Abortion should be a medical matter, not a criminal one. The law needs to change
There has been a predictably overwrought response to the election manifesto promises of both Labour and the Liberal Democrats to decriminalise abortion. Rightwing and Catholic commentators alike imagined hordes of heavily pregnant women at abortion clinics, demanding their fully formed foetuses be evacuated from their uteruses. Just because the law said that they now could.
I, unfortunately, know far more than I want to about what utter nonsense this emotive, anti-abortion rhetoric is. On 26 September 2012 I ended the life of my much-wanted daughter, Elodie, at 24 weeks’ gestation. It’s the hardest and most painful thing I’ve ever done. One thing I now know, with certainty, following this traumatic experience, is that no woman would choose to terminate a pregnancy that late on unless she felt there wasn’t any other option. And no doctor would countenance it, whatever the law said.
Decriminalising abortion isn’t a policy promise designed just to win votes. It’s a sensible response to representations from many organisations, including the Royal College of Midwives, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the British Medical Association. It would bring the UK into line with more enlightened countries such as Canada. Most importantly, it would mean that consenting, adult women finally had agency over our own bodies. Because abortion should be a health issue, not a criminal one. We wouldn’t force a woman to donate her kidney to her sick child, would we? Yet the law still allows us to force women to carry foetuses to term against their will, to be vessels.
Many people are unaware that in the UK in 2019, abortion is still, technically, a criminal offence. This is because the Abortion Act 1967 is underpinned by a Victorian law, the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. Rather than replacing the outdated law, the 1967 act merely modified it. Thus, abortion became legal only up until 24 weeks (except for cases where foetuses are severely ill or disabled, or a woman’s life is at risk) and only if two doctors agree to it – taking consent away from the individual woman and putting it into her doctors’ hands. No other medical procedure requires legal authorisation as well as the patient’s own consent. The penalty for breaking this law? In theory, life imprisonment.
In practice, very few women go to prison. But the law does mean that you can’t get abortion pills at your GP’s surgery and are restricted in where you can have a termination. It also causes delay, so women often have to wait several weeks before they can have the abortion they’ve requested, meaning – in a grim irony contrary to the spirit of the law – that they are much further along in their pregnancies than anyone would desire.
Labour has promised to decriminalise abortion without time limit, while the Lib Dems will retain the 24week limit. There’s absolutely no evidence that more women will have abortions simply because it will become easier. That’s frankly insulting. In Canada, which legalised abortion in 1988, there has been no increase at all; in fact rates have been decreasing in the past decade.
But pro-lifers don’t just want to prevent decriminalisation. They want to further restrict abortions by banning them after 12 weeks’ gestation. This is misguided. Sometimes, knowing that she has time to make a decision means a woman chooses to go ahead with a pregnancy rather than rushing into an abortion before a legal deadline.
My termination would have been legal up until birth even under the current law because my daughter had a severe and extremely rare chromosome disorder, which meant she was unlikely to survive to term and that, if she did, she would be born with painful and debilitating disabilities and probably die shortly afterwards. I knew I had to prevent her suffering.
But it wasn’t until I was almost six months’ pregnant, following many invasive tests, that doctors diagnosed her condition. Had the abortion time limit been lower, I could have been forced to make a decision before I knew if she was viable, to play Russian roulette both with her life and mine. I might have ended up terminating a healthy baby based on guesswork in a rush for a deadline. Many women don’t find out what’s wrong until late in their pregnancies. That’s why legalisation without a time limit is essential.
Let me tell you the brutal reality of a late termination. I lay on a hospital bed while a sombre doctor passed a needle through my belly into my daughter’s heart, giving her a lethal injection of potassium chloride. Horribly, they call this feticide. I then carried her around, dead inside me for two days before I was admitted to the hospital maternity unit, induced and, following a traumatic and painful labour, I gave birth.
A woman would choose this only because she had no option, not because she’d “changed her mind” about pregnancy. Neither do doctors like performing late abortions. The statistics say it all: in 2018, 80% of NHS-funded abortions took place at under 10 weeks. Just 289 terminations took place after 24 weeks – 0.1% of the total. Until abortion is fully decriminalised, we are only a slippery slope away from countries such as El Salvador, where women are jailed for having stillbirths and miscarriages. We need to distinguish ourselves from these woman-hating places. We need to distance ourselves from the backward-looking US, where abortion rights are under attack. Women should not be treated as criminals for wanting full rights over our own bodies.
