Abortion

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

[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’. The college cancelled the debate, between Brendan, who is pro-choice, and Tim Stanley, who is pro-life, because of ‘security and welfare issues’.

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. This is a short and simple piece

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. As for the safeguards in the bill about it being limited to those with

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

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

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. But, as it is generally accepted that human beings are susceptible to the messages they are given, either explicitly or subconsciously, the underlying principles of Christianity – forgiveness and compassion – must certainly influence behaviour; likewise if people are told that they can only be happy if they

By way of a metaphor for the way the NHS and, come to that, the law regards foetuses, you can’t really better the reality, viz, that foetal remains from abortions and miscarriages are being incinerated in NHS hospitals and possibly used to heat that hospital. If a foetus lives less than 13 weeks, it could, in Addenbrooke’s Hospital, for instance, be used as fuel as part of the hospital’s waste-to-energy schemes. And 13 weeks is just over three months’ gestation – the point at which wanted foetuses register as recognisably human on the scans that prospective parents take home and show their friends. Meanwhile, the unwanted foetuses, or the ones

Because I’d like to have a child, and I’m getting on a bit, my husband and I have spent time recently with consultants. They’re an odd breed with distinct and shared characteristics. Invariably, after we’ve all sat down, their first move is to tilt their chair back, or give it a little twirl (design permitting), just to signal how free and easy it is at the top of the medical tree. When they speak it’s with a sort of hurried condescension, as if giving career advice to a hopeless niece. And they scribble as they go, on some scrap of paper. Ovary, ovary, arrow, hieroglyph, arrow, ‘Got that? Hmmm?’ Follicle,

There was a lovely little ultrasound picture of a foetus to illustrate the Independent’s splash today about the incidence of sex-selective abortions in Britain. According to the paper’s analysis of ONS statistics, the incidence of second daughters among immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh and possibly those from other countries such as India isn’t quite the same as in the population at large. Either immigrants from these groups are, more than the rest of us, having child after child until they have a boy or they are simply aborting second pregnancies where the foetus is a girl in order to ensure their next child is a boy: most probably, according to

There’s been much chatter today about Keir Starmer’s declaration that it was right not to prosecute doctors who authorised abortions that were requested because of the gender of the foetus. You won’t read a better piece on the subject than the article by our new regular blogger Melanie McDonagh. She describes the full implications of Mr Starmer’s thinking: ‘As Mr Starmer made clear it’s possible for doctors to authorise an abortion without actually ever having seen the woman concerned. On this basis, pretty well any abortion is justified, on the basis that any pregnancy, carried to term, would be worse for the mental or physical health of the mother than not

Oh, Ireland! You knew it would come to this. Today’s Irish Times carries the appalling story of the death of Savita Halappanavar, a dentist in Galway, who died in hospital largely as a consequence of being denied an abortion. As the paper reports, Mrs Halappanavar: [P]resented with back pain at the hospital on October 21st, was found to be miscarrying, and died of septicaemia a week later. Her husband, Praveen Halappanavar (34), an engineer at Boston Scientific in Galway, says she asked several times over a three-day period that the pregnancy be terminated. He says that, having been told she was miscarrying, and after one day in severe pain, Ms

Are men not allowed to talk about abortion any more? I’ve lost count of the angry comments I have read on Facebook and Twitter, denouncing Jeremy Hunt, the new Health Secretary, as a vile bigot because he supports a reduction in the 24 week time-limit on legal abortions. ‘Hunt: stay out of my c***’ is one that sticks in mind. Lily Allen, the singer turned Twitterer, has joined the outrage. ‘Can small minded idiot blokes stop telling women whether or not they’re entitled to abortions please?’ She added: ‘Enough now… The day the number of single father households equal the number of single mother households is the day I start