Over the last few days, both Matthew Sinclair and Chris Dillow have written ‘abortion debate’ posts from the standpoint of the sceptic/uncommitted, a perhaps usual looking position in a debate where taking sides can almost seem obligatory, but a respectable one nonetheless and one that should be addressed.

Chris is struggling a little with his instincts, noting both that there are secular arguments for placing some value on the life of a foetus but also, importantly, picking up on a socio-economic argument that veers, somewhat, towards a point raised in Steven D Leviitt’s famous/notorious ‘Freakonomics’ paper on crimes rates and abortion.

…a major motive for a woman to have an abortion is that she is not yet ready to be a parent. Having an abortion at 20, then, can be a way of clearing the ground so that she can be a good mother at 30. If this woman were banned from having an abortion at 20, the child she has at 30 might not be born at all - as she would feel unable to give it as much attention as she’d like.

Allowing abortion, therefore, helps ensure that children are brought up by better parents - with more chance of becoming good citizens.

Before raising what is a perfectly reasonable concern:

My problem is, this argument - whilst appealing - is a close neighbour of some very ugly ones. It’s a form of liberal eugenics.

I wouldn’t go quite so far as to call it that but it is a valid point, nonetheless. It’s only a century or so ago that politically-driven enthusiasm for the erroneous creed of the Social Darwinists saw prominent left-wing figures, members of the Fabian Society even, speculating on the possibility that eugenics would ’solve’ the problem of the social underclass created by the first great era of liberal free market dominance, so we’ve no cause to be complacent about the ethical question that Chris raises. That said, the excesses of the first-half of the 20th Century, which culminated in the horrors of the Holocaust have, I think, sensitised society sufficiently, for the time being. to ensure that we don’t get complacent in our thinking about the socio-economic impact of abortion, or of other measures in the HF&E bill that may/will have social consequences, even if these have not been a major feature in the current debate.

In many respects, the big problem we face is in ensuring these questions are given the prominence they deserve/merit in the face of the ease with which they can be, and are, so easily used and abused by religiously-motivated opponents of abortion as a means of trying to capture the moral high-ground. No debate between religionists and rationalists, today, seems complete without the introduction of a reductio ad Hitlerium somewhere along the way, whether the debate is on the origins of life and universe or on the question of abortion. It didn’t take long, for example, on a recent Conservative Home post about the apparent level of support in the upper echelons of the Tory Party for Dorries’ abysmal 20 week campaign, for someone throw this into comment into the mix:

The 6 million abortions reminds us that the abortion holocaust is on a similar scale as the murder of the Jews 60 years ago.

Spectacularly offensive and deeply ignorant as such comments undoubtedly are, and its not just the comment box trolls putting out this of nonsense, the opening gambit of the Guild of Catholic Doctor’s submission to the Commons’ Science and Technology was the claim that were it not for legal abortion,the UK would not have needed to allow so many immigrants into the country over the last 40 years, there are questions here that need to be addressed not just to counter such manifest, and the latter case, racist absurdities but also to satisfy ourselves that we are not losing sight of the social and cultural implications of legal abortion.

Matthew is much more critical, and acerbic, in his scepticism than Chris, even if he doesn’t seem quite to understand the underlying motivation and purpose behind this weeks series of Dorries’ posts:

Nadine Dorries may be guilty of all manner of sins. That doesn’t mean that there is any real point to Liberal Conspiracy’s group hate. They are free to do as they will with their blog but if they seriously think it will achieve much, beyond putting a few moderates off the debate entirely, they are mistaken.

Its yet to be seen quite what effect, if any, the assault on Dorries’ credibility may have - I’ve certainly got some thoughts on this, some of which people may find a bit of a surprise, but for the moment, its still too soon to say anything definitive on this and speculating on the kind of things I have in mind could easily provoke a reaction of a kind that would serve to obscure the effect I have in mind.

Will any of this affect the outcome of the vote in Parliament? I doubt it very much and if it does then the impact will be at best marginal, helping to persuade a very small number of MPs that they are correct in their instincts either to vote to maintain the status quo on the upper abortion limit or abstain on the basis that neither side has really landed a knock-out punch.

