By Katherine Burgdorf
This week in the UK a pregnant, undercover reporter from the Daily Telegraph 'exposed' two doctors who signed off her proposed abortion after she told them she wanted the termination because she didn't want a girl baby. The doctors were filmed interjecting with 'we don't ask questions.'
In response to this story the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has criticised the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for declining to bring charges against the two doctors, and was backed up by Emily Thornberry, the Labour MP for Islington and South Finsbury who took to the press saying this was an illegal act which should be punished as any criminal activity. The doctors are currently answering to their professional conduct board, the General Medical Council.
The sub-text here is that these doctors - and many like them - are condoning female infanticide. The suggestion is that any feminist should be outraged that unborn baby girls are being killed across Britain. But more dangerous is that this story is generating another attack on women's right to choose what happens when they become pregnant. It is being suggested that if women cannot be trusted not to abort girls, then they cannot be trusted to abort at all. It is the Telegraph - and a modern working female journalist at that, shame on her - paving the way for another attack on women's rights to govern their own bodies.
I've always vaguely taken it for granted that getting an abortion in Britain is fairly straightforward - something you hope you never need to do but reassuringly available if needed. When I imagine it, I imagine going to a clinic, saying that I just didn't want to bring up a child, possibly be subjected to bloodied photos of terminated embryos to make sure I was ready to proceed on my murderous path, but nonetheless given approval.
This week's story got me wondering what the law actually is, and embarrassed not to really know it. Is it really as straightforward as I think? Because if you aren't allowed to say 'I don't want this baby because it's a girl,' then what can you say? In Britain is saying that any different to 'I just don't want to have a baby'? Or are they both illegal?
According to the Family Planning Association's factsheet, the Abortion Act of 1967 (amended in 1990), allows that a woman in England can be granted an abortion up to 24 weeks if two doctors agree there is a risk to the physical or mental health of the woman. After 24 weeks, agreement is needed that there is grave mental or physical risk to the woman or a risk that the child will be seriously mentally or physically handicapped. There is a high profile group of campaigners and politicians, including Health Secretary Hunt, seeking to reduce that to as little as 12 weeks.
For context, the FPA reports there are around 189,000 abortions in England and Wales each year, which is just under 22% of all pregnancies. In 2012 only 160 abortions were carried out after 24 weeks. Rates of abortion have been steady for many years. In 2007 members of the British Medical Association voted in favour of removing the requirement for two doctors to provide signatures up to the 24 week period but this has not affected the current law requiring two doctor's signatures.
So, in order to get a termination currently a woman has to prove to two doctors there is a risk to her mental or physical wellbeing if she has to carry the baby to term. Well, what does that mean? How does a doctor determine that risk, or indeed judge the woman's current or future wellbeing? I argue they can't. The point is, the legislation is graciously forgiving in its language. The point is, the legislation doesn't specify how unhappy she would be to have a child, or why she would be unhappy, though one might presumably be asked to say something on the matter. It just implies, rightly, that a mentally balanced woman has a greater right to physical and mental wellbeing than the State has to say when or if she gives birth. To a point - currently 24 weeks and sometimes longer - she has more of a right than the foetus, I would argue on the basis that without her, there is no foetus.
Now, of course the point of the Telegraph's story is that this woman had a different agenda. She was breaking the law - or rather entrapping others to break the law - by saying she wanted a termination because her child was going to be born a girl. Her request, they argue, had nothing to do with mental or physical health. But how are we to know what is in the heart or mind of any woman seeking an abortion? Yes, we 'know' in this case, but how in other cases are we to probe the minds of those who say their health or wellbeing is at risk? And if the police are likely to come and ask, why on earth would any doctor agree to carry out abortions even though they may well believe in a woman's hum\n right to choose? How do we ask women to prove they are not getting an abortion because they want to get further along in their career, or if they don't think they're ready yet, or they don't have a reliable partner, or enough money to pay rent, bills and also raise a family? These could all be loosely termed 'risk' to mental or physical health, but I would argue many are not, they're simply good reasons not to have a child at a particular point in time. Who am I to point and say 'criminal' to the family of four boys who doesn't want another? Or someone who just doesn't want kids? Or a woman who's just bought a house for two kids and doesn't want a third? Technically it's against the law but how far do I travel before I say 'criminal' to those who choose to say 'it's just not for me?'
