When I was 23 and 11 weeks pregnant, I had an abortion, an experience neither jolly nor terrible but necessary. Afterwards, I felt pure gratitude, which is how I still feel about it now. Since then I've sampled many experiences on the fertility menu: given birth to twins, miscarried, had a baby. You don't need to be a wet-eyed sentimentalist to know a baby becomes a baby well before it's born; I could feel when it happened to all of my babies at about the six-month mark.
The legal limit exists for good reasons, including the mother's mental health, and maintaining public support for abortion. Arguing that a woman has the right to terminate a fully gestated healthy baby is the most self-defeating version of the pro-choice movement, because it will reinvigorate the anti-abortion argument in this country, just as arguing for the most extreme version of trans rights destroyed the moderate accommodations that existed before. Labour has kicked a hornets' nest with this vote. And it's women who are going to be stung.
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