As a happily childfree woman who intends to stay that way for life, I'm a member of several groups on Facebook where the childfree can get together and discuss the various issues we encounter in a society that still seems to view women who don't wish to reproduce with, at best, suspicion and at worst, outright hostility. One of the discussion topics that seems to come up with regularity is abortion, which is not entirely surprising as pretty much everyone on the group seems to be pro-choice. I don't really see how you could intend to stay childfree for life and not believe in the right to abortion on demand, but anyway. While the majority of commenters tend to be agreed on the need for abortion access, any discussion about it inevitably includes some kind of comment about 'people using abortion as birth control' or 'people who wait 20 weeks then get a late-term abortion'. Firstly, I always wonder why, when it's obviously impossible to legislate to account for all the possible reasons someone might want an abortion, anyone even bothers making a comment such as 'I think it's fine to get abortion if X, Y and Z [the implication being that if you were just let down by your contraception, or raped, or the foetus had serious abnormalities, you somehow are more DESERVING of the abortion] but if you just weren't careful then I don't think you should get one'? Does anyone actually think doctors are going to start asking women for proof that they've 'been careful' or were raped, or aren't just 'using abortion as birth control', and does any pro-choice person actually think that's a desirable state of affairs?

Similarly, the discussion about late-term abortion always seems to involve a similar abandoning of the sense and logic that I would usually expect from pro-choice people. Even though 91% of abortions in the UK are carried out at 13 weeks or less, and abortions are being performed earlier and earlier thanks to better detection rates, there is often a disproportionate focus on later abortions, presumably because the more 'it looks like a baby', the more emotive people tend to get about the issue of terminating a pregnancy. What people tend to forget that, however distasteful they might find the idea of a 6 month old foetus being terminated, UK doctors technically have the right to terminate the foetus right up to the point of birth if the mother's life is actually in danger, so there's no point pretending that, under our law, the foetus' 'right to life' ever trumps the mother's right to live, however developed it is - because as long as it's inside the mother's body, there are always circumstances under which it could still be terminated.

What got me thinking about all this was reading an article from The Times, published in July this year, which described the work of Dr Susan Robinson, who performs abortions at a clinic in New Mexico, where there are no time limits on the gestational age at which abortions can be performed. I was interested to hear someone on the front line respond to those who believe that abortion should be granted to women if they have 'earned' the right through an unfortunate mishap, but not if they had simply been careless, or 'left it too long'. I hear these arguments far too often, even from those who are supposedly pro-choice, and I wonder if they genuinely believe that any woman gets pregnant, sits around for 20 or 24 weeks and then says 'Hey ho, better go see about an abortion'. As someone for whom children are simply not an option, I know that the first inkling of pregnancy would send me straight to the pharmacy to find out the truth, and then straight to the doctor to, as Ellen Page's character puts it in Juno, 'nip it in the bud'. I also know however, that I am a healthy, well-off middle-class woman living in a 1st world country where abortion is available locally, quickly and for free. So it interested me to read some statistics on abortions carried out at 25 weeks and beyond. In a study of 268 cases in the US, Glenna Halvorson-Boyd found that 29 percent of these women had experienced no symptoms of pregnancy - either they still had periods, or had had erratic periods to begin with (I fall into the latter category - the progesterone-only pill Micronor means I don't menstruate, so I do not have any periods to 'miss' in the first place). Another 19 percent were 'overwhelmed by extraordinary circumstances, such as homelessness or drug addiction'. I think even those who wish to 'punish' women for being so 'irresponsible' as to wait 25 weeks to end a pregnancy might think twice about the wisdom of forcing a homeless or heroin-addicted woman to become a mother.

A further 18 percent were told that the foetus was very ill late in pregnancy - another unfortunate aspect of biology that a lot of people forget. Many foetal abnormalities don't show up until the 20 week scan, which means women in 8 American states may have to carry seriously ill foetuses to term, as the law in their states prohibit abortions after 20 weeks. 2 percent of post 25-week abortions were carried out on 'teen athletes who did not menstruate', and 3 percent on women pregnant from rape. Another 3 percent 'had planned to have their baby until their circumstances dramatically shifted (most were abandoned by the man, but one was diagnosed with cancer'. Ever noticed that those who are most disapproving of abortion are also those who tend to have a massive downer on single mothers, deeming them to be the root of most social ills? So I wonder what solution they would advise, if a woman is pregnant and then her partner walks out on her, cheats on her or starts to beat her? Which reminds me - two women out of these 268 'had only been able to reach an abortion provider after escaping from abusive captors'. And in one case 'a pro-life doctor may have intentionally misled the woman', telling her she was not pregnant.