So far as what happens in parliament on Tuesday, there will be block votes for a reduction in the upper time limit from the religionists and social conservatives and against from the social liberals and those who are personally committed to women’s rights. Amongst the floating voters, some will play safe and abstain, feeling that they can’t satisfactorily unpick this issue one way or another, which is a respectable enough view, and others will try to make the best judgement call they can based on what they’ve read in science and technology committee report, their perception of how the way they vote will play with the their constituents and the press, and for many backbench MPs, their local press will be a bigger factor than the nationals, and also which lobby their party leader looks likely to head through. Although there will be a free vote on all the abortion amendments, both main party leader (Brown and Cameron) have made they views on the ‘correct’ upper time limit public and this will undoubtedly influence some of the undecideds out of a combination of mild careerism and herd instinct.

If Matthew is a little disappointed with this week’s intellectual fayre then, in many respects, that’s only to be expected - he’s joined the debate here at a stage where he isn’t really part of the target audience and would, I suspect, have got much more value out of some the formative debates that took place here a while ago:

Pipe down, Christian soldiers
Life with Dave
‘Call Me Dave’ and the argument from viability
The talking politics of abortion
Who died and made you God?
Why do women have abortions?

Matthew’s joined the fray at a time where the priority has been to counter on of the most dishonest and disreputable single issue political campaigns mounted by a ‘mainstream’ politician in living memory and that, necessarily, takes the response here is a particular direction, one that perhaps fails to do justice either the earlier debates or the thinking behind them.

That needs to change, once we get over this current bump in the road - I don’t necessarily agree with all of Stroppybird’s points, but what I would agree with is that its not enough to simply fight a rearguard action up to the vote on Tuesday then down tool and move on to something else, safe (hopefully) in the knowledge of a job well done, until the next time that Dorries or one of her supporters tries to take another nibble at sneaking restrictive amendments to the laws regulating abortion in via the parliamentary back door.

Like Matthew, I’m not the greatest fan of many of the arguments that routinely dominate abortion debates. The supposed opinions of mythical universal intelligences don’t hold any sway at in my thinking, not just because they wander directly in a wall of unbelief but because, from what I can see, I’m usually much better read when it comes to the ‘holy writs’ of some of the more vocal religionists than they are.

I also, like Matthew, find the argument from viability unconvincing and not just a little dislikeable (see ‘Call me Dave and the argument from viability’, linked above), for all that we have to work with it as it is has played a key role in the formulation of our existing abortion laws much as I’m uneasy about the emphasis placed on ’science’ in this debate - its a useful aide to unpicking a number of important issues but too often looked to for definitive answers that it cannot reasonably provide.

Despite his misgivings, Chris’s general point about the socio-economic impact points to a field in which there is a weight of evidence I, personally, find persuasive for all of his expressed doubts as to the value of evidence-based policy making and policy-based evidence not to mention D-Squared’s views of the limitations of Levitt’s crime/abortion paper and data-mining generally.

This takes us towards some material I’ve been meaning to write-up for the past view days, which looks at some of the evidence for socio-economic trends linked to the availability of legal abortions - and which I will get around to in a day or two - particularly in terms looking for evidence to support the view that reproductive ‘rights’ have played a role in enhancing the social and economic position of women over the last 40 years…

…and the evidence is certainly there.

To give but one example, there is a clear correlation that runs right through the 1970’s between the decline in the annual number of, particularly, first marriages and marriages where the female partner was under the age of 25, and the rise in the number of abortions over the decade. A little further digging turns up another trend showing a strong correlation; a sharp decline in the number of children born annually to women who had been married for less than 8 months and, again, the sharpest falls are found in the lowest age groups, the under 20s and 20-24s.

The conclusion is a simple one - legalising abortion in 1967 (although it was actually part way through 1968 before the act came into effect) halved the ’shotgun-weddings’ taking place in the UK in the space of a decade, particularly amongst young women. Of the 60,000 babies born to married women  under 20 in 1970, 35,000 were born within the first 8 months of marriage and by 1979, there were 35,000 such births, of which under 18,000 were within the first 8 months of marriage - today there are a little of 4,000 children born to married women under 20 each year and only 1,000 or so within the first 8 months of marriage.

