Abortion

Well, the High Court in Belfast has driven a coach and horses through Northern Ireland’s abortion law. The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) sought a ruling to allow women to have abortions in local hospitals in cases of fatal foetal abnormalities, rape and incest; today, it got it. This judgment is plainly at odds with the opinion of the democratic forum in the north, the Northern Ireland Assembly, where every attempt to have abortion introduced upfront, in law, has been thrown out. Instead abortion seems likely to be brought in through the courts, that weaselly, undemocratic method of choice by the human rights lobby, whose concept of human rights never seems to extend to prenatal life.

Two reports on the BBC Ten O'Clock News this week, both unashamedly partisan. Yes, yes, I know they are not the only reports this week guilty of bias. There’s the same ol same ol refugee hugging every night and there was also a report on the fact that our population is about to rise by ten million without even the faintest suggestion that this might not be a bloody good thing. But I mean two specific reports. One, by Reeta Chakrabarti about protests outside abortion clinics. This was the most egregiously biased piece of reporting I have seen for a long while. It took, as a statement of unalterable fact, that these protests were vile. There was not a single voice raised in defence of the protests, or against abortion. It was propaganda, pure and simple.

You know all that stuff about 'safe spaces', places on university campuses where you’re not allowed to say or do anything mean or that could possibly be construed as mean about anyone in case it hurts people’s feelings, especially if you’re a minority of some description? Well, I got the chance to try it out myself the other day. I was at a gathering in Dublin of pro-lifers – I’d been asked to be one of the speakers at their annual event – and it was all going well. There had been a nice young woman talking about hostels for single mothers. There was also a professor of law from Trinity, Dublin, who discussed the background to the Eighth Amendment, which extends equal right to life to both mothers and their unborn offspring.

I write about free speech. And I’m tired of writing about free speech. I’m tired of needing to write about free speech. I’m tired of needing to defend women’s freedom to discuss our long-contested bodies without being plucked and waxed into acceptable, tidy language, bland and inoffensive as a Playboy Bunny’s perky smile. I’m tired of needing to defend a blogger or cartoonist’s freedom to poke fun at other people’s idols, when it’s men with guns in Paris, not roués with ink, who make me feel ‘unsafe’. I’m tired of the death of irony; I’m tired of the death of good faith. But most of all, I'm tired of student unions.

Try as I might, I can’t make myself furious about the #ShoutYourAbortion hashtag. It is, above all, cause for sadness. Many of the stories women tell about their abortions are, in some form, about social indifference. The women tweeting often say that a baby would have shipwrecked their life chances, that their abortion enabled them to be better mothers to their other children, that it would have been financially unfeasible to carry their pregnancy to term. And in a country such as the US, where over 40pc of women who have abortions live below the poverty line, and the most common reason for a termination is financial insecurity, those are serious concerns. https://twitter.com/MaryEmilyOHara/status/645969048514248704 https://twitter.

The headline on page 33 of today's Times reads: 'Repent and we will forgive abortions, Pope tells women'. It's a bad headline, because the Church already grants absolution to women who repent of their abortions. CNN did much better: 'Pope Francis says all priests can forgive women who've had abortions'. (In fact, the Church teaches that God does the forgiving, but 'priests can forgive women' is OK as shorthand.) That said, headlines aren't written by reporters, so you'd expect the Times article to set the record straight. On the contrary: Tom Kington, the author, litters his piece with ignorant misrepresentations of Francis's ruling.

Pope Francis, unpredictable as ever, has just announced that during the forthcoming 'Year of Mercy', Catholics can receive absolution from priests of the ultra-traditionalist Society of St Pius X (SSPX), which has illicitly ordained its own bishops and doesn't recognise the Second Vatican Council. He's also given all priests permission to absolve anyone who truly repents of the sin of having or procuring an abortion – which they could already, though they might need the permission of the local bishop since it incurs automatic excommunication. So this isn't such big news.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thereturnofassisteddying/media.mp3" title="Lord Falconer and Douglas Murray debate 'assisted dying'" startat=42] Listen [/audioplayer]A couple of years ago I contacted Holland’s top pro-euthanasia organisation. Our House of Lords looks likely to approve a bill legalising euthanasia here, I told them. ‘Very exciting!’ came the reply. Next month Parliament will again be discussing ‘assisted dying’, and although the tone of the British debate is not yet quite like the Dutch one, a shift in tone has undoubtedly occurred. In the past few years euthanasia has been renamed ‘assisted dying’ and become part of the ‘progressive’ cause.