• Hilary Freeman is a journalist and author
The law still allows us to force women to carry foetuses to term against their will, to be vessels
on her terms. In April 2013, when she was less than one year old, we were all playing on the floor when she jumped on my chest and I thought, “Ooh, that hurt a little.” After that, whenever I was lying down she’d lie on me and paw at this one spot on my right breast. If I moved her paw, she’d put it back in the same place. If I was sitting down, she’d get up on my lap and nudge her head there. She started following me around everywhere. She wasn’t like that with anyone else.
It was three months of that behaviour before I admitted it wasn’t going to stop. I knew it sounded crazy to go to the doctor and say, “My cat keeps bothering me,” but I had some discomfort, too. The doctor found atypical cells and calcification in the same spot Missy had been nudging. It wasn’t full-blown breast cancer, but it had the potential to change, so I had an operation to remove the cells.
I felt so grateful to Missy; I wouldn’t have gone to the doctor if it hadn’t been for her. I’d heard of dogs doing that kind of thing, but not cats. When I got home I rewarded her with some Marks & Spencer’s prawns – rather than the Asda ones that she’s used to.
As my wound healed she backed off and went back to her aloof self. It was weird for me. I felt like maybe she didn’t love me as much any more. I was back to being treated like everyone else. But I was comforted that there was a reason for her behaviour.
One night two years later, she came and lay on my chest in bed. I said to my partner: “Do you think she’s trying to tell me something?” He laughed it off. But the next night was the same. She started following me again. It was really unsettling. I’d got used to her barely bothering to get off the bed. When I went back to the same doctor with no symptoms other than my cat pestering me I had to plead with her to believe me.
She sent me to the hospital and I was given the same diagnosis and they did the same operation again. It was the same consultant and team. They were fantastic – and believed me. Not everyone does, but that’s up to them.
Two years later when it all happened a third time, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. There were eight areas of calcification in my breast. I had a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery and they removed the lymph nodes.
That was 2017. Thankfully, Missy’s been consistently aloof since then and I’ve been fine. I know it sounds strange but I feel as if she saved my life. She will forever be my hero, whether she likes it or not.
‘After I lost everything, he made life worth living’: Ben Coles, 33, unemployed, and Biggie the iguana,4, Chippenham, Wiltshire
When I first got Biggie, I had a job, a house, a girlfriend. He was six months old and about 18in long. But about six months into having him, I went through a bad spell of mental health. As a result, I lost my job, then my house, broke up with my girlfriend, and was almost declared bankrupt. Everything just toppled on me. I had anxiety and I was very easily irritated. I don’t blame them, but my family and friends eventually became sick of me. It felt like Biggie was the only being not giving me grief and I just felt this closeness to him.
But it was a struggle for me to keep hold of him. No landlords wanted to take us in and I was left homeless. People hear “iguana” and they think, “Oh God, it’s going to rip everything apart.” I spent three months living on my mum’s sofa, paying friends to look after Biggie. I fell out with my mum for not taking him in. For a period, he lived in Bristol and I went back and forth every day to see him, because obviously all the moving and being apart from each other was stressful for the lizard as well.
I’d lost everything in my life, but he was my partner in crime and the only thing I was living for. I can’t imagine how much harder that time would have been without him. Keeping him alive saved my life.
Eventually I got a place in Chippenham. He’s grown to four-and-a-halffoot long now. He thinks he’s a cat and just loves attention. When I do the dishes, he comes and sits on my head. If I turn my face, he’ll give me a little lick on the lips. With certain people he’ll climb up their leg and sit and stare at them until they start stroking him. When he outgrew his vivarium, I set out basking areas with UV lights, and now he roams free around the house. I bathe him twice a day because he’s a rainforest lizard. He makes a fuss to get in the tub, but loves it once he’s in. My girlfriend works in an expensive supermarket and Biggie loves their fruit, which is quite a pricey habit. His favourite is Candyfloss grapes. At night, he sits on my chest and I put my dressing gown over us. Luckily, my girlfriend loves him, too.
