So in reality putting in this limit wouldn’t impact many women as most abortions occur before 12 weeks.
Yes, so we’ll go back to a situation much like when abortion was illegal in mainland Britain pre 1967 Act, the well to do and well connected got themselves a safe hospital abortion at vast expense and with great stress and secrecy about being reported and the others died in the backstreet. Is that where we want to be in the 21century.
Jeremy Hunt must know but appears not to care that many women who need one will still get the abortion even when it’s illegal.
They just get the abortion very expensively and clandestinely but relatively safely from a real doctor off the books and then remain a blackmail target for life
or
They travel at great personal cost to a country where it’s legal. Still with great stigma. I’m assuming here Hunt is not suggesting criminalising travel for abortion but you never know..) But in best case scenario where a woman can travel, she will do so typically unaccompanied and with only the shortest possible stay booked at the destination. This is because because bringing someone else and staying for enough time to get proper medical follow up in the different country where it’s legal costs much more money and they have responsibilities at home and/or are travelling with an alternative cover story. So they ‘choose’ the most invasive, quickest surgical method on offer. As Irish and Northern Irish women have done for generations.
..or.. The ones who can’t afford any of the above will be sufficiently desperate to have a DIY or backstreet abortion. These days hopefully avoiding a coat hanger and using mail order drugs illegally bought online. But what happens then if it all goes horribly wrong? Will those women be allowing themselves to be taken to hospital for the care they need, knowing they have broken the law?
And all the above grim scenarios assume we are talking about an adult competent woman who knows about her own pregnancy and who knows there are some alternatives to hav having the baby.
You know what happens when you ban abortion to women who have none of those resources? They have a go at self-aborting maybe, succeed or fail and injure themselves, infect themselves, or succeed or fail and aghast at the prospect they kill themselves. All scenarios that happened pre 1967 Act.
Not every woman will resign themselves to going through pregnancy against their will, particularly when there is high social stigma and social cost around that.
Not all women (can’t believe I am having to write this!) will submit against their will to carry and birth a baby that then goes for adoption with all of the trauma that forced pregnancy and forced adoption is known to involve.
Jeremy might want to enslave women to their bodies (that is not hyperbole and I do not use that metaphor in any way lightly, slavery is an obscenity) but the rest of us and his political peers should utterly reject him for that. As we should reject any candidate who resorts to irresponsible dog whistling as part of his or her campaigning.
You know what I find particularly offensive about this latest from Hunt? The cynical self interest. Hunt is not a campaigner on this issue normally, I don’t think he’s morally invested in it at all, he’s comes overs as just a common misogynist.
The timing here suggests he’s probably just wanting to move the public conversation along from the drug taking history and is trying to re- establish himself as socially conservative. Not in a way that applies to him though you understand, he is special and deserves choices. He deserves to make mistakes and get another chance- and at leading the country no less. He chooses to appear winningly socially conservative instead in a way that will never affect him or other men and only threatens the lives and health of women. Women not only deserve no second chances but our actual lives are expendable by his reckoning.
What a disgusting, woman-hating moral hypocrite. I didn’t care about Hunt’s stupid drugs experience when I heard about that. Now with this, I see him for exactly who he is. 