TERMINATION of CHOICE

Long ago, when the world and I were both young, I used (in a phrase employed in the gay community) to “cruise both sides of the street”. How I came to settle on the one side is a story for another day but, as it turned out, the road I didn’t take was the one that leads to parenthood. The line from me all the way back to the primeval swamp finally expires when I pass.

During my bisexual phrase, I embarked upon one particular relationship with a woman in which she handled the contraception matters, choosing a so-called Dutch cap. This turned out not be foolproof, however, and she fell pregnant. I did what a chap was expected to do back in those days and proposed that we marry but she determined that she would seek an abortion. I was not offered a vote.

It was a tumultuous time in my life. I was just beginning a new and demanding job, upon which quite a lot rode. Our relationship had had its fractious side, including some unresolved issues. Nonetheless, I felt no sense of relief at her decision, nor at her absolving me from any part in it. It did seem, though, to signal that the relationship had no sustainable future. So we went our separate ways. In time – perhaps a surprisingly short time, in the circumstances – we re-engaged in what has proved to be a lasting friendship. I am happy to relate that she subsequently bore a child.

The aborted foetus remains a small shadow on my psyche, an area of scar tissue that perhaps will never disappear. That foetus (had no further misfortune of a fatal nature befallen it) would now be a person nearer in age to forty than thirty. My life would have panned out unimaginably differently had the pregnancy gone to term, even had I still eventually settled for life as a gay man. And I cannot pretend that I contemplate that sliver of history with a wholly dispassionate eye. It is not something that I have placed in any sort of public forum before – I have disclosed it to vanishingly few friends – but I do so now because I want to say that, whatever my emotions concerning my own experience, I support and defend to the hilt my one-time lover’s right to make that choice, without pressure from anyone else.

The lobby that presently appears to be prevailing in the matter of rewriting the laws that govern the procurement of and the administration of abortions pretends that it is not a pressure group. But that is exactly what it is. Inevitably, the motor behind this lobby is our old friend religious bigotry. People who subscribe to the view that everyone else must bow to their irrational prejudices have hijacked the argument so thoroughly that the government – hereby revealed as repressive and anti-progressive – is minded to bow to their organisational clout and vim.

The lobby’s argument -– a slanderous one, you might think – is that such impeccable professional organisations as the Pregnancy Advisory Service and the Marie Stopes Clinic have some vested interest in talking women into terminations. What is certainly true is that these Christian propagandists have a vested interest in talking women out of terminations. Their proposal, which the Department of Health appears to have accepted, is that the PAS and the Stopes should be denied any advisory or counselling role and that women should be able to avail themselves of “independent advice”; for which, read religious interference.

Don’t let’s be naïve about what the bigot lobby wants: the wholesale abolition of the right to abortion. Many of its members go so far as to add “in any circumstances”. In their world, the impregnated victim of a gang rape by crackheads should be obliged to carry the foetus to term, whatever the possibility that the woman would harbour complex feelings towards the child who would, from its own point of view, be born already the victim of withdrawal symptoms from the crack in its system. In their world, the woman whose own life is threatened by the foetus should be impelled to accept the sacrifice of her own life rather than that of the unborn child.

These people describe themselves as “pro-life” as though anyone who takes issue with them is, by definition, pro-death. What they really are is pro-imposition of their own supposed value system, born of irrationality, on everyone else. The nightmare logic of their position leads to the murder of medical practitioners in the cause, they would have you believe, of pro-life. Praise Gandhi and pass the nuclear button.