‘Trixie helps me control my obsessive thoughts’: Stephanie Lynch, 25, civil servant, and Trixie the hamster,1, Port Talbot, Wales
So often in my life I feel like what I say or what I do is going to have a grave consequence, but with Trixie I don’t feel that way. When I shut the bedroom door to be with her, she’s so present in the room, everything else just goes away.
I have OCD which stems from guilt towards a lot of things. As a child, my family had a house fire and one of my little brothers passed away. After that, if I heard a noise in the night, I had to sit up to check everything was OK; if I didn’t, I’d feel like there would be another fire. I became obsessed with thinking about accidents. Every 10 minutes I was imagining falling and would have the physical feeling you get just before you fall. It was about me, my boyfriend, anyone around me.
But Trixie helped change that. Late last summer, I started medication and got her not long afterwards. Hamsters need a lot of care and having a positive impact on her through feeding, changing her bedding, just making the right choices, really helped me. Watching Trixie play, sniff around, climb all over me, I found myself smiling on my own, which is not something I do. It was such a light feeling of joy. And a break from my thoughts.
Our boxroom is her room now. I love changing her cage. I think, “Well, what might she find interesting?” I know her different moods and have learned her favourite treat is watermelon. I still get the obsessive thoughts, but I can choose to let them go and think of Trixie.
She doesn’t know how much she means to me. Or how I feel. But that doesn’t matter. There’s something to be said for getting comfort from another being without telling them why you’re upset. Obviously I know hamsters don’t live forever and hate the thought of her dying, but I know I’m giving her the best life possible. And she gives me so much back.
‘I felt so isolated, but he helped connect to the world’: Majid Sohrabi, 49, and Oxford the dog, 5, Alexandria,Dumbertonshire
The first time I saw Oxford he was a puppy. I thought, “He needs someone to look after him; how’s he going to help me?” But within months, he had changed my life. I can’t bend down any more so when I drop things, which is all the time, he picks them up. He helps me get dressed. If I ask him, he gets the landline phone. He kind of stands and puts his paws around the handset and then grabs it with his jaws, very gently. It’s especially helpful when I’ve had a fall.
Back in 2010, I was working as a nurse in Glasgow and writing my dissertation for my master’s when I started to get this feeling like I had cushions under my heels, within days it turned into unbearable pain. I was having lunch with my girlfriend when I realised I couldn’t stand up on my own. Later that year I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
Physically, the disease made me uncoordinated and I became unstable. I had to give in to using a wheelchair. To me, it felt like the end of the road. I used to love cycling from Glasgow to Loch Lomond and running. I couldn’t stand looking out of the window at people going about their normal life. My girlfriend and I broke up and my family were all in Tehran. I had to move out of the city to find a bungalow. I didn’t know anyone in my new town and just spent my time on my own behind the computer watching movies. My physiotherapist suggested I get a dog through the charity Canine Partners.
Oxford was key to reconnecting me to the world. He made me get out of the house to take him for walks. I started sailing and playing wheelchair basketball. He’s changed my body image, too. When I used to go shopping I felt like this strange thing everyone was staring at in the middle of the shopping centre. When you’re at a lower level to everyone else, you can think of yourself as not a part of society. But with him next to me, more people say hello or approach me and ask about him.
His foster parents, from when he was a puppy, Jan and Peter, live in Sussex and we’ve become close. They come to visit us once a year and we travel around Scotland. I can’t believe how pessimistic I was before I got him. He’s my best mate and we’ve become a great team.
Majid has received support from the MS Society
about it, in a piece for the New Yorker. “On the set, I didn’t miss a beat, but I struggled,” she wrote, of returning to Game of Thrones after brain surgery. “Season two would be my worst. I didn’t know what Daenerys was doing. If I am truly being honest, every minute of every day I thought I was going to die.”
It’s remarkable, considering her profile and her regular appearances in the Daily Mail in lovely dresses and grand smiles, that she managed to keep it secret for so long. She didn’t want to tell strangers, “Because it was mine.” She feared, too, that people would “sneer at it”.
