This is the text of a speech that was due to be given at Christ Church college yesterday. The speech was not delivered following protests by the Oxford University Student Union Women’s Campaign.
I’m not here tonight to debate whether or not abortion should be
legal – so if anyone wants to ask what should be done about abortion in
cases of incest or rape please don’t waste your time. Most people accept
that abortion is in certain circumstances a tragic necessity and is
here to stay. No, I’m here to debate this specific motion – whether or
not the abortion culture harms Britain.
I define the abortion culture as a culture in which abortion is used
so often that it begins to look like it’s being treated as a regular
form of contraception (which the numbers suggest) and in which there is a
widespread view that it is a right, carries no risks and in fact
represents some kind of liberation for the women for whom it is
available. In an abortion culture, it would be controversial to
near-impossible to debate the this of terminating a pregnancy – and the
attempts to close down this reasonable discussion suggestions that such a
culture exists.
But I think that the abortion culture actually makes certain
injustices in our society worse. And anyone who truly cares about the
freedom and rights of women – and that is all of us – has to be prepared
to look again at the evidence of what abortion on demand does to us.
And how silence on its effects harms certain minority groups.
First, the numbers. The abortion statistics for 2013 tell a grim
story. There were 185,331 in that year. Of which, only 1 per cent were
due to a risk of the child being born handicapped. 99.84 per cent of
those carried out under Ground C of the Abortion Act 1967 were due to
the “the risk to mental health of the woman” – a provision that is
notoriously easy to get around. Vincent Argent, the former medical
director of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, admitted on record
earlier this year that doctors routinely pre-sign abortion forms without
meeting the woman. It’s worth noting, by the way, that 64 per cent of
abortions take place in the private sector financed by the NHS. There is
money to be made in this.
Now if you dig down deeper into those numbers you find some
interesting things about class and race, which suggest that abortion is
something that is found in particular concentration among particular
groups. We know a lot about this in American society: the first
legalised abortion clinics were heavily located in black-dominated areas
and in 2012 data showed that in New York City more black women had
abortions than actually gave birth. In Mississippi, African-Americans
represent around 37 per cent of the population but 75 per cent of
abortions. Those figures are not so dramatic in the UK because our
population is more demographically homogenous. But consider this: “Black
or black British” people only make up 3.3 per cent of the population
but account for 9 per cent of abortions.
Some 37 per cent of all women having abortions in 2013 had had one or
more before (up from 32 per cent in 2003) and around one in seven women
who had abortions were actually in a relationship. This data suggests
that abortion might be being used by some people as a form of
contraception. This is extraordinary given that our society is saturated
with messages about safe sex and given that abortion industry advocates
insist that the procedure is safe, legal and rare.
So why is abortion being used in this way? One explanation might lie
in a Joseph Rowntree Study from 2004 that found that girls with few
educational prospects choose to keep their babies while those who
planned to go to college and find work were more likely to have an
abortion. In other words, certain groups of people are still having
regular, unprotected sex and still getting pregnant (despite decades of
education) – and what they do next is a choice framed not necessarily by
personal will but by economics.
Now you might say “that’s good because it means that women exerting
control over their bodies are also in control of their economic future”.
But turn it on its head. What it also means is that a) certain groups
are ignoring all the information about contraception and relationship
advice, getting pregnant and then returning to the clinic again and
again as thought it was no different to the pill. And b) it means that
decisions about child rearing are determined less by genuine personal
choice and more by cultural pressure. It suggests that women aren’t
given serious alternatives to abortion – they’re not getting support
from families or their government, but they are receiving cultural
messages about the terrors and pressures of child rearing. You might
take some of that message from Tory policy on withdrawing child benefit,
which I would argue runs counter to their family friendly image.
While we’re talking about cultural pressure, let’s talk about the
issue of disposability. Abortion on demand feeds the idea that we all
deserve full autonomy and liberation from responsibility for others.
That’s great for the strong; bad for the vulnerable.
Consider this strange hypocrisy. We live in a society where we care
very deeply about the rights of disabled people – the backlash against
the government’s welfare reforms showed that – and we’re always telling
ourselves that they have a right to full citizenship. Yet we also tell
pregnant women that if the child is disabled then they have a total
right to abort it. The results are pretty troubling. Nine out of 10
unborn babies diagnosed with spina bifida are aborted. The proportion is
about the same for kids with Down’s Syndrome. In fact, a 2009 study
found that three babies were aborted every day due to Down’s.