So, not so much a case of pregnant woman sitting on the sofa scoffing Doritos until 6 months have passed, and more a case of factors such as unreliable biology, money, health, life shitting in your lap and male coercion/violence combining together to create a world where late-term abortions are still very much necessary.

However, even if the woman exists who does 'use abortion as birth control' and doesn't take responsibility for her fertility in a way we might like, it's still not for any of us to judge. Either abortion is available to us all for whatever reason, or 'trusting women' means nothing. If we have to be treated like Oliver Twist begging for what is rightfully ours, we cannot call ourselves full or free citizens. Men's reasons for wanting to have a safe, legal medical procedure (a procedure which, in this case, has a risk of death 14 times LOWER than that associated with childbirth) are not questioned or attacked, and neither should women's. As Susan Robinson says, she trusts all the women who come to her "have good reasons... They may not be the reasons that you would need or I would need... But who am I to tell somebody that their story is not good enough?".

Latest Posts By Me

A review of Hillary Jordan's excellent When She Woke - a feminist dystopian novel envisioning the US if Roe v. Wade were to be overturned - for Bitch.

A piece for Women's Views on News about North Wales judge Niclas Parry, who told a rape victim she 'let herself down badly' - even as he was sentencing her GUILTY attacker.

Another day, another ‘pro-lifer’ ...

...decides their viewpoint on the ethics of abortion must be heard. Today, our resident anti-choicer is Mehdi Hasan, who considers it greatly important that we know one can be both left-wing and pro-life. Quite what relevance he thinks this has to the abortion debate I’m not sure, but Hasan seems to think he’ll get some kudos for not being a right-wing extremist as anti-choicers usually tend to be. Sorry chap, it doesn’t work that way. Ladies are well aware that men can pride themselves on saying and doing all the correct liberal, lefty political things, and still be downright women haters. Julian Assange, anyone?

But let’s consider what Hasan feels he has to bring to the debate. He starts with a defence one of my painfully right wing (Islamophobic, homophobic, anti-feminist) relatives has trotted out to me before, pretty much word for word “Who is weaker or more vulnerable than the unborn child? Which member of our society needs a voice more than the mute baby in the womb?” Anyone who canonises a zygote, embryo or foetus over a living woman has pretty much shown which flag they’re nailing their colours to. Yet Hasan’s article was (seemingly) defended by James Bloodworth, another left-wing man, who tweeted “not all pro-lifers are simply anti-women.” Sorry fellas, but I’m not buying it. If you want to erase women from the picture and rate their life behind those of the unborn, then you’re anti-woman. You don’t get to wriggle out of that just because you put your argument forth nicely and calmly and don’t stand outside women's clinics hollering and holding up pictures of dead foetuses.

Hasan then puts forward the bizarre argument that because the UK is ‘the exception and not the rule’ with its abortion time limit being higher than the rest of Europe, that’s somehow reason enough for us to fall in line and follow suit for the sake of consistency. Hmmm, just like Britain went into the Euro just for the sake of fitting in....oh, wait. Anyway, why compare Britain to the likes of Italy – where the Catholic church has massive influence – when you could compare it to Canada, another liberal Western country, where there is no time limit on abortion? 

He also point outs “how 91 per cent of British abortions are carried out in the first 13 weeks”, which is actually a fact that I do wish more people would take notice of in the argument about the 24 week limit. Unfortunately he goes on to say “You may disagree with a 12-week cut-off but to pretend it is somehow arbitrary, or extreme, or even unique is a little disingenuous.” No, where I disagree is with people who act like the small percentage of women who do get late term abortions just get pregnant, hang about for 23 weeks twiddling their hair and then decide to ‘kill their baby’ at the last minute. The majority of late term abortions are given to women who WANTED to give birth, but discovered major deformities or life-threatening conditions after the crucial 20 week scan, and to vulnerable women such as rape victims and sexually abused minors, who are often in denial about a pregnancy. How denying much-needed abortions to women in either of these terrible circumstances is ‘protecting the vulnerable’, I'll never know. To me it sounds like utter sadism.