The truth of course is that in many countries around the world girls are killed for being girls. They are killed soon after birth or, if the technology is available, aborted beforehand. If they survive those scenarios they are consistently and heftily discriminated against for life. What sort of society drives this discrimination? The answer, of course, is a patriarchal one in which giving birth to a boy brings significant economic benefit and status to the family, from sheer muscle power to help run farms, or bring in wages, to wealth through patriarchal inheritance laws. In many countries families must raise crippling dowries to marry off daughters, so they kill them to avoid the expense. These societies - China being the classic - show significant disruption to natural birth ratios of boys to girls. In China there are around 121 boys born to every 100 girls. Within nature it's between 105-108. In Britain, it's 105.1 and it has not changed in decades (Department of Health, 2011). Nor, as Janice Turner points out in The Times (7th Sept, Opinion), have these statistics changed due to immigration in Britain. She reports that in 2011 the DoH looked into birth figures according to the mother's country of origin - focusing on countries where female infanticide is more common such as Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and China - and found no evidence they were outside normal British parameters. There is no evidence suggesting the systemic termination of girl foetuses by people from those societies living in Britain. Why? Because thankfully, despite the slow progress we make against everyday sexism, in Britain it makes no particular economic or social difference if you have a boy or a girl.
So, what conclusions do we draw? A newspaper has uncovered what is technically a criminal act. Two doctors have been asked by a woman for an abortion and she has offered up a reason that does not comply - on its own - with the law (and we do not know what else she said to those doctors). The Government is putting pressure on the CPS to charge them with a crime. The CPS has stated that bringing a prosecution would not have been in the public interest, in part because the abortion did not take place, and was never going take place. Had this been a real situation, perhaps they would have.
I draw two conclusions. Firstly, anti-abortion campaigners are dressing up their agenda in the clothes of feminism and asking us to share their outrage that a woman might decide to abort a girl. They will use this to tighten up abortion laws generally, and are already making moves on the 24 week limit. It is hardly going too far to imagine that next week a male-orientated campaign group will uncover that a woman who wants to terminate a male foetus.
I also argue that the current abortion law is still too restrictive. How can one doctor, or two, or three, know what is in the mind of another person? They cannot, and to say otherwise is ludicrous, so why do we insist we can assess it? The pregnant woman - and only the pregnant woman - should be able to choose an abortion within a timeframe guided by scientific research and say whether or not she gives birth. To make her jump and justify degrades our right to personal freedom and the pursuit of happiness. If the point of the current law is to give broad discretion then why not explicitly state we may have it? Society's role - and it does have one, backed up by the law - is to ensure that anyone born - girl or boy - has access to exactly the same rights and opportunities such that there is no reason for families to favour one or the other on any normalised basis. If we changed the law in this way we would see absolutely no change to the birth ratio in this country. Why? Because British women are not pursuing abortions based on gender in any systematic way. And I predict they would not start if it was legalised. The role of the law is to ensure that women are safe, just as men are safe.
I am not arguing that female infanticide doesn't matter. It does matter and it matters on a dramatic scale but it matters because it's the sign of a terribly and hopelessly unfair society. It is not the result of legalised abortion, it's the result of long history of patriarchal favour, and laws which ingrain that favour. It's the result of hopelessly ingrained pro-male culture, implicit and explicit. And it will lead to unprecedented imbalance in countries like China. I'll write it again, female infanticide does not exist because women are allowed access to abortions. It exists because the societies where it takes place hold boy babies dear, and girl babies cheap. It happens where women have no recourse, and often no education, to do anything to change the environment in which they live, and the laws which govern them. It is an outcome of history and social values, not an outcome of freedom. And in these countries do you think it's well policed? Of course not.
There should be oversight of abortion in the same way there should be oversight of all medical and health services. There is room for women to be pressured into abortions and vigilance and support is required. I support euthanasia on the same grounds. But let the person bodily affected by the situation decide. Give people information, consideration and support to make their own informed decision. Carrying a baby, and giving birth, carries all sorts of big and small health consequences from death in labour to stroke, diabetes to simple (but debilitating) incontinence. Would men be hasty to restrict the right to choose if it were they who faced these risks? No indeed.
Women in Britain are not systematically aborting girls or boys - let the statistics reassure us of that. Anyone suggesting that the right to abort will lead to it is motivated to reduce the right to choose any abortion. No. Women in Britain are aborting babies at the same rates they always have, and they are choosing to abort for the reasons they always have...individual reasons. May we all have the right to do so, lest the Government start asking us to prove what's in our minds.