The value in this is well expressed by this paper - Boden J M, Fegusson DM, Horwood LJ. Early motherhood and subsequent life outcomes. The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 2008; 49(2): 151-16o, which concludes that:

Notwithstanding the above limitations [for which you’ll have to read the study - U.], the results of this 25-year study confirm the view that women who become mothers earlier in life are at risk of experiencing poorer mental health, reduced educational achievement, and barriers to participation in paid employment.  However, for mental health outcomes and enrolment in higher education, these issues largely reflect the influence of family, social, and background factors that influence early motherhood, rather than the specific effects of early motherhood per se.

Although not a universal panacea by any means, it seems a reasonable conclusion to suggest that legalising abortion has given many women a way out of poverty, opportunities for personal advancement and improved life outcomes, outcomes that that they might not otherwise have had…

For the armchair moralists out there, BTW, the data on births within and outside marriage for the 1970s show no significant increase in the number of childen born to unmarried mothers from the start of the decade to the end; the main rise in the annual number of children born to unmarried women in both under 20s and 20-24s comes only at the beginning of the 1980’s and runs to 1987 for under 20s and 1989 for 20-24s before stabilising at current levels, not to mention that the increase may not be as large as you might think.

Even in 1970, there were around 20,000 children born outside marriage to women under the age of 20 and around 22,000 to women in the 20-24 age group, and the numbers for 1979 are broadly the same, 23.000 for the under 20s, 22,000 for the 20-24s. By 1990, the annual number of births to unmarried women under the age of 20 hit 44,000 - its actually slightly less today at 41-42,000 - while the figures for 20-24 age group topped 73,000 for 1990. Little wonder, then, that Conservative politician have been so keen to blame the liberalism and permissiveness of the 1960’s and 70s for all the social ills of modern Britain, because if its not that then we have to start asking some pretty stiff questions about how the social changes wrought in the 1980s by the Thatcher government may have helped to create Cameron’s so-called ‘broken society’.

Bringing a third British ‘econo-blogger’ into play, Tim Worstall, in commenting on the Telegraph’s coverage of an Oxford University study of social mobility noted, in January this year, that:

…these studies which show a decline in social mobility are not really very accurate. They’re measuring a decline in social mobility for men, yes. But that is then being interpreted as a decline in total social mobility, which isn’t actually what is being measured at all. And the decline in male social mobility is being described, but without reference to the largest change in the labour market, the rise to equality of women.

And alongside structural changes in the labour market arising out of Britain making the transition from a manufacturing to a service economy and legislative provisions for equality in the workplace, I’m prepared to do a bit of Levitt-style sticking my neck out and argue that legalising abortion (and, of course, the developments in contraception that complete the reproductive ‘rights’ package for women) has not only played a major role in improving social mobility amongst women over the last 40s but - getting controversial here - that the role it has played, while not as significant as changes in the economic/labour market ‘mix’, exceeds that of any single piece of equality legislation and maybe even all of it, but for, perhaps, the Equal Pay Act.

I’ll conclude this section with a link to Christchurch Health and Development Study’s publications page which is a veritable goldmine of information and includes the somewhat controversial - and frequently misrepresented - study of abortion and mental health - Fergusson DM, Boden JM, Horwood LJ. Abortion among young women and subsequent life outcomes. Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 2007; 39(1): 6-12.

We’ve barely scratched the surface of the socio-economic impact of the legalising abortion. As I pointed out in posing the question of ‘Why do women have abortions?‘ there have been no substantive studies conducted in the UK that attempt to explore that question in the 40 years since the 1967 Act, largely, I suspect, because the Act’s careful medicalisation of the grounds under which ’social’ abortions are carried out in the UK served to discourage research that might appear to undermine the current systems’ reliance on designating women as being at risk of physical or mental health problems in order to provide a legal justification for permitting them an abortion.