But Hasan’s clever – he’s even trying to manipulate feminism to support a pro-life agenda. Wot, you mean some women who fought for votes and equal treatment in the 1700s and 1800s were anti abortion? Oh right, better alter my whole ideology on that basis. For the record I love Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony, but  I can accept that they were wrong or misguided on some points. They also lived in an extremely different era where childbearing was seen as effectively mandatory due to the lack of available/reliable birth control, let alone abortion access. The likes of Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes changed that by promoting birth control and were harangued for it (much like those defending the right of women to control their fertility are today - hmmm, I see a pattern). Neither of those women were perfect either – Sanger made some very unfortunate statements about using birth control for eugenics. But I support and believe in the good things they did, without believing I have to subscribe mindlessly to everything they say just because they’re a) women and b) feminists.

But Hasan even has a 21st Century feminist up his sleeve, or so he claims. He describes Daphne De Jong as a New Zealand feminist author – all I can find about her is that she has written a lot of Mills and Boon novels, oh and - she just happens to be part of ‘Feminists For Life’, an organisation that claims to be both feminist and pro-life. Much like my mate who’s both Palestinian and Zionist. But OK, let’s address De Jong's claim that “If women must submit to abortion to preserve their lifestyle or career, their economic or social status, they are pandering to a system devised and run by men for male convenience.” Yes, that's a good point. It’s utterly wrong, and counter to the aims of feminism, that women should ever have abortions simply to fit in with a male-dictated system. Funnily enough, it’s also counter to the aims of feminism that women should be made to give birth simply to fit in with a male-dictated system. And what is Mehdi Hasan asking us to do? Legislate about women’s bodies based upon what he, Jeremy Hunt and Christopher Hitchens think. Last I checked, that's a pretty fucking male-dictated system.

But Hasan just can’t let go of this idea that being a woman automatically makes you a feminist, or pro-woman. Apparently 49 percent of women would support a reduction in the abortion limit – OK, I’ve never met any of them apart from the wife of the anti-abortion relative mentioned above, but I’ll assume the poll was taken from a broad enough pool. I wonder how many of those women are past reproductive age, single or happy mothers who can’t imagine ever wanting or needing an abortion. It’s easy to argue against abortion when it’s theoretical and will not impact upon your own life. Just look at how ‘pro-life’ US Representative Scott DesJarlais switched from saying “all life should be cherished and protected” to pressuring his pregnant mistress into getting an abortion the moment his happy little set-up was threatened by an unwanted pregnancy. Or have a read of the deeply revealing article ‘The Only Moral Abortion Is My Abortion’, where abortion clinic workers reveal that many of the ‘pro-lifers’ who picketed outside their clinics later turned up wanting a termination themselves.

As my dad, who manages to be both a man and pro-choice, often says ‘It’s easy to argue from a position of no consequence’. It’s easy to be a woman who doesn’t want or need an abortion, or a man whose bodily autonomy will never be threatened, and say abortion is wrong. Wait til your needs or your life changes. I wonder how Hasan would feel if one of his daughters (and it bears saying he is lucky to have two WANTED children) came to him after a rape, or with a life-endangering pregnancy, and he had to explain to her she was morally obliged to go through with a birth that might ruin her life, or kill both her and her baby, because her dad felt she should not be allowed to make a decision about her own body.

I think Hasan is using his credentials as a ‘left-wing’ man with ‘progressive principles’ (I use quotes because I do not believe him to be progressive in any way) to try to obscure the fact that being anti-abortion does make you anti-woman. The fact is, his left-lean has nothing to do with this argument. Neither does the fact he is not religious. They are not even worth mentioning, and the fact he does shows he feels he needs to try and pre-empt the inevitable accusations of being a woman-hater by hiding behind the ‘Moi? Impossible? I’m a liberal kinda guy!’ defence.

