Abortion isn’t a morality issue. It is a women’s health issue, just like smear tests, menopause and menstruation.
Those uppity womenfolk. Ever since the shrieking sisterhood succeeded in winning the right to vote back in 1893, there has been no end to their pernickety protests. All that fussing over equal pay for equal work, state-sponsored tampons and the right to sit around the corporate board table! Where will it end? Good lord, those strident hussies will be demanding the right to decide what they do with their own bodies next! I mean, the cheek of it all.
Two years ago this month, an elderly woman was photographed standing alone on a Polish street, looking mildly impatient, holding up a homemade protest placard.
Her message, printed in bold type on two pieces of A4 paper stuck to a flattened cardboard box, went viral: ‘‘I can’t believe I still have to protest this f...ing s...t.’’
That photograph became an internet meme and her message has since been adopted as a women’s rights motto, routinely popping up at feminist marches, anti-Trump rallies and in-home embroidery kits from artsy crafters on Etsy.com.
The f...ing s..t she was protesting was the Polish government’s attempt to ban all abortions. That’s despite the fact that Poland already had one of the strictest abortion laws in the world, with terminations allowed only when the pregnancy results from rape or incest, or the life of the foetus or mother is at risk.
It’s not something we can claim the moral high ground on. I was three years old when the Contraception, Sterilisation, and Abortion Act was passed in 1977, making abortion legal only with the agreement of two certifying doctors that there was serious danger to a woman’s mental or physical health if she was unable to access a termination.
Without that medical sign off, trying to get an abortion is still considered an offence under the Crimes Act of 1961.
But the times, they are a changing. On the campaign trail last year,
Jacinda Ardern signalled her intention to change the law, arguing that abortion is a women’s health issue and ‘‘shouldn’t be a crime’’ – and, really, who could argue with that?
I’ll tell you who: angry old men who phone radio talkback shows. Women who want abortions, said one indignant caller to Mark Sainsbury’s Radio Live show this week, deserve to be hung in the town square. (He was, at least, an equal opportunity barbarian, reckoning that doctors who perform abortions also warrant the hangman’s noose.)
The Law Commission’s new briefing paper, Alternative Approaches to Abortion Law, outlines three alternative models to our existing law. Model A makes it no one’s business but the woman wanting an abortion, with no legislation and no statutory requirements. Just go to your doctor, and go from there.
Model B would decriminalise the procedure, but would still leave the final decision in the hands of health professionals who perform abortions. They’d have to believe it was warranted in the interests of the woman’s physical and mental health and wellbeing.
The third suggestion is a hybrid of the two, with Option A covering pregnancies up to 22 weeks, and Model B covering late-term abortions. It is to my mortal shame that, as a teenager, I once gave a right to life speech (of sorts) to my classmates. It is a woman’s right to choose, I argued, but it’s not a choice any woman wants to make, even if it’s a choice some women need to make. Better sex education, I declared, was surely better than killing babies. As young adults, we invariably parrot our parents’ political views and moral values. My parents lost a premature baby and my father remains haunted by the experience of watching his firstborn struggle for breath, then die. As a teenager, he once told me that he’d disown me if I ever had an abortion.
And therein lies the problem. No woman wants to terminate a pregnancy, but should they need to, the last thing they need is the guilt treatment, or to be told they’re breaking the law without a doctor’s rubber stamp.
When our abortion laws are brought to the house for debate, it’ll be a conscience vote for MPs. Here’s hoping they agree that abortion isn’t a morality issue. It is a women’s health issue, just like smear tests, menopause and menstruation. (And if what goes on in a women’s wotsit is of such public interest to men, perhaps they might like to fork out $20 every month for our tampons and pads?)
By all means, let the menfolk have their say, but let them have it in private, with their wives and reproductive partners or anyone else they’ve personally impregnated, accidentally or purposefully. Otherwise, it’s none of their business.
It’s only fair and reasonable, fellas. And should any men’s health issues come up for parliamentary debate – involuntary vasectomies or compulsory cooking lessons at high school, for instance – I’ll do my bit and hold my tongue.
Just this once, mind.