Feminists shouldn't try to stifle debate about abortion

SAF summed it up for me, with this: women are totally responsible for what their bodies can do but shouldn't have control over it.

Pro-choice doesn't mean pro-abortion. If it did, I'd be rampaging around insisting that all women should have abortions! Ridiculous, huh? Just as ridiculous as insisting that no women should. We are not on opposite sides of an argument about abortion, only about the right to choose it. And if you cannot choose abortion, more unwanted children will result. It's not even a feminist position necessarily, it's a position of economic and social common sense.

... unless, perhaps, the anti-choicers want to be able to dictate who has abortions and who doesn't? (Shades of eugenics.)

Exactly Prolesworth - she's taking an issue about which there's a fair degree of consensus (that teen pregnancy is - on the whole - a bad thing) and proposing her own hobby-horse as a solution. When it's nothing of the kind.

I'm disappointed that the Guardian, of all papers, isn't seeing this campaign for what it is.

Humperdink - I have no idea what your second sentence means - but I fully agree that if ND was actually serious about teen pregnancy, she would furnish herself with facts and research and look at what's different in societies where the rates are lower. But she's not, is she........

Dorries is famously anti-abortion. And has been caught lying like a good'un to serve this end.

Did anyone see Nadine Dorries on Newsnight last night? It was quite a poor discussion - between her and Ann Furedi of BPAS about why they've been excluded from the govt advisory board on sexual health - and it turned into a boring fight about exactly what the DoH had given as their reasons for excluding. But the interesting thing that she said was that the public at large don't want the UK to continue to be the country with the highest rate of teen pregnancies and abortions in Europe.

I was interested because at least she's finally framed the problem to which this latest flurry of anti-abortion activity is trying to find an answer. It would be interesting to know - and I hope a feminist mner can help - what the ACTUAL research says the main causes of teen pregnancy are.

I don't know if anyone agrees with me that this IS a real issue and it ought to be tackled, but that starting with access to abortion is going about it in completely the wrong way.

I suspect that Dorries has an anti-abortion agenda and that she's using the excuse of teen pregnancies to drive it through, even though reducing access to abortion will have no effect whatsoever on the numbers of teens getting pregnant. It really makes me sick to think of the way that this agenda is focussing on the behaviour of women and completely ignoring the role of men and the attitudes of society at large which contribute to the problem.

Just read that article, maybe the writer should take a look around the areas where
teen mums are 'put' mostly tipping area's where evey problem family that has been evicted from everywhere else is probabaly next door to you. The idea that someone would get pregnant to attain this 'dream life' is mad or like another poster said alot are in hostels.
alot of council house donb't allow the BF's to stay there or only a few nights a week so are forced to stay in bad area's alon at night in ususally a rough area.

sorry for rant as a teen mum myself this ignorance makes my blood boil.

I didnt think Feminists stifled that argument

Elephants That makes my blood bloody boil. Within the law of the UK, a pro-choice or pro-life individual can express their views however they see fit. If they're six weeks pregnant, they can have an abortion, or not have one. If they're sixteen weeks pregnant, they can have an abortion, or not have one. If their pregnancy has terrible complications very late on, they can have an abortion, or not have one. That is literally the end of it.

It's not simply wanting to ban people 'who don't agree with' me. It's about pointing out that these people - with no scientific evidence whatsoever, and who consistently smear and lie in order to discredit the medical community - want to change the law. It's not about 'expressing themselves' (and surely their most powerful 'expression' is, um, not having an abortion), it's about compromising the bodily autonomy of others.

I don't want to change the law so that all women have to have at least one abortion. If I did, perhaps everyone would tell me I had no place in the government of the UK. I see these forced birthers as no different.

"But you simply cannot call yourself "pro-choice" and then bar people who do not agree with you from expressing their opposing view. It's an oxymoronic position. People who defend such regressive behaviour, simply mirror that of the dictatorial hardliners they supposedly stand against. Then they wonder why they get called "feminazis"."

Did she just resign from feminism? No-one is being barred from expressing their opinion, unless I am being barred from expressing my opinion because the government haven't called ME in to advise them? But that is nonsensical. They can express it all they like, it doesn't mean we all/the government have to listen.

I usually agree with everything that Deborah Orr writes but on this occasion she can fuck right off. I thought she had a better political brain than to resort to such women-hating, Littlejohn-esque nonsense.

'It is perfectly legitimate to be anti-abortion'. Um, of course it is - with regards to yourself. Don't want an abortion under any circumstances? Don't have one. It is not remotely fucking legitimate to attempt to force these beliefs - with the attendant guilt and shame - onto the bodies of others. I cannot understand, not for one minute, a forced birth position. Because that's what it is, if you deny women's access to abortion. Forced. Birth.

And while I'm on this soapbox, Deborah, your idea that LIFE's views on sexual health aren't wanted in government because they're not 'agreeable' is a pile of old shite; actually, you might find that we can all read the evidence filtering over from the US about the abject, abject failure of 'Just Say No' programmes. Pregnancy rates rising, STD's through the roof, anal sex becoming the sex du jour because vaginal viginity is all that matters, don't you know. Don't make out we're too busy lentil-weaving to listen to the sensible abstinencers. Just fuck right off with your deliberately polemical nonsense.