[Socialism Today, No 12, October 1996, p. 30-31]
Abortion: Between Freedom and Necessity, by Janet Hadley. Virago, 1990. Reviewed by Clare Wilkins
Anti-abortion MPs are planning another attack on the provisions of the 1967 Abortion Act and the present 24-week time limit on abortion. This follows a summer of intense media interest in aspects of reproductive technology and the individual women involved.
Janet Hadley’s book is a timely account of the history and worldwide experience of abortion, and its impact on other aspects of reproductive rights.
The availability of legal abortion has been central to the development of the new reproductive technology. Hardline anti-abortion campaigners have used knowledge gained from artificial fertility techniques about the very early stages of embryo development to reinforce their ideology about the rights of the embryo/foetus.
The anti-abortion lobby is preparing another attack while memories of illegal abortion in Britain are fading. Between 1964 and 1966, 98 women died as a result of illegal abortion. Illegal abortion was the main cause of maternal death in Britain from 1945 to 1967.
Abortion is “probably the oldest, most common and universal method by which women have controlled their fertility.” It was only in 1869 that Pope Pius IX forbade abortion, stating that the soul was present from conception. Abortion was not a crime in England till 1803.
Making abortion illegal has never made it go away. Hadley says about the United States: “In the 1960s the kickbacks from illegal abortion made it the biggest racket after narcotics and gambling”. Illegality just makes abortion painful and dangerous.
Abortion is a personal issue that has become “sensationally and bewilderingly public”. The language used, as Hadley says, has “cut loose from its moorings – life versus murder; motherhood versus infanticide; family values versus selfish individualism; the rights of the foetus versus the rights of the mother.” The book deals with all these issues in an objective way, which reinforces the message that safe, legal and accessible abortion makes sense – not only for women’s lives and health, but also in terms of health care and social costs.
“Many anti-abortionists have a deep hostility to women’s rights in general. This is starkly shown in the links between anti-abortionists in the US and the Republican Party.”
Hadley is concerned that feminists now have “little to say about abortion and the new issues which have impinged on it”. Anti-abortionist campaigners have been allowed to seize the offensive. It is crucial that, in a period of savage attacks on welfare provision, they are not allowed to retain it. As she says: “The anti-abortion camp’s moral arguments inform a much wider political and ideological strategy, which many defenders of abortion struggle to highlight, but are at a loss how to counter as long as they are pinioned to arguing about life … the narrow moral focus prises abortion out of context, away from a woman’s reproductive health and sexual identity … and away from the individual woman’s life.”
Many opponents of abortion have a deep hostility to the idea of women’s rights in general. The political and ideological offensive and its influence on politicians is starkly shown in the links between anti-abortionists in the United States and the Republican Party. Single-issue voting continues to build up anti-abortion majorities in many states. Republican party strategists feared that “going soft on abortion would drive many of their single-issue supporters back to voting on their economic interests, which are not Republican”.
The rabidness of the US ‘New Right’s’ anti-abortion stance is characterised by Hadley as stemming from a response to personal fears about rapid social changes, including the increased economic independence of women or their expectations of independence. “’Talking up’ the rights of the foetus or embryo is an attack, not just on abortion rights, but also on women.
Since 1980 there have been an increasing number of women prosecuted for ‘prenatal child neglect’ in the US. These women have been overwhelmingly poor, and black or Hispanic.
As well as dealing with the right to choose, the book also deals with a woman’s right to refuse and explores the issue of sex-selection, especially in India and China, and the question of coerced abortion. In Britain, Hadley says, “undoubtedly young mothers, poor mothers, and, above all, poor young black mothers are being hustled towards abortion.” There is also a chapter on RU 486, genetics and HIV/AIDS.
All of the issues and evidence reinforce the arguments about “a woman’s right to choose”. But the legal right to abortion is no good without access to facilities and this is often reduced to the ability to pay.
“An unwanted pregnancy is an unjust dilemma in a world in which most women have so little power to choose anything at all, to control any aspect of their lives. And since biology dictates women’s’ special relationship to reproduction, women must always have the option to end an unwanted pregnancy and should not be coerced into pregnancy and childbirth”.
The book concludes by dealing with how abortion rights should be advocated. ‘Simply reacting to anti-abortion allegations, timidly blurring the edges of the arguments in the hope of winning allies in the ‘middle ground’ is, as Hadley says, “a dangerous game”.
“Access to abortion is pivotal to women’s reproductive freedom and can never be taken for granted. Women in eastern Europe have recently learned that to their cost. For many women … it remains a fundamental health issue, sometimes a question of life and death”.
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