Abortion law reform (1)

Fact and fiction: replying to Leo Abse

Madeleine Simms

I write both as a mother of teenage children and as someone who has been professionally involved with the abortion problem for some fifteen years.

I note with interest that while women generally remain fairly cairn about abortion, middle-aged men sometimes get quite unbalanced by it, desert hard facts and take refuge in hysteria. This I find intriguing.

The essence, for example, of Leo Abse's case (The Spectator, January 18) appears to be that anti-abortionists like himself understand "women's needs," as he calls them, better than do the women themselves. They must therefore be protected by having their freedom of choice removed. As John Stuart Mill observed in his essay, The Subjection of Women' (1869), the plantation owners of South Carolina took just this view of their cotton slaves.

It is an open secret that Mr Abse is responsible for drafting the bill that Mr James White, a Glasgow trade unionist MP, will introduce in the House of Commons on February 7. This will seek to restrict the 1967 Abortion Act as severely as possible. Mr White can perhaps be taken to be under heavy pressure from organised Catholicism in his constituency; and while the Labour vote in Scotland is crumbling fast in face of Scottish Nationalist inroads, the woman's movement is only in its formative stage. Presumably he thinks he will gain more on the swings than he will lose on the roundabouts, but he would seem to know little about his subject, and may not be aware that the facts of the abortion situation in Britain are quite different from the fantasies purveyed by Mr Abse's "virginal and pristine" friends from the News. of the World.

Britain has one of the lowest abortion ratios in the world. Since 1972, .Britain's abortion figures have stabilised. There are now about 110,000 abortions each year in England and Wales, and about 7,000 in Scotland, where they have started to decline. This is roughly one abortion for every six live births. In Catholic France, as Mme Simone Weil, the French Minister of Health pointed out during the recent abortion debate in the National Assembly, there are many more abortions. She estimated the figure at 300,000 a year, roughly one abortion for every three live births — and this in a country where abortion has never until now been legal. If, as Leo Abse asserts, there is an 'abortion Mecca of Europe' it is in Paris, not London. Legislation has little effect on the incidence of abortion. It simply determines how many of the abortions that take place, anyway, are carried out legally and safely.

Since the Abortion Act was passed, abortion has become very safe in Britain. In 1973, the early legal abortion mortality rate was just under three per 100,000, whereas the maternal mortality rate was ten per 100,000. Nevertheless, though it is now safer to have an early legal abortion than to have a baby, everyone would wish to see the incidence of abortion reduced. Certainly the parents of teenage children would. But abortion cannot be combated as long as it is driven underground. This is why it was only after the Abortion Act was passed, that the government became seriously involved in birth control and other preventive measures.

Leo Abse appears to believe that one cannot support both abortion law reform and improved provision for unsupported mothers and deserted children. Why he should believe this is unclear, since abortion law reformers have always supported _both. Nor is Mr Abse correct in his complacent assumption that there are no unwanted children left. As 'A Sectator's Notebook' pointed out (also January 18), there are plenty of children still waiting to be adopted. Some of these are to be publicly advertised in women's magazines. Perhaps, before irresponsibly creating a new reservoir of children "in special need who are particularly difficult to place," we should try to resolve existing problems.

In 1967, Britain's Abortion Act was the most advanced piece of legislation of its kind in Europe. This has long ceased to be the case. On the continent, abortion is now widely available at the request of the pregnant woman. Here it is only available on specified 'grounds.' By comparison with Scandinavian countries, and indeed with Roman Catholic countries such as France and Austria, the 1967 Abortion Act looks very old-fashioned indeed. The Lane Committee sat for for nearly three years and investigated the working of the Abortion Act very thoroughly, receiving evidence from all sections of opinion (inclqding Mr Abse and myself). It concluded: "We have no doubt that the gains facilitated by the Act have much outweighed any disadvantages for which it has been criticised."

Opponents of the Abortion Act insist that abortion is not a matter of conscience, it is a matter of enforcing the letter of the law (unless of course that conscience happens to be Roman Catholic or in other respects anti-abortion, when a protective clause has to be written into the Act, as was done in 1967). This point of view is not acceptable today. If conscience matters for the Catholic lobby, it matters equally for the women's lobby. The right to have a baby is as important as, but not more important than, the right not to have one. The fact that the Lane Committee failed to recognise this, has made its recommendations seem a little old-fashioned in the eyes of many younger women.

Opponents of abortion often speak as if there was little abortion before the 1967 Act. In fact, safe abortion has always been available at the request of the mother, provided she could pay for it; and dangerous abortion has always been available in the back streets if she could not pay very much. Because abortion is now open and officially notified, does not mean there is more of it than before. On.September 10, 1929, Marie Stopes wrote a letter to the Times which so horrified it that it refused to print it. She said that when she first opened her birth control clinic, within a period of three months no less than 20,000 women came to ask her advice not, as she had expected, about birth control, but about safer methods of abortion. What amazed her most of all, was that they took abortion so much for granted, that it did not even occur to them that it was illegal. This concern was echoed by the Catholic Federation when it came to give evidence to the Birkett Committee on abortion in 1937. It urged the Birkett Committee to try to combat the "high incidence" of abortion and to recommend prosecuting cases more vigorously.

The hope of suppressing abortion still flickers. Various suggestions were made to the Lane Committee for increasing the anti-abortion bureaucracy, to produce a bottleneck effect through which fewer women, would be able to squeeze: committees, panels, medical referees and such other methods as anti-feminist ingenuity could devise were hopefully proferred to Lane, who rejected them firmly on the grounds that where they had been tried elsewhere they had simply resulted in later and more dangerous abortions.

It is a feature of an advanced industrial society that women wish to choose the number of children they have. It is no more possible to reverse this trend now by Act of Parliament, than it would be to abolish trade unionism by Act of Parliament. Mr James White, who is a pillar of the Transport and General Workers' Union, should see the force of this.

In 1972, National Opinion Polls asked voters their opinions of the Abortion Act. 54 per cent of those aged over fifty-five wished to see the Act changed "to make it more difficult to obtain legal abortion." These are Mr White's supporters. But 60 per cent of those aged between twenty-one and twenty-four wished to see the Abortion Act either "left as it is" or "changed to make it easier to obtain legal abortion." These are David Steel's supporters, and they predominate in all the child-bearing age groups. There might be a moral.in this.

How odd it is, incidentally, that Mr Abse, who once' fought for the freedom of (homosexual) men, should be So anxious to reduce the freedom of (heterosexual) women.

Madeline Simms has written a number of books on abortion, most recently Abortion Counselling