My one significant disappointment this time out is that it looks very much like there will be no amendment that seeks to alter this position and place the UK’s abortion laws on a more open and transparent footing - our parliamentarians appear to be, even now, gun shy of anti-abortionist rhetoric around abortion ‘on demand’ and lack the inclination or drive to seriously challenge some of the pernicious moralistic fallacies that permeate this debate, the kind which seek characterise women who do have abortions as being feckless and irresponsible. The reality, if one looks to America as being broadly comparable to the UK, is very different, as research that has been carried out there provides a very different perspective on this question:

RESULTS:

The reasons most frequently cited were that having a child would interfere with a woman’s education, work or ability to care for dependants (74%); that she could not afford a baby now (73%); and that she did not want to be a single mother or was having relationship problems (48%). Nearly four in 10 women said they had completed their childbearing, and almost one-third were not ready to have a child.

Fewer than 1% said their parents’ or partners’ desire for them to have an abortion was the most important reason. Younger women often reported that they were unprepared for the transition to motherhood, while older women regularly cited their responsibility to dependants.

So much for another Dorries’ pet fallacies - ‘forced abortions’ - which in the US make up a very small percentage of the number of abortions carried out annually in a society in which both the social and economic pressures facing women and the stigma attached to abortion are much greater than is the case in the UK.

We are also only just starting to get to grips with the question of why some women present late for abortions.

What little information we do have comes from this study by Dr Ellie Lee of Southampton University, a study that - in another telling ‘commentary’ on her campaign - Nadine Dorries argued should be excluded from the deliberations of the Science and Technology Committee on account of it not being a peer-reviewed journal paper. It had, after all, only been published on the University’s website for six months prior to committee sessions, which is more than sufficient time for the anti-abortion lobby to review its findings and respond to them should they have had any solid criticisms to make.

Lee’s brief study makes for interesting reading. 41% of women, for example, cited difficulties in reaching a decision on whether to have an abortion as one of the main reasons for their late presentation, which hardly seems an indicator or fecklessness or irresponsibility. Surely it follows that if, by reducing the current upper time limit, we pressurise these women into making decisions before they’re ready then don’t we run the risk of exacerbating the problems they may face if they come to think, later on, that they may have made the wrong choice?

38% reported having failed to realise they were pregnant until relatively late on due their periods being irregular - so that’s the very young, older, mainly menopausal, women and women who have either a medical condition that causes menstrual irregularity or who undergo such problems due to some aspect of their lifestyle, which may run to anything from crash dieting (and eating disorders) to drug addiction, particularly heroin and methadone. That’s a pretty vulnerable group of women you’re talking about compelling into motherhood if you start cutting the upper time limits.

Then there’s the 36% who got the maths wrong and thought, mistakenly, that they weren’t quite do far along in their pregnancy as, presumably, obstetric scans taken prior to their abortion demonstrated and the 31% who miscalled their condition because they’d had a contraception failure without, initially, realising it. Do we force them into motherhood for making nothing more than genuine miscalculations.

26% cited delays arising out of concerns over how their parents would react to news of their pregnancy, which goes almost without the need for comment, but for reflecting on the fact that while talked of ‘forced abortions’ is a fairly common trope amongst religionists in these debates, little or no attention seems to be given the moral and ethical questions arising of ‘forced motherhood’.

And, to cap it all, there’s 23% who appear to have been sailing along happily towards motherhood only to find, during their second trimester, that their partner is a bastard and that pregnancy, far from bringing the joys of a close family relationship, has precipitated nothing more than the sight of their partner heading off into the sunset.

I mention all that because Matthew has expressed a preference for a European-style two-tier system of a lower, on request, limit supplemented by a higher limit, giving the UK:

a system where only early or exceptional abortions would take place which might reassure the large number of people (probably a majority) who find abortions above twenty weeks distasteful but would also allow for people in exceptional circumstances.

Having looked at the various laws in effect around Europe - which again, Dorries and her supporters hopelessly misrepresent in their propaganda - it is certainly no inconceivable that a long-term solution of just this kind might not be a possibility and even worthy of consideration.

But…

It has to be asked just exactly what Matthew means when he talks about ‘exceptions’, what criteria does he propose for assessing these exceptional situations? Are these exceptions to be only those where there is a clinical need, a risk of serious injury or to the life of the mother or evidence of a serious foetal abnormality, or do some of the many social factors which, from Lee’s research, account for why some women present late for abortion, also count as ‘exceptions’.