But feminists are smarter than that. We know that you can be left or right wing, male or female, religious or atheist, and still be insidiously trying to erode women’s right to bodily autonomy. So when Hasan asks “my fellow lefties and liberals to try to understand and respect the views of those of us who are pro-life, rather than demonise us as right-wing reactionaries or medieval misogynists”, it’s a pretty bloody tall order. Because on this issue, Mr Hasan your ‘principles’, make you indistinguishable from those ‘right-wing reactionaries’ and ‘medieval misogynists’ you are trying to distance yourself from. And that is why I am not interested in trying to ‘understand and respect’ your views.

Anti-choice = anti-woman. It’s always that simple.

Latest Posts By Me

One for the Ms Magazine Blog, on why the UK cabinet reshuffle is bad news for abortion rights.

And one for Women's Views On News, on the landmark conviction of a Colombian army officer found guilty of rape and murder.

Saturday Morning at the Clinic

It was a hot and sunny Los Angeles morning and we were standing on the dirty paving stones as the traffic blasted past. The sidewalk was narrow, with a constant flow of people trying to get past, to the 7-11, to the dry-cleaners - it was not a comfortable place to be. So why we were there? Because they were there.

They were a mixed group - from a young, olive-skinned man who looked to be in his 20s, to a white man probably in his 60s. A Hispanic lady in her 30s had brought two beautiful young boys with her, wide-eyed long-lashed angels no older than five. A tall, grey-haired man in a light green polo shirt with mirrored aviator shades walked up and down the pavement handing out small business-size cards. And a lady with a too-perfect dyed red bob cut and a face that betrayed the effects of more than one cosmetic procedure slithered up and down the pavements at such an eerily slow pace she appeared to be in a trance. There were a few others, but they were the ones I noticed.

What did this diverse group have in common? Well, they were all clutching rosary beads. They were all murmuring in prayer, and at one point recited the entire rosary in one voice. But the thing that united them was something no one actually mentioned - that they were all anti-abortion, and they were there to try to persuade, intimidate or emotionally blackmail the women who passed them into eschewing the services of the women's clinic around the corner.

They couldn't go any closer to the clinic than this sidewalk, which gave those entering the clinic a buffer zone and, if they came in via car, a chance to enter unmolested. But anyone on foot would have to walk the gauntlet of people praying, swaying, murmuring, and be handed a card depicting pictures of miscarried foetuses.

We were a smaller group, but still diverse. Male and female, white and Hispanic, mothers and childfree. Orange-vested, we stood and chatted and smiled, breaking away every now and then to tell a passer-by 'These are protesters. You don't have to listen to them, you don't have to take anything from them' or to offer to dispose of the disturbing card they'd just been handed. A young woman who was clearly disgusted by the image she'd just been presented with gratefully handed the card over saying, 'Yes, please, throw it away'. A young man looked at the card and boomed 'I don't need to see that shit, I got one on the way'.

A Hispanic lady left the clinic and leaned against the outside wall, clearly waiting to be picked up. Green Polo Shirt swooped in like a vulture, handing her a card. I followed quickly and asked if she wanted me to throw it away. She said it was OK, then asked me what we were doing. I explained that we were volunteers there to help women get into the clinic without harassment, and that the other group were anti-abortion protesters. The woman told me she had just had a tubal ligation and was feeling dizzy. I found it hard to quash my anger that in the middle of a sweltering day, having just had an anaesthetic and an invasive procedure, this woman was being bothered by proselytisers handing her an image likely to make most of us feel queasy even if we hadn't just undergone an operation. The woman pointed out that the clinic provides many other services other than abortions, and delicately said of the protestors 'I think these people are a little confused'.

A college-age white woman stood looking at the protestors for a while. I stepped forward and told her she could ignore them. 'Oh no,' she said, breaking into a smile. 'I think they're great!'. She gave the group a thumbs up as she walked past them. I cringed inside to see a young person so supportive of those wishing to take her bodily autonomy away, but I suppose her 'Catholic University' hoodie should have given me a clue that I wasn't going to win this one.