Now, again, I’m not saying that women shouldn’t necessarily be free
to make that decision. All I’m saying is that in an abortion culture,
there is a bias towards choosing abortion as a mythically easy option.
Peter Elliott, Chairman of The Down Syndrome Research Foundation, who
has a 24-year-old son David with Down’s Syndrome, said of that 2009
study: “Why are the abortions at such a high rate unless they have been
given the impression the situation was terrible and it warranted an
abortion? I don’t think the choice is presented to the parents in the
light of the true situation where the children have a good life and are
in fact viewed as a blessing to the parents, not a curse, and I don’t
think these parents getting the abortions know much about Downs syndrome
at all.”
Moreover, it makes perfect sense that a culture that regards human
life as disposable at one end of the lifecycle should regard it as
equally disposable at other points during its cycle. That point of view
was eloquently expressed in an article in The Journal of Medical Ethics
by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, who argued that newborn
babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life” –
after all they are not, like that embryo in the womb, entirely
autonomous of their parents. They said that parents should be able to
have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.
It’s perfectly natural to extend this logic to euthanasia – which has
been legalised in the Benelux countries and is now being discussed
seriously in Britain. Dr Joseph Fletcher, one of the godfathers of
modern bio-ethics and a celebrated proponent of both abortion and
euthanasia rights once reminisced fondly about about the days when he
and the family planning advocate Margaret Sanger joined the Euthanasia
Society of America, in order to “link the two [abortion and euthanasia]
causes so to speak the right to be selective about parenthood and the
right to be selective about living”. Fletcher explained, “We’ve added
death control to birth control as a part of the ethos of life style in
our society.” His argument was that life really has no value unless it
is of a certain quality – a point reinforced by Richard Dawkins when he
advised of a child with Down’s, “Abort it and try again – it would be
immoral to bring it into the world”.
By the way, Dr Fletcher would have agreed. He once said that there
was “no reason to feel guilty about putting a Down’s syndrome baby away,
whether it’s ‘put away’ in the sense of hidden in a sanitarium or in a
more responsible lethal sense. It is sad; yes. Dreadful. But it carries
no guilt. True guilt arises only from an offense against a person, and a
Down’s is not a person.” A horrific attitude, you might think, but not
so strange really when you consider the great violence that abortion
does to our very concept of personhood.
Perhaps the greatest irony of this whole phenomenon is that while
abortion was supposed to give women greater autonomy, we have evidence
that it was being used in England by some families to terminate
pregnancies entirely because the fetus was female. In other words,
abortion was being used in such a way as to validate the medieval idea
that girls are worth less than boys. Happily, this abuse looks set to be
officially and explicitly outlawed for the first time.
All these problems are all the more troubling for the fact that we
don’t discuss them. This reflects how modern capitalist societies deal
with issues surrounding poverty, suffering, abuse etc – it pushes them
out of view, using medical jargon or political phraseology to cover up
for a variety of problems that need to be discussed in far blunter
terms.
I was not always pro-life. I became so when my historical research
into the American conservative movement compelled me, reluctantly, to
read pro-life literature.
I was shocked to discover how messy abortion is. How painful it can
be. How there is evidence to show it having long-term psychological
effects. For instance, research by Professor Priscilla Coleman published
in the British journal of psychiatry argues that, “abortion is
associated with moderate to highly increased risks of psychological
problems subsequent to the procedure. Women who had undergone an
abortion experienced an 81 per cent increased risk of mental health
problems, and nearly 10 per cent of the incidence of mental health
problems were shown to be directly attributable to abortion.”
Why did I not know this? Because while abortion deals trauma to our
society, we deal with it by ignoring it. It’s no different to the fact
that we ignore shockingly high rates of suicide in prison. Appalling
standards of care in elderly homes. The abuse and rape of children in
children’s services. And this is what is so doubly perverse about the
abortion culture: we effectively open the floodgates on something – and
then refuse to talk about its reality. Abortion is at the very centre of
the therapeutic state: the state that dulls pain with simplistic
solutions rather than addresses their complex causes.
And all I’m asking for here today is that we have a serious conversation about it. Thank you for listening.
