Get your rosaries off my ovaries

For all the liberal language, independent counselling is just an underhanded anti-abortion tactic
Suzanne Moore, Guardian.co.uk


[..] I know what having an abortion is like myself so I could make a terrible joke about it running in the family. Actually, my point is that abortion is a very common experience. Nor am I trying to suggest that the proposed amendments to the Health and Social Care Bill concerning counselling mean a return to these dark old days. The reason I am telling you all this is because I admired my mother's refusal to be ashamed of her own experience. Now this new breed of anti-abortionists snip round the edges of the process with their strategies of delay ... er, sorry, "independent counselling". But beware their language of care. This is not about care but about control. This control absolutely depends on shame: sexual shame. This shame keeps us quiet. Shame keeps us locked into individual guilt. Shame even makes us stupidly grateful that we are allowed to have any choice at all.

This whole debate around counselling pivots on the idea of deep and private shame, positing the idea of counselling being used to sell an evil procedure. Women are always "vulnerable" dupes, never simply adults who have made decisions. Some weird pension analogy has been brought in, though health care is nothing like it as advice and services do often come from the same people ie: doctors. [...]

There is little point trying to persuade those who are religiously opposed to abortion (though I am intrigued at the Catholic attitude to the foetus – miscarried babies are not buried as they are not baptised) but we can simply remind ourselves we are living in a largely secular democracy.

Loving the unborn more than the born is politically convenient, as the unborn do not have to be housed or educated or parented. [..]

We are repeatedly told this is an "emotive" issue. The new vocabulary of the anti-abortion lobby is full of vaguely feminist platitudes – not feminist enough to counsel the men who walk away from pregnancies but still. Underneath, we are fallen women, damaged goods and so terribly stupid that we can be persuaded to have a quick abortion by wicked charities. When we could be what? Wombs to provide babies for "proper couples" or go it alone as the root of all evil: single mothers?

This is nauseating. A vote of conscience? If MPs had one they would say it is not the business of the legislature to control women's reproduction. They would stop telling us what is "emotive" and ask what actually is. I didn't want counselling in order to have an abortion. I certainly did after a miscarriage – again an awfully common experience – but none was offered. No, instead let's bring on an army of "independent" zealots who can tell us that abortion leads to cancer, mental health issues and infertility, and sod the evidence that having a baby is more risky than having an abortion. Anyone who talks about how easy it is and how the reality is glossed over is ignorant. You have a scan. You know and see what you are doing. It's not a walk in the park but it is a huge relief. The emotive part is the enforced waiting.

Now the tactics are to further that wait. This is nothing short of cruelty dressed up in the language of concern. [..]