A fellow escort told me that she had formed a 'good relationship with some of the protestors', and that she even swapped stories of motherhood with one of the anti-choice women. The shouting, confrontation and violence my partner and I had been expecting were nowhere to be found, although we were told that this was not necessarily a typical example, with other clinics being much more beseiged. Instead, the protestors murmured their prayers, and the two little boys played on the sidewalk, at one point even wrapping their mother's rosary beads around themselves and pretending it was a seatbelt. I had to laugh at that one.

It was the later shift so most women were already inside the clinic and we didn't have to do any real 'escorting' - it was more just like a quiet turf war to see who could influence pedestrians the most. So many people accepted the dead-foetus-picture cards without a blink, and only a few threw them away. I suppose it's just a reflex to put out your hand when someone comes towards you offering something. Some groups walked through the protestors totally oblivious - the most likely group, I was heartened to see, being teenage girls, preoccupied with their cellphones and conversations. The protestors didn't even register to these groups, and for once I was grateful for the self-obsession of adolescents.

Gradually the protestors peeled off, and as the mother walked her two boys away they grinned and shouted a cheery 'Goodbye!' to us. Their mother pulled them away angrily. We waited until the last protestor had left, then called it a day. 

I hoped we had done something good, but I couldn't be sure how effective we'd been. Despite our orange shirts stating 'PRO CHOICE ESCORT' in huge letters, many people seemed unaware of what we were doing. A man even congratulated us, under the impression that we were protestors. 

What I wondered most was how the protestors would have been able to justify their actions without religion to hide behind.

So many wars are being waged on women across the USA

...that it can be hard to know where to begin. One piece of legislation that really got me thinking - amongst all the other pieces of woman-hating guff - was the bill currently being debated in Kansas which would effectively allow doctors to lie to pregnant women if the doctor believes that imparting certain information to a woman might cause her to have an abortion. It's pretty stunning in its naked contempt for women, and I don't think I need to analyse how it's just one in a long line of bills that treat women as a) worth of less rights than a foetus and b) complete morons incapable of knowing their own minds or making informed decisions. However, it did get me thinking how anti-choicers love to point to the 'eugenics' of abortion. A commentator on the Guardian argued that feminists had no right to get up in arms about sex-selective abortion whilst at the same time arguing for abortion on demand, and without apology. I can understand that, if you're already anti-choice, no reason for obtaining an abortion is going to wash with you, and if feminists want to protect female foetuses from being 'unjustly' aborted, then anti-choicers can't understand why the same protection isn't afforded to foetuses with Downs syndrome, cerebral palsy, spina bifida, cystic fibrosis.

Well, let's start with the consideration that being aborted because you're female, and being denied an abortion, actually emanate from the same poisonous root - a society that views women as inferior. A female foetus is not a disabled one unless the society it is going to be born into pushes it into that narrow box. However, a foetus with cystic fibrosis is sadly always going to be disabled however many accommodations society makes for it. The child it grows into will spend a short, painful, illness-ridden life enduring daily aggressive pummellings to stop it drowning in the fluid that accumulates in its lungs. And that's probably one of the milder examples of how disability will affect a child's, and their parents', life. I've worked with disabled children. I've seen parents wracked with guilt over sending their child to disabled boarding schools because they can no longer cope with the violent rages of their autistic son, or their 18 year-old daughter's incontinence. I've seen plenty of couples split from the stress of trying to raise a severely disabled child. I've seen parents who will never do what other parents do - see their grown child 'fly the nest', because their child is so disabled it will either have to live with those parents until they die, or be institutionalised for life. And what I've gleaned from that is twofold - one, that parents who raise disabled children do a 24/7 job so hard it would slay most of us, and thus deserve our utmost respect, and that two, no one should EVER EVER EVER be forced into that role.

But that's exactly what the Kansas bill would do - force women to give birth to disabled or deformed children; or worse, suffer serious, possibly even fatal, health complications from carrying to term a non-viable foetus. It would also deny parents who fully intend to go through with a pregnancy regardless of disability, the chance to learn about their child's condition and prepare for the arrival of a baby who will need massive amounts of help, both practical and financial, just to live from day-to-day. But, should this contempt for women and potential parents be any surprise when recently this country has seen bills introduced which would let women die in order to save a foetus? The only surprise is that all women of childbearing age haven't packed their bags and left these shores in disgust - but I guess like this legal alien, some of them are willing to stay and fight.

