And as well as the small matter of the ruination women’s rights to operate equally in the world without the responsibility of parenthood as men can naturally do, thus restricting women’s equal freedom of life choices in their jobs, relationships, sex, housing, and in providing sufficiently for the children that they already do have…
Let’s not forget that back when abortion was not legal and women could not decide whether or when to become a mother, that thousands of babies were simply abandoned or they were given up for adoption via the legal route.
Women who were unmarried and pregnant were stigmatised and could be sent without any choice to mother and baby homes to be pregnant and give birth in shame and secrecy, then the baby taken away to be given anonymously to new, more socially respectable, ie married parents.
The trauma caused by the legal restrictions on abortion, rooted in the misogynistic and anti-child religious belief in the ‘legitimacy’ of birth within marriage only; is still playing out to the people affected by it. See the forced adoption enquiry recently completed in Westminster.
What decent human being would ever want to take women and children back to that trauma, by making abortion unavailable again?
See: The Violation of Family Life: Adoption of Children of Unmarried Women 1949–1976 – Report Summary. Report by the House of Lords and House of Commons Committee report, with recommendations to government.
publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt5803/jtselect/jtrights/270/summary.html
Yes, we all know that forced adoption continued beyond the very first legalisation of abortion 1967 but very strong misogynistic cultural and religious attitudes don’t change overnight.
So in most countries including the UK, access to abortion even once made legal, is usually at first very difficult to get until attitudes change.
Eg where abortion remains socially very stigmatised, in the health care system among NHS service commissioners who might otherwise fund abortion, among women who might otherwise choose abortion and among the doctors who might otherwise choose to be providing it. Leaving many women with no other choice but to bring babies into the world that they couldn’t keep or weren’t allowed to keep.
Access to abortion in Northern Ireland has only recently been legalised, for example, which is a source of historical national shame for the entire UK. And access to abortion in Northern Ireland is still not as straightforward as it should be even now.
None of which is to say that state financial support and legal protections for women who have babies now in the UK is perfect now that attitudes to abortion have moved on for the majority of people- it isn’t perfect by a long shot- and it should be improved to give women more choice to keep babies if they want to. Pro choice means pro choice.