UK abortion debate
Parliament has rejected all the various proposals to cut the time limit for standard abortions (ie those where there is not a threat to the mother’s life, and where the foetus/unborn child (please pick your favoured term rather than telling me which one to use) does not have a severe disability). That’s not the main point of this post though - abortion is, in the UK, generally a very personal issue and I don’t think it’s one that should be argued about on blogs (God forbid we should ever have the sort of attitude to abortion debates that pervades the United States).
However one thing that I saw in the Guardian’s G2 section yesterday (available online here) made me frown slightly, a comment by Anne Quesney who is the head of advocacy at Marie Stopes International (a private abortion provider):
It’s real women we’re talking about, not just case studies. This is an issue that has defined women’s equality with men - if you take away abortion rights, or family planning, you take away the key to women’s equality with men.
I fail to see how abortion is necessary for women to have equality with men. Let’s just imagine Anne Quesney’s hypothetical scenario where abortion is completely banned.
Women and men would both be able to choose not to become parents by using contraception (pills and condoms respectively) - as they can now in fact. I fail to see the “inequality” in that situation, however undesirable it might be. Again, I’m not trying to make a pro-abortion or anti-abortion point here, I just don’t like it when “equality” is used in a misleading way.