Possibly the most depressing news of the year so far...

...is the article on P13 of today’s Independent, titled ‘US-style anti-abortion protestors target clinics in Britain’. The picture of a frankly ridiculous looking ‘pro-life’ protester in a Texas Chainsaw Massacre-type mask holding up the obligatory doll does undermine the notion that these woman-hating loonies actually pose any serious threat to our rights, but the article still makes for uneasy reading.

Apparently a Texas-Based group calling itself 40 Days For Life has begun targeting abortion clinics in the UK, clearly no longer satisfied with just harassing and browbeating women born on American soil. They call their actions ‘peaceful, prayerful and [a] legal vigil’, a claim not exactly borne out by the fact they have been filming women and staff walking into clinic (presumably to ‘name and shame’ those goddamn whores who dare to kill cute ickle babbas) and pressing misleading literature on women seeking abortion. Oh, that old literature, with its claims about all those terrible ‘risks’ of terminating a pregnancy. I love the way they never get around to pointing out that giving birth is actually 11 times more likely to prove fatal than having an abortion. And that there’s no such thing as ‘post-abortion syndrome’. And that the only thing that’s likely to cause a woman mental trauma or depression is being prevented from GETTING THE FUCKING ABORTION WHEN SHE NEEDS IT. But I guess the only people to acknowledge such facts are ones who see women as autonomous, full human beings deserving of respect – instead of as wombs on legs.

I don’t know who in the article is more deserving of my contempt, the male British head of 40 Days for Life who claims “I am pro choice. But I am not pro-choice about rape, burglary, kidnapping or killing children”(because a 12-week old zygote is the same as a child. Riiiiight), or the British paediatrician joining in harassing women and staff outside the London Marie Stopes clinic, who claims “We’ve seen seven clinics close because of our vigils and at least 3100 women, who were going to have an abortion, but didn’t”. Sure they didn’t just go to another clinic where your unevolved, woman-hating asses weren’t outside giving them shit, sista? Jesus fucking christ.

Darinka Aleksic, campaign co-ordinator at Abortion Rights, gets right to the crux of what these crusaders are actually up to. “We are strongly in favour of women receiving as much support, counselling and information about abortion as possible. But we’re worried about the tenor of a lot of the advice being given out by these picketers. There’s a lot of emphasis on guilt and misleading scientific information.” Yesss, you can just never quite get away from guilt when it comes to religious, right-wing propaganda, can you? Ms Aleksic is being pretty fucking restrained in her comments in a way I’m not sure I could manage – my own phrasing would probably go a little along the lines of “they can’t stand the idea of all women not being barefoot, pregnant and chained to the kitchen sink, so they’re making sure they shame women a) for daring to have sex in the first place and b) for wanting bodily control, by haranguing them at a time when they’re already vulnerable, with sinister propaganda that prioritises the rights of a ball of cells over a living human. What a bunch of retarded, Bible-bashing, misogynistic losers”.

What’s more disheartening than the fact that the American lunatic fringe has invaded our peaceful shores with its slut-shaming, “weren’t things great back in 1830 before these bitches got too uppity?” attitude, is the short post-script to the article reflecting on the erosion of British abortion rights. When the motion to reduce the abortion time limit from 24 weeks to 22 weeks was voted on two years ago in Parliament, the three men who are now respectively the current PM, Foreign Secretary and Health Secretary, voted in favour of it. Therese Coffey, a newly elected Tory MP, has put forward a motion requiring women “seeking an abortion on mental health grounds to receive counselling and be warned of possible risks to their mental health”.

It may all sound fairly minor in comparison to the insane assaults on abortion rights in the States (having to have an ultrasound before you abort, anyone? Having to sign a death warrant for that cute li’l baby you murdered, bitch?), but you’ve only got to look across the Atlantic to see where this insidious, piece-by-piece, peeling away of abortion rights is getting its ideas from. The motion by Coffey particularly disturbed me, and not just because of the total lack of evidence that abortion causes any other mental sensation for women than one of RELIEF. As someone who has mental health problems in my past and hence on my medical records, I’m concerned that should I ever require an abortion, the validity of my request for one would be called into question by that very fact. The idea of having to be ‘counselled’ – which in any pro-life/anti-choice arena means, having your decision aggressively questioned and undermined, and fed anti-abortion propaganda – before you’re ‘trusted’ to undertake a procedure which should be available on demand and without apology, makes me shudder.