It so happened that, the week before I went to meet her, I had a similar (though less dramatic) neurological diagnosis – when I tell her about it, for some reason my voice shakes. She is warm and quick with recommendations, and as she continues she says, “Well, you know, then. You know the worries. That people will think your soul, your movement, your voice, who you were,” was damaged. “It was nerveracking to share it, to be honest. It always is, when you make yourself vulnerable.” She waited so long to talk about it, because, “I didn’t want people to think of me as… sick.”
There are still days on set when she will quietly pull aside the makeup person and say, “‘I think I’m having a brain haemorrhage. I’m not, I promise, but maybe just put me in a cold tent and we’ll sit down for a second, and I apologise in advance if I freak you out.’ Over the summer I was burning the candle at both ends, and I was with my mate on the plane. And I was like, ‘Dude, I feel really weird…’ But I was fine. It’s hard not to think the worst. It’s hard to think you’re overtired, or you’ve been on Instagram too long, and to realise these might have the same side-effects as something deadly. But the charity evolves with me. I use it. Here’s something else that I feel: maybe someone else feels the same way.”
She talks about the summer just gone with a regretful kind of wonder – it was th e summer after the Game of Thrones finale had divided fans, when she was coming to terms with how the “overwhelming” amount of nudity in the first season had affected her. And, after years of “filling every hiatus with a movie, shit, good or otherwise” (she starred opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator Genisys, and as Qi’ra in Solo: a Star Wars Story) she had decided to take a break. Or, the decision was made for her.
“After we did the premiere for the last season, it felt suddenly like I lost all of the bones in my body. And I was in this puddle on the floor going, ‘Maybe this isn’t just the show.’ I’d never wanted to look around and see what we had, because I was convinced it was just going to blow up in our faces. And, well, at the end it kind of did. So I kept my head down. Then, after the premiere, I finally was able to stop, and that was difficult.” She travelled and went “raving with my mates, but that was not fulfilling. So, bloated and exhausted I went away for two weeks with my best girlfriend, [The GoodFight star] Rose Leslie, and it was in this retreat in India that I suddenly got it. This is what stopping feels like. And I was able to finally… be kind to myself.”
All this is recent. All this is really recent, with a new understanding of grief. Her beloved father, a theatre sound engineer, died of cancer in 2016. “The world felt like a scarier place once my dad wasn’t in it,” she said at the time. “There was the referendum, too,” she shudders. “It was the year of everything bad.”
But it was after her lost summer that, “I finally got this feeling. As if, on a cellular level, I’d grown up. And it’s so bittersweet, because I was clinging on to that childlike optimism. Then, when I finally let it go, I realised that was actually quite a heavy backpack to be wearing. I felt like that at the Emmys, too, finally popping my head up from the bunker. It’s as if you can see the actual landscape that you’ve been living in this entire time from another perspective.”
Occasionally she looks at me apologetically, her eyebrows like arrows, to check she’s not saying too much, and then she continues. “It can be perceived as such a feminine trait, can’t it – the responsibility to ‘put a smile on it’. And, and you feel like it’s a defeat if you give in and admit, ‘Maybe it’s not going to be OK in the end.’ But then, if you do, then you have an opportunity to go… ‘and what if that’s all right?’ Death is shit,” she says, dramatically. “It’s really hard and grief is horrific, and yet it is completely and utterly guaranteed. No matter how much Silicon Valley boys want to prove to everyone it’s not. But the finality of death, the absolute certainty of it, I’ve realised, is such a tonic.”
Along with a good stroke, I add the loss of a parent to her list of recommendations. “No! I’m not recommending it to anyone, obviously. But it is something real you can actually hold on to. We don’t look at grief properly. I’m not talking about the random moments of completely overwhelming emotion, I’m pretty in control of that… there was only one time on set where I just physically couldn’t stop crying. It’s the other stuff that we don’t discuss – the functional grief; when your worldview and your perspective on life and yourself changes irrevocably, forever.”
How is she dealing with that? “By realising that there is a framework that life lives within, and knowing when you reach the edges of it. There’s that. And I try to use the shit feelings as opposed to just ‘breathing through it’. It’s like putting my plastic in the recycling bin – it might not do anything, but I should at least try. And then being an actor and having a production company, knowing that the greater understanding I have about life, the greater storyteller I can be. As an actor, you’re always observing – no matter what trauma you’re going through, there’s a wee bit of your brain that’s like, ‘Isn’t this fascinating?’”
