Thank you for all your feedback - we'll be sure to digest it and have a think about the issues you've raised. Apologies in advance for a rather mammoth post.
First off, we need to clear something up: we absolutely think that Mumsnet is a place where women can (and indeed do) talk about their experiences of terminations, or about choices they need to make that may involve termination.
We didn't, at all, mean to suggest in our previous post that women shouldn't post on Mumsnet about abortion. This really, really couldn't be further from our point of view. It's a vital and important topic and we absolutely embrace MNers using the boards to discuss it, in any form.
One MNer had contacted us off-board about the possibility of setting up a new talk topic where MNers could discuss their personal abortion choices, and had mooted the idea of this topic being pro-actively modded, or otherwise 'protected'. Some sentences in our previous post on this thread were
cribbed from our reply to her, and so conflated two slightly different issues. In hindsight, we can see why saying "we're afraid that we don't think Mumsnet is able to be this place", has given the wrong idea, and we apologise for this (that'll teach us not to be lazy and copy and paste).
Just to explain our thinking a bit further: the reasoning behind our reluctance to introduce a specific 'Abortion' or 'Termination' topic is that, realistically, it would be an absolute internet-wide magnet for trolls, inflammatory single-issue posters, and bunfights. While we take on board that some of you don't think it's ideal, the beauty of our 'Antenatal tests and choices' topic is that it has a usefully anodyne title, and is very rarely targeted by trolls or inflammatory posters - meaning that (in our experience) women who post there tend to get the thoughtful support that they're looking for.
One possible solution is to change its title to 'Pregnancy: choices and tests' - would that work?
"Question, MNHQ: theoretically, if there was a 'bus'-style long-running thread within Antenatal Tests and Choices specifically for termination support and chat, would you be willing to delete inflammatory/politicised/religious posts which appeared on it which were not in contravention, technically, of the Talk Guidelines but were inappropriate, insensitive and/or fighty? There's precedent for this in the recent 'please report gratuitous aggressiveness on AIBU campaign."
Thank you for suggesting this AdamsLambsBreath. A long running support thread sounds like a grand idea and you're more than welcome to start one, wherever you would like.
Obviously we can't say for definite what we would and wouldn't delete til we see it: in the end, it all comes down to whether we think something breaks Talk Guidelines. We've always resisted implementing special rules for individual threads and individual topics; there are, of course, an awful lot of very sensitive and difficult topic areas on MN, and our aim is apply our rules equally to all of them. As with all personal or potentially difficult topics, we'd like to see threads concerning abortion being thoughtful, humane and mindful of the individual circumstances of the poster concerned. And as ever, we will always take a look at any posts that you think are deliberately inflammatory, abusive or just plain mean.
If it appears that someone has signed up to Mumsnet purely to pursue a particular agenda, and we can see that they are irritating or upsetting a lot of MNers, we are always happy to step in. Similarly, we're always happy to look and see whether someone seems to be deliberately inflaming, or refusing (consistently) to engage with the debate in hand.
With these things, it's always a question of context and judgement - what one person might consider inflammatory, another might consider a valid opinion. But we are always happy to take a look.
All that said (SORRY that this is so long!) do please keep feeding back and let us know if you think we're getting it all wrong. (Or even just a little bit wrong, or the usual amount of wrong
).