Whenever I am asked my opinion on abortion, I always answer immediately that I am definitely pro-life. When the questioner expresses surprise, I then elaborate with a hopefully rather less stiff, smug and stagey version of the following: “Yes, I am pro-life — that is, I am in favour of continuing the only life which is actually worthy of the name — that of the unwillingly pregnant woman — in the way in which she wants to live it.
Yes, the recently noted gummy ‘smiles’ of the foetus may be ‘sweet’, if you’re a bit of a saddo, but it is no more actually smiling, dancing or walking than a mote of dust is ‘flying’. It is not, contrary to risible, hysterical, sentiment, a ‘person’, but actually nearer to being a puppet. And when its strings are cut — that is, the support system of the unfortunate woman’s body — it ceases to move about in imitation of life. And imitation is surely all it ever was.”
By now, if all has gone to plan, my interrogator will be displaying stark horror and wide-eyed terror. So, happily, I continue to enlarge on my subject: “So yes, I am most definitely a pro-lifer — that is, pro the life of the schoolgirl freed from the burden which would have likely condemned her to a life of stunted poverty, pro the life of the already-harassed mother with precious little support — pro, even, the life of the feckless singleton who would prefer a nice holiday for two weeks than a child for life. I am pro-life because I support the living, not the not-quite-alive. And because, of course, I am a feminist, like every woman over the age of 12 who is not a sad sack of low self-esteem. Quite simply, as a feminist I believe that until men are capable of giving birth, it might be more sensible for them to butt out and put their own house in order — for example by finding new ways to stop themselves raping people, murdering people and molesting children.”
On the subject of which, how revolting has it been over the past few weeks to see the Jewish Michael Howard and the Protestant Rowan Williams currying favour with Rome by trying to reduce the termination period? Quite frankly, if I was Cormac Murphy-O’Connor I think I’d be inclined to keep quiet on the subject of children because I’d know that if I did venture my opinion on the subject, there might always be some awkward blighter ready to bring up the rather dubious way I ’d spent some of the previous decade failing to respond adequately to the child-molesting habits of the priest Michael Hill, only to have him end up as chaplain of Gatwick assaulting a handicapped child in his care.
I may still be struggling towards my faith — Protestantism, thank the Lord. But even I can see that to force a human being — made in the image of God! — to carry a foetus unwillingly to term is to make that person into a human incubator; into a machine. And I can think of few things more offensive to any coherent idea of God.
With the wedding of the Royal Clown and his Chief Concubine approaching at pace, it is worth remembering that one of the most poignant and powerful grudges which we of the Princess’s Party hold against the House of Windsor is that it used Diana as what is popularly called “a brood mare”. There is real revulsion in this accusation, nailing as it does how a vulnerable, sentient human being can be used as breeding stock; if abortion were curtailed, this abomination could become the norm.
Philosophical arguments apart, I support abortion as it stands also because it seems to me one of the very few instances in the realm of life and death, sickness and health, where the lives of women have equal value to the lives, or even potential hurt feelings, of men. Abortion is one of the few things that women do solely for themselves — hence the peculiar and singular outrage it evokes in the Daily Mail, the only national newspaper that appears to be ceaselessly tormented by the outrageous idea that SOMEWHERE, SOMEHOW, A WOMAN IS HAVING FUN AND GETTING AWAY WITH IT!
We may not abandon baby girls to die in the streets as they do in some countries, and we may not see a female foetus as immediately more worthy of aborting than a male one as they do in other cultures — though if we say we embrace “diversity”, we must doubtlessly accept this habit — but we still value male life higher than female life, and this can be seen in our attitudes to men and women in matters of sickness and death. We are forever hearing the heart-rending testimonies of mothers who care for autistic sons, and wives who stand by husbands who cannot remember their names from one hour to the next, but we rarely hear of men caring for sick daughters or men devoting themselves to wives with no memories. On the contrary, we are often treated to the spectacle of cases in which men kill their sick or healthy children, out of mercy, spite or a combination of the two, and self-adoring books in which men detail how they “helped” the woman they “loved” to die.
From the fact that two women a week are killed by partners or former partners to the way that that weirdo Jack “Doctor Death” Kevorkian seemed to operate mostly on a basis of offing willing women — despite the fact that terminal illness is not gender-specific — to the way that male psychopaths often kill in a sexual frenzy, there seems to be an acceptance that men must murder and women must weep, or be wept over by grieving relatives. I have been interested in the recent case of the McCartney sisters; their standing up to the thoroughly foul IRA (the same IRA whose butchers are not excommunicated by the Catholic Church currently lecturing this country about its evil abortion laws, BTW) is excellent, but I can’t help contrasting the “Angels of the Hearth” treatment dished out to them with the media reaction to those two great men who refused to rest until the killers of their daughters were brought to justice — Ron Smith for his Helen, John Ward for his Julie. These heroic men, after a brief flurry of congratulation from the media, were quickly pathologised as oddballs and obsessives — and why? Because the loved one they sought to avenge was female.
And it is because there is such a tradition of men killing women and society accepting it as something of the norm that I feel so sceptical of the husband, and feel forced to side with the parents, in the Teresa Schindler Schiavo case.
While I am in no way against suicide — on the contrary I think they’re brave, and I’d give them special fancy graves — I do feel that liberalism towards euthanasia will lead down a road of even more male-on-female murder. And even before I read that the man now arguing for his wife’s “right to die” is already engaged to marry another woman, with whom he has children, and is alleged to have abused his wife to an extent that had her considering divorce before she succumbed 15 years ago to her mysterious collapse, I felt sceptical. Another man who wants his wife to die. Rather than get upset over the unborn unliving, wouldn’t it add more to the sum of human happiness if the likes of the Daily Mail and Cormac Murphy-O’Connor put the same amount of effort into informing men that the words “Till death us do part” don’t automatically mean “Until I want you dead”?
julie.burchill@thetimes.co.uk