Every time I interview a famous person I leave feeling slightly high and slightly sad, because to enter their fabulous world also, inevitably, means you see the shadow of their cage. The imposed disconnect, for instance. And the constant smiling and the many locks. Clarke was catapulted to extreme fame during a period when she nearly lost her mind. She started to find gifts outside her door, from one of many stalkers. One, she says, is extremely unwell, another extremely mean. “The stalker stuff is just horrible because, as a single lady walking around town, I already feel like I’m being followed.”
These stalkers believe they’re having a relationship with her, “which is confusing, because having a relationship with people I don’t know is a big part of what I signed up for. I care about what art does to people. But it carries with it a responsibility, and when you leave your front door you take that with you. And it’s a difficult path to navigate. Because sometimes,” and she’s talking about fans now, the line between the two often being blurred, “you get grabbed physically and your instincts kick in. When you see shock being registered on someone else’s face, you’re like, ‘Where’s the danger?’ And then you realise, oh, it’s me – I’m the danger.”
Her fanbase is due to change shortly, as she maps out her career without dragons. Clarke’s new film is Last Christmas and is based on the Wham! song. While it is a box-office hit, reviews have been… mixed. “The kind of bad,” said Rolling Stone, “that falls somewhere between finding a lump of coal in your stocking and discovering one painfully lodged in your rectum.” It threatens to become a cult classic. Reader, I loved it.
Clarke plays a woman whose messy life, it becomes clear, is partly a result of recent illness. “I was able,” she says darkly, “to bring a lot to the role.” There is a romantic twist, a twist so gooey it may cause diabetes in vulnerable audiences, but there is a second twist, in that this film (co-written by Emma Thompson) could prove to be the most effective piece of anti-Brexit propaganda of the festive season. Clarke (with Thompson as her mother) plays the youngest of a family of first-generation immigrants, dealing with the fallout of the referendum.
“We filmed a scene of a hate crime,” Clarke says, a scene on a London bus where a couple are told to go back to where they came from. “And Emma said, ‘Come on, let’s be honest: haven’t we all witnessed something similar?’” She loved working on this film, in part because of the women in charge, “who recognised that we all had a life outside this movie. You don’t have to have a vagina to do that, but the difference lay in that slight... lack of patriarchy?” And in part because of the intersection between entertainment and what she describes as “meaning”. Something she continues to search for, albeit with regular disclaimers of privilege, and embarrassment.
“The world is scary at the moment, both politically and environmentally. You have politicians pushing people to the absolute limits of their left versus right parameters, and the middle ground that we were all living in before is now wasteland, because both sides are life or death. It feels so much more polarised and extreme than ever. You’ve got 33-year-olds like me asking, ‘Should I bring kids into this world? If I do, what will that kid feel like?’ It feels frightening, consistently. And I’m not alone. I’m leaning hard on Bake Offright now.”
But the fear has made her reassess her work, post-Game of Thrones. “Entertainment is about taking you outside of yourself for a second, which is largely what I think the success of Game of Thrones was. People wanted to see something familiar, but also have that level of separation, through dragons and magic. Escapism is what lots of people go to art for. So, if we can cherrypick stories to tell people in a shitty time, I’d like to give them something really good. It could make them feel better, or less alone, or make them realise there’s something outside of their front door that they should care about.”
She takes a sharp breath. “You know, I spent a lot of time being like, ‘What I do is all bullshit. I’m completely selfish, a total narcissist.’ And then…” And then the world hit her at a great speed, and she emerged into this new adulthood, and 10 years crawled over her like glittering rats. “And then I realised what it was for. I help provide relief. And that’s worth something, especially now. Right?”
It takes a second before I realise she is waiting for an answer. “Right,” I say, reassuringly. “Right.”
Last Christmas is in cinemas nationwide now
Stylist Hope Lawrie; makeup by Lynsey Alexander at Streeters using Lancôme; hair by Ken O’Rourke at Premier Hair and Makeup using Charles Worthington Volume & Bounce Body Booster Mousse; shot at Chesterton Road at beachstudios.co.uk