Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Will Blair jump on anti-abortion bandwagon?

Socialist Resistance no24  |  page 3-4

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

Tory leader Michael Howard's response to a question on abortion, in an interview in Cosmopolitan magazine last month, parachuted the issue onto the preelection agenda. Howard said that he wanted a reduction in time limits to 20 weeks from the current 24 weeks

While Howard was responding to a question, there is little doubt that he had consciously planned to add this issue to the right wing agenda he has been building up under the guidance of his new advisor Lynton Crossby, such as increasingly vicious attacks on travellers.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Conor, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster was quick to follow Howard's intervention, saying that while it was not enough of course -because the Roman Catholic Church opposes abortion under any circumstances, he was glad it was on the political agenda.

In an article in the Sunday Telegraph, and in his sermon on Easter Sunday, he went further by comparing the destruction of foetuses through abortion with the Holocaust - not surprisingly provoking anger in the Jewish community as he did so.

Tony Blair's response to the Cosmopolitan interview had been to say there were no plans to change the law at the moment, and that while he didn't like abortion himself, he did not think it should be

criminalised. Sadly Blair doesn't mean that he supports abortion on request - current legislation means that abortion is only partially decriminalised. And even when the pro-choice movement was at its height, campaigners never succeeded in imposing a whip to support women's rights on this issue. A number of Labour MPs have gone further than Blair has dared with the election spotlight on him in suggesting that they agree with Michael Howard on this question at least. All this suggests that we may well face another We know that battle on the quesBlair has tion of time limits

in the aftermath already bent of the general to the Tory election. We know

that Blair has bent agenda on

to the Tory agenda many other on many other

issues issues - with the

election out of the way we are unlikely to see him do anything to support women's right to control our fertility. While only one percent of abortions currently take place after twenty weeks, for those women who find themselves needing them it would be intolerable if that right was taken away. The result would be a return to the backstreets with dying from unsafe illegal abortions. And as Murphy O'Conor makes clear, the anti-abortionists would not be satisfied with that anyway - but would go on to further attack on rights to control our bodies and our lives.