Question: Is abortion on gender grounds illegal in the UK? Answer: yes and no and maybe - depends who you ask. Ask Britain's biggest abortion provider, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, and they will tell you that the law is ‘silent on the matter'. Try the British Medical Association and they'll say that it may be permissible in some circumstances. Ask an academic, like Professor Sally Sheldon, and you'll get a nuanced answer about how the illegality of the practice is ‘far from clear’. Meanwhile, the government repeats in vain that ‘abortion on the grounds of gender alone is illegal’. So who's right? Well, everyone apparently. The way abortion law is framed means that contradictory interpretations of the law are possible.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_20_Nov_2014_v4.mp3" title="Brendan O'Neill and Harriet Brown discuss the rise of the Stepford student" startat=41] Listen [/audioplayer] Don't be a Stepford student — subscribe to The Spectator's print and digital bundle for just £22 for 22 weeks.  Brendan O’Neill writes this week’s cover piece on his encounters with ‘Stepford Students’ - a censorious mob who try to shut down debates that they don’t like. His comes out this week after some Stepfords managed to shut down a debate about abortion at Christ Church by threatening to disrupt it with ‘instruments’.

Imagine that you became pregnant. Imagine that you were entirely dependent upon your husband. Imagine that you became the victim of domestic violence during that pregnancy, and your husband began demanding that you did not give birth to a baby girl. Facing strong social pressure, coercion, or violence to end a pregnancy because you are carrying a girl, is a reality for a disturbing number of women in Britain, according to women’s advocacy organisation Jeena International, which helps women escape domestic violence. To begin tackling this issue, a large group of MPs led by Fiona Bruce have proposed the Abortion (Sex Selection) Bill.

There is, I realise, no perfect, neutral way of describing ‘assisted dying’, the substance of Lord Falconer’s bill which comes up for its second reading on 18th July. ‘Right to die’ is a bit tricky; dying is one of those rights that are thrust upon us without our even asking. It’s part of the human condition; just wait long enough, and it’s yours. And as Jenny McCartney eloquently makes clear in her piece on the subject, it’s actually assisted suicide — the assistance being provided by a doctor – or if you prefer, killing by request.

Rory Sutherland writes in this week’s magazine that the Mozilla/Brendan Eich affair has finally put him off his dream of moving to the United States, quoting Andrew Sullivan that ‘The whole episode disgusts me – as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society.’ The issue of gay marriage has changed politics in the English-speaking world in a way that perhaps people didn’t expect – breaking the liberal-Left’s final link with the ideal of John Locke that permitting something did not mean approving of it. This notion has been coming under pressure for some years, especially with discrimination laws, but SSM has snapped it. (Brendan O’Neill has written about this extensively for Spiked and Telegraph blogs.

If you happen to be reading this column at breakfast, I’d recommend you skip to something more agreeable like Dear Mary and save mine till a bit later. It concerns the ugly details of one of the most revolting mass murderers in US history. His name is Kermit Gosnell — a doctor who ran a particularly dodgy clinic in Philadelphia specialising in late-term abortions for mostly poor black women. When police raided it in 2010, they encountered a scene of quite appalling horror. In a flea-ridden, blood- and faeces-stained basement, Gosnell had been operating on women using unsterilised equipment, killing babies well over the legal term limit, sometimes by sucking out their brains with a machine.

After David Cameron’s whole God thing last week, there was a discussion on the radio this morning about whether religion is necessary for morality. Clearly there’s nothing to stop atheists being as moral as religious people, and as atheism grows in more advanced, literate countries, almost by definition the least corrupt and venal societies also have the lowest levels of religious belief.