The view from Europe is that there is no clear consensus on this issue - some countries only allow second trimester abortions where this an overriding clinical need, some allow for social factors providing it can be shown that there are no viable alternatives and some have criteria for ‘exceptions’ that are as open to interpretation as the medicalised criteria used for ’social’ abortions in UK.

One, Israel, even affords women a legal right to abortion right up to the birth - but only where the woman is unmarried.

In theory, if we allow for the fact this debate will not go away any time soon and that, in the public’s view, neither total or near total prohibition on abortion or an unfettered right up to birth is likely to command widespread popular support, then such a two tier system could provide a platform to lock down the debate once and for all be providing a framework for abortion that could not effectively be challenged on either side of the debate, but that would require a clear public consensus on nature and scope of these ‘exceptions’ one that I suspect will prove elusive, certain for the time being.

There is, on this issue, no one dominant default position, other than that some form legal access abortion is necessary to avoid a return to the era of coathangers and knitting needles and,  much as I’ve defended the current 24 week limit and have my own personal rationale to underpin that support, I’m not blind to the fact that this limit does generate some measure of disquiet amongst both public and members of the medical profession.

That said, I’m firmly of the view that now is not the time for making changes, other than for those liberalising measures which speed up access to abortion during the first trimester, not least because there are too many ‘variables’ in this debate that we have, as yet, failed to account for and too little information and informed debate on critical elements such as abortions socio-economic effects and, critically for me, too little understanding of why abortion rates are at the levels they currently are and what factors most influence women in their choices.

For all Chris’s misgivings about evidence-based policy making, this is a debate that requires more evidence and considerably more reasoned public debate before it will be possible for us all to arrive at an informed decision as to how best to frame our abortion laws for the 21st century.

For that reason I will personally make no apology whatsoever if I’m seen be some to be actively seeking to take Nadine Dorries and her supporters completely ‘out of the game’, because its only by removing the uber-religionists that we’ll be able to get on with the debate this issue needs and deserves and the one that I think both Chris and Matthew are looking for.

The notion that sport and politics should never mix is a curious, and also deeply political, one. Sport, after all, is just the waging of international politics by other means. Ask the East Germans.

Rarely has the mix been quite as fruity as this weekend’s end to the Italian football season Continue reading…

1) Consistency is not really her strong point, Bookdrunk said yesterday when Unity blogged the amendments Tory MPs are proposing to the HFE Bill. There’s Mr Edward Leigh supporting amendments to reduc the limit to 12, 14 or 16 weeks and there’s Nadine Dorries supporting reducing the limit to 20 weeks and 16 weeks! Is she not conviced by her own arguments?

But you see, that isn’t her ultimate agenda and neither is it of these other mysogynist MPs.
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Welcome to Casting the net, Liberal Conspiracy’s daily web review. As always, please feel free to share your own recommendations in the comments.

The Guardian - Brown to compromise on 42-days, rather than lose further authority?
Amnesty - What gets me, is that 21% of Britons quite like cluster bombs…
Kevin Maguire - A high profile political blogger is arrested and sentenced. Time for blogger solidarity?
Under the microscope - If America is worried about the increasing scientific prowess of Asia, why is it treating its female scientists so poorly?
The Sharpener - The Sharpener is back. *wipes tear from eye* It kicks off with a characteristically sardonic piece, with John Band hoping that our Punch and Judy politics continues.
Get Your War on - [Cartoon] Pointing out what a mess we’re in (scroll down for latest). via. Justin
Westmonster - So George W. Bush hasn’t profited from the Iraq War. A missed opportunity, I say.
The Tory Troll - Are we about to see a power-struggled within the BNP?

Oh, and I’ve been asked to plug this Obama song.

Leading Conservatives in David Cameron’s shadow cabinet are taking money to run their private offices directly from commercial companies with vested interests in the portfolios they hold. But will Guido Fawkes blog these pigs at the trough?

Scratch that… Paul ‘Guido Fawkes’ Staines sentenced to three months imprisonment curfew order. Shame… the buggery gag is a good one… humble pie at the Ministry of Truth.