I just hope that, if this bizarre, condescending motion actually gets taken seriously in parliament, and it sparks ‘a renewed debate on abortion laws’, that the debate results in these audacious erosions of women’s rights being brought to full light, and both MPs and the wider world reflecting on just how woman-hating, freakish and sinister they are. And realising our laws need to stay the way they are for very good reasons.

Women, men, politicians and doctors who are pro-choice trust women. Anyone who is 'pro-life', or, let's call it what it really is - anti-choice, mistrust, and therefore wish to oppress women. It’s as simple as that.

Whilst I'm sure most Americans are intelligent, right-thinking people...

...the mind simply boggles at the actions of US law-makers. The latest piece of jaw-droppingly misogynistic legislation hails from Louisiana, where it has recently become part of state law that women seeking an abortion must undergo an ultrasound scan first. Even more depressingly, perhaps, than the nakedly woman-hating law itself, is the fact it was brought in by a female senator - a Democrat as well! - who claimed the law 'empowered women'. And even worse than that, the bill passed with absolutely zero opposition from the 78 other members of the state house.

Words. Fail. Me.

If I were a woman living in Louisiana right now, I'd be packing my bags and heading for the border, as I don't think the state can make it any clearer just how much contempt it has for women and their autonomy. Never mind that the sheer cost of an ultrasound, thanks to the American health 'system', will put abortion out of the reach of many low-income women. Never mind the nauseating implication that if a woman realises that what she's aborting 'looks like a baby', she'll suddenly start cooing and decided she couldn't possibly murder that cute prawn-shaped thing on the screen. What is most despicable about this piece of legislation is its total undermining of a woman's right to choose, its attempt to put conditions on a medical procedure which SHOULD and MUST be available on demand and without apology, if we can ever claim that women are truly treated equally in society.

My painfully right-wing uncle started spouting off recently about how 'the measure of a civilised society is how it treats its most weak and vulnerable members, and you can't get any more vulnerable than the unborn foetus'. He didn't seem to consider the vulnerability of the 9 year old raped by a family member (a true case which occurred in Brazil), or any other woman carrying an unwanted pregnancy, for that matter. Much like the ultrasound process, which neatly removes the mother from the pregnancy scenario and makes it all about the 'baby' (NOTE quote marks - to me, it's a zygote, embryo or foetus, NOT a baby), my uncle seemed to have entirely forgotten that the unborn are housed within a WOMAN. A person. A living, breathing, already-existing full human being. It always seems very easy for a man to be pro-life, doesn't it? I wonder how pro-life my uncle would be if laws suddenly started telling him he couldn't have his cancerous liver removed, 'because it's a living organism'. An early-stage pregnancy is probably technically less of a developed organism than a liver, so that seems a fair comparison to me. Something tells me he wouldn't stand for it. But telling women they've got to endure a pregnancy because they're less important than a clump of cells? No probs, because it's all about the ickle ba-ba at the end of the day.

At least some commentators on the Louisiana legislation got right to the point:

"One sentence into this article, and i am already filled with rage.
Hey, darlin'! i know your daddy raped you, but are you SUUUURE you don't wanna have his baby? You'll go to Hell if you don't! Think about it, and let us know!"

"Pregnant women aren't mothers. They're pregnant women."

"Let's be plain. This is NOT a bill that "empowers" women. No one is dumb enough to believe that. This is a bill that presumes women are too frail and stupid to have realized what they are about to participate in."

"Jeez...why don't they also require the woman to frame the ultrasound picture and hang it over her fireplace..."

Refreshingly, the majority of comments were in this vein and socked it to the occasional (all male, from what I could see) pro-lifer who put their two-bibles' worth in. If so many American men and women can see this legislation for the vile piece of woman-hating it is, why can't US state government do the same?