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Jill Stephenson
Why has the issue of abortion become prominent again? I suppose that, for the people who oppose abortion at any stage and for any reason, it is always a prominent issue. But recently a number of politicians have treated us to a view of their ‘personal’ opinions.
All of them want – as a matter of personal preference only, of course – a reduction in the period of gestation during which an abortion is permissible. If only they had kept their personal preferences to themselves. We do not need to know about them.
Much is made of when life begins or when a foetus can feel pain. But most of those arguing about these things are the people who oppose abortion root and branch anyway. At least we are not yet at the stage that has been reached in the USA (we never are), where doctors performing abortions have been murdered or threatened with murder. We have had – on a much smaller scale than in the US – demonstrations of zealots outside abortion clinics, with gory pictures of aborted foetuses thrust in front of already distressed women who have felt they had no alternative but to abort a foetus inside them. I doubt that it is an easy decision for most women faced with it. Demonising and assaulting them – if only verbally and pictorially – helps no-one.
What is it that makes anti-abortion campaigners feel that they have the right to try to compel a woman to carry to term a baby that is not wanted? For many of them, there is a strong religious conviction that drives them on. For others, this may not be the case but there is nevertheless a strong reek of ideology. It seems to me very strange that there are people who think that they have a (god-given) right and mission to compel the unwilling to continue with a pregnancy. They know nothing of the circumstances that have impelled individual women to seek an abortion, yet they claim the right to condemn them for this decision and to try to prevent their having the opportunity to take this decision. Why can’t they mind their own business?
Why are there still so many unplanned pregnancies? One reason is a lack of information about, or diligence in using, contraception. This is not the responsibility of women alone. A man who has unprotected sex with a woman with whom he is not in a stable relationship or with whom he does to wish to have a child is utterly irresponsible. For the most part, he is not the one who has to suffer the consequences.
Yes, the woman should show responsibility, too. Sadly, it is too often the case that women are deluded by unscrupulous men who claim to love them or claim that intercourse will be ‘safe’, when neither of these is the case. All of this says much about the inadequacy of sex education and the availability of reliable contraceptive information in some quarters. It is probably no coincidence that many of those who oppose abortion are also opposed to sex education and the availability of reliable contraception.
I hope that we are past the days when an illegitimate baby was regarded as the visible punishment a woman received for having sex outside marriage. What a fate for a child – to be regarded as a punishment, and to grow up with the stigma that that implied. It was still the case before 1967 that some women had to go through with a pregnancy and birth, and then had to suckle their baby and care for it for a few weeks before it was summarily taken away from them and given to a childless couple to adopt. That was a further part of her punishment. Is that really what some people want us to return to?
Not all women seeking an abortion are young and unmarried/not in a stable relationship. The birth of yet another baby in families that already feel themselves to be complete could have a deleterious effect on the life and standard of living of existing children, to say nothing of the parents. A woman who believed that her reproductive life was at an end and whose children were more or less grown up, but found herself pregnant again, would not necessarily wish to return to a life of nappies and baby food. Why should she be condemned to such a life?
I have said in these pages on a previous occasion that the one thing that has given women opportunities in education, employment and general fulfilment has been control of their fertility. This is what certain agencies and individuals in influential positions, not least in some churches, have tried to prevent. Attempts to curtail the availability of abortion have to be seen in the same light. Their aim is to tie women to unpredictable patterns of pregnancy and childbirth in such a way that their ‘natural’ destiny as wives and mothers will be fulfilled but any personal aspirations beyond these self-sacrificial ones must be renounced. This is what we can no doubt expect in the kinds of regime where the clergy hold a disproportionate amount of power.
One had hoped that, since 1967 especially, women had a significant degree of reproductive self-determination in Britain. But now one has to wonder, especially in Scotland.
Jill Stephenson is former professor of modern German history at the University of Edinburgh
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