A quick interview with pro-choice MP Katy Clark on gearing up for next week’s vote on the existing abortion time limit of 24 weeks:

Remember this, says Katy Clark: the abortion debate we’re having should not be about the 24-week time limit for the legal right for abortion. The issue is purely and simply one of a woman’s right to choose - whether the state should make it lawful for a woman to terminate a pregnancy. The End, in many ways.

Except that it’s not the end, of course: there are only a few days left before MPs take a vote on proposals to amend the Abortion Act via the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, and Clark is certainly one that feels that a woman’s right to choose a legal abortion is ‘under a very real threat.’

Continue reading…

This weekend has not been a good one for the dangerous freaks and dissenters among us. I spent it mostly in the garden under a scrap of boiling London sky, contemplating all the things I’m suddenly not allowed to do anymore. That, and reading the papers, most of which have spent the post-Boris comedown wanking grotesquely over the Fritzl case.

In case you’ve spent the past month hiding in a box, this is the big Austrian incest story that made headlines across the world when it emerged that a grandfather in his seventies had imprisoned his daughter in a custom-built dungeon under his house and fathered seven children by her whilst the rest of the family lived upstairs in complete ignorance.

Horrific, utterly, stunningly horrific. And not something you’d ever see on these civilised islands, of course.

When was the last time you read a home-grown incest story in the British press? You can’t remember, can you? There’s a reason for that. No, it’s not that they don’t happen. It’s that both the law of the land and the journalists’ code of practice (PCC, ed.2006) expressly forbid the reporting of child sex cases and especially of incest cases.

Here’s the PCC:

Article 7. Children in sex cases

1. The press must not, even if legally free to do so, identify children under 16 who are victims or witnesses in cases involving sex offences.

2. In any press report of a case involving a sexual offence against a child, i) the child must not be identified; ii) the adult may be identified iii) the word ‘incest’ must not be used where a child victim might be identified; iv) care must be taken that nothing in the report implies the relationship between the accused and the child.

All jolly sensible stuff; thank you, the PCC. This law is specifically in place to prevent, just for example, the terrible feeding frenzy with which the British tabloids and dailies and even the broadsheets have descended on the hapless, vulnerable Fritzl children, ensuring that wherever they go in later life, they will be ‘those kids from the cellar’.

In the UK, a story like this simply would not have broken, or not in any matter which would have retained the human interest of this staggering piece of news. If Fritzl was identified, any sexual activity or abuse would have been omitted from the reports; if ‘incest’ was retained, reporters would have had to leave out everything else: a non-story. But because it happened in middle Europe, it’s open season for the press, and no doubt the bones of this tragic story will be picked clean before the summer is out. That, after all, is what the British press are here for.

But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen here, too. Incest happens in this country, every day. The sexual abuse of young girls and boys happens in this country, all the time, which is why gloating over something that happened in ‘Hitler’s homeland’ makes for such teeth-itching cultural hypocrisy. Everywhere, sad men are getting their grizzled rocks off on sexual power-trips over the young and fragile. It happens.

This, of course is also why internet paedophila is such a news fascination over here: as long as the story’s not about actual sex with an actual child, we can break it gloriously, splashing snaps of picture-hoarding perverts across the tabloids, whilst actual pederasty - physical sexual interference with children rather than just sick appreciation thereof - remains practically unreported.

But it happens. Violence against women and children happens. And whilst the law of this country protects young people from media scrutiny up to a point, we’d do well to remember the number of things we still don’t adequately protect them from. Perhaps we’re not quite as civilised as we think.

And that, frankly, is all I have to say on the matter. If anyone wants me, I’ll be in the garden smoking a fat reefer the size of a baby’s arm and watching zombie-porn. Come and join me, bring drinks.

Not 100% sure what delights Sunny has in store for everyone today…

(’Sunny delights’, GEDDIT!!! - Sorry, bit of a Glenda moment there, only to be expected when you’re monitoring Dorries)

…but in the mean time, the list of amendments to be debated on 20th May is mounting up, necessitating an update.

As far as the upper time limit for abortion goes, the current list (with sponsors) looks like this:
Continue reading…

Welcome to Casting the net, Liberal Conspiracy’s daily web review. As always, please feel free to share your own recommendations in the comments.

