by Katherine Burgdorf.
Jeremy Hunt, the new Secretary for Health, would like to reduce the legal time limit for abortions in Britain from 24 weeks to 12 weeks. He is supported by other Conservative MPs like Nadine Dorries. He is not supported by any of the medical bodies interviewed by The Times as part of this story.
How Jeremey Hunt is still in politics after the BSkyB scandal I will never know. What he wants to achieve with the politicitsation of medicine is completely and utterly beyond me. The only thing I can think is that he wants to make women's lives more difficult for the benefit of his Christian faith.
Is that it, Jeremey? Does your personal fulfilment through your chosen religion feel better if I can't have an abortion beyond 12 weeks?
How about this Jeremy. I'll trade you 24-week access to abortion if you dismantle the British arms industry. If Britain stops manufacturing weapons to kill people, because human life is so precious, I'll support a reduction in abortion time to 12 weeks. After all, there's nothing more important than life, right? Well, usually. Well, middle class white people and children anyway. The Society for the Preservation of White Middle Class Brits and Unborn Babies. I'll be co-president if you stop making and selling weapons.
What's that, Jeremy? An important source of income for Britain? Someone else's department?
Gotcha. No deal.
Didn't think so.
The trouble with reading these stories on the weekend is that it enrages me. I can sit at my kitchen counter on a beautiful Autumn day, when all should be right in the world, and I weep with frustration at the people who seek to control my insides with politics. This is what living in America is like, and we fucking hate it. I will not live in a country which tries to govern through religious politics. This personally puts me in a difficult position because my husband says he won't live in Britain if Miliband becomes PM. I won't live here if Hunt gets his way. Looks like we're in for a tricky marital decision come 2015. I'd pay any amount of tax for the right to live under rational government policy.
Lowering the limit to 12 weeks will rush women into making a decision they might otherwise make differently. It will prevent women from getting abortions who didn't know they were pregnant - this is not uncommon, particuarly for older women who are not expecting to be pregnant. It could force teenage girls into having children before they are emotionally or financially capable because they have had no one to confide in and who have therefore missed their chance. It will prevent women from aborting babies with illnesses like Downs Syndrome which only starts to show at around 14-15 weeks. That's science.
Women are not born with the unlimited capacity to nurture. We are not that different to you, men. We are not superhuman. Yes, we can grow life. Yes, hormones help us in that process. But we are not an unlimited cavern of human sympathy and love. We are exhaustable. You should know, because for thousands of years you've been telling us we weren't as good as you at anything! We are not capable of emotionally thriving with 3, 4, 6, 13 children dangling around our necks. Even if stay at home mothers do make your unemployment figures look better.
I hope there are other women - mothers and non mothers - out there who will fight this if it comes to it. If I was a third wave feminist I would sit back, smile and say fuck em, I fought for equal pay, I fought for equal rights, and look what these silly girls have done. They've been ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL. They've been smug, they've been educated, and now they're at fucking home, not working, baking cupcakes and the men who still run this country are slowly, slowly, quietly, quietly cutting away at their rights. Politicising gender. Why? Because men don't raise children. Their lives are not sucked down into despair over children. Because science still isn't as powerful as religion.
Well, not me. If this thing kicks off I will be out protesting like it's 1960 all over again. I will turn into one of those insane people who builts a cardboard protest camp on Parliament Square and dies in it 67 years later, still protesting, still angry, still right and still, possibly, wearing flares.
At least we know what our protest slogan will be: Jeremy Hunt get your hands off my...womb.
Why don't we just say it? James Naughtie did it on Radio 4, after all. Jeremy Hunt, get your hands off my cunt!
ReplyDeleteIn other serious commentary, I'd like to ask where you might live? You can't move to Australia, they're busy banning gay marriage and comparing gay sex to bestiality. Nobody has told the parliamentarians that it's 2012 and the Australian people stopped believing in them somewhere in the late 1990s.
My suggestion is France, where the constitutional separation between the state and religion ensures this kind of rubbish doesn't happen so much. I'm not saying France is perfect, but it does have all that yummy cheese, which comes as close to perfection as I think we can get as mere mortals.
See you there.