Last night I watched Panorama, which enraged me even though I already know. The smug men who sit there and proclaim that an eight or nine year old girl, or a fourteen year old raped by her own father must go through with her pregnancy, because of the rights of the unborn child. A church that speaks out against poverty yet is blind to the causes of poverty. A church that pays lip service to women's equality yet wants women to churn out child after child into a life of absolute poverty, malnutrition, disease and squalor, children who will never get much more than a basic education, if that.
I happen to support abortion. If I look at the context of the society with which I am familiar, urban England, my empirical observation is that safe legal abortion is necessary. Based just on the sample of people I know who have told me they have had terminations, I know that there are dozen reasons for having them, and I don't believe that any were done lightly, and without much soul searching. I support free, legal safe abortion because I firmly believe that no woman should be forced to go through with a pregnancy that will impose on their bodies, entirely transform their life and produce an unwanted child.
Even if I didn't believe that, I would still assemble a set of arguments that would demonstrate logically that abortion is an essential choice in our society. The three most convincing arguments are: a foetus which has been shown in scans etc to have no viable life outside the womb; a woman (or girl) who has been raped by a close family member; and the woman who has cancer that could be treatable by chemotherapy, but would die if she wasn't.
From each of those scenarios comes 'lesser' examples of the same vein. Many people who seek to delegalise abortion in Britain will concede that it is permissable in some circumstances - if the carrying of the foetus will kill the mother, or after rape. Of course, this does beg the question - what is rape? A court case to prove a rape may take some months to process; even if the perpetrator is found. What if the woman sincerely believes that she has been raped, but there is insufficient evidence to convict beyond reasonable doubt? Logically, it is not possible to frame a general law based on such premises, and, therefore, every case would have to be examined on its own merits.
However, I uncomfortable with late-term terminations. I understand that a child born at 25 weeks may survive with little or superficial damage, yet abortion is legal up to 24 weeks. My discomfort at late terminations is exactly why I support early abortion on demand. To get one at the moment, a woman needs the consent of two doctors and has to prove that having a baby would cause her or her family greater physical or mental damage than not having one.
Although I am absolutely clear and unshakeable in what I believe, I can sort of understand some people who oppose abortion - certainly, everybody has the right to believe that they would never have one themself.
I suppose therefore what makes me especially angry is the Catholic church's intransigent opposition to contraception. We had to learn all this at school, even though it was entirely contradictory to the realistic sex education we also received. We were taught that each method of artifical contraception has its drawbacks. (Our RE teacher also pointed out that the Church's adherence to natural contraception simply could not work for many people, in the real world). I have a real issue with the philosophical views behind the contraception ban. It is ludicrous, but ignored, in the West. In much of the developing world, it really is a matter of life or death.
I find it totally abhorrent that a group of men who have chosen not to enter into what they ironically believe to be normal human relations nevertheless believes that they are the experts on human sexuality. These men, these repugnant vile little men, who are either hateful, or stupid, or both, impose their perverted warped views onto a fifth of the world's ever growing population, and they think they are morally superior. They talk about morality but they are responsible for a genocide worse than any perpetrated by the the most evil 20th Century dictators.
I want to rant, and am speechless with anger, an anger I have felt for too many years. My only consolation is the hope that those truly evil men will burn for eternity in Hell.