Dawn Teo - Why Edwards *hearts* Obama.
Gail Collins - There is one scenario where Hillary wins. And yeah, it’s a bit far-fetched and involves the state of Oregon slipping into the Pacific…
tygerland - [video] Clinton Speaks
Indigo Jo Blogs - On Ghayasuddin Siddiqui and the Quilliam Foundation’s launch event.
Alix Mortimer - The way the government handled the 10p tax change was a “disgrace”, but the way it has handled the climb-down is just pathetic.
Mark Pack - The Tories have been exposed as hypocrites… surely not???
Question That - The sticky moral wicket that is the Human Fertilization & Embryology Bill. Ian looks specifically at the “father figure” amendment - from a Libertarian perspective.
The Curvature - The US pro-choice lobbies are divided over Obama and Clinton. One is accusing the other of “dividing the movement”. Another tale of Liberals bickering amongst themselves?

The Fixed Term Parliaments Bill, introduced by David Howarth MP, receives its second reading debate in the House of Commons this Friday. LibdemVoice urges readers to get active.

A survey on LabourHome has found that just under a half are motivated enough to campaign for the party. “Shoring up the core vote” seems to be the most popular policy going forward. Is the party top-brass listening?

Abortion, and of course the wider issue of reproductive rights, still seems to be an area that the left need to be pushed on.

Yeah they will often make the right noises, but they will make excuses for anti abortion men such as Galloway, and yet I can’t see them being quite so tolerant if someone was, ooh let’s say pro-war. But abortion is a women’s issue isn’t it, it’s not quite up there with the serious male leftie men and their real politics about war and arguing the toss over the finer obscure theoretical points of Marxism or who did what when to whom in 1983.

That’s not to say the majority of the left aren’t pro choice and I’m not going to bang on about Galloway as it’s pointless. Back to the subject, the left and pro choice, why should they get their finger out on this?

Much has been said on this, so I will try to focus on what I see as specific issues for the left, starting with the fact that working class women are those who lose out the most when abortion rights are restricted. Money has always helped procure such services from discreet private doctors.

Working class women, pre 1967, had to make do with the back street abortionists and the resultant risks to health, potentially fatal.
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1) On March 19th Nadine Dorries MP published a blog-post titled The Hand of Hope, which featured this image of a small hand apparently coming out of a uterus. She said:

When the operation was over, baby Samuel, at 21 weeks gestation, put his hand through the incision in the uterus and grabbed hold of the surgeon’s finger, a gesture which was apparently met with a huge amount of emotion in the operating theatre. Dr Bruner said that it was the most emotional moment of his life and that for a moment he was just frozen, totally immobile.

Except, it was a hoax and Dr Bruner himself had said so. This was pointed out on several blogs including LC and Dorries wrote another post defending her actions with the view that the photographer, a born-again Christian, should be believed over the surgeon (who she had earlier quoted herself).

The Hand of Hope also makes an appearance on the pictures and video section of her new campaign. In other words, a member of parliament is actually perpetuating a hoax that has been debunked several times.

In many ways, this sums up her entire campaign.
Continue reading…

Welcome to Casting the net, Liberal Conspiracy’s daily web review. As always, please feel free to share your own recommendations in the comments.

Laurence Boyce - An account from the latest blogger audience with Nick Clegg.
Random Acts of Reality - Ponders another shitty night in an ambulance crew.
Dave Hill - Some inter-newspaper bitchiness causes smiles in the Hill family.
Obsolete - The sad death of a middle-class white boy has spurred on commentators to call for zero-tolerance policing, with The Sun claiming New York is now safer than London. Septicisle argues that figures suggest otherwise.
A Very Public Sociologist - Gladiators is/are BACK!
Bel is thinking - Political Journos concentrate too much on the Westminster narrative, rather than what policies actually mean to the voters.
Freakonomics - Why charitable donations to help those in Myanmar Burma will be meagre compared to Katrina and the Asian tsunami.
Mike Power - On the “All round shitbag and Lib Dem MP for Birmingham Yardley, John Hemming”.

Until relatively recently, standard British usage meant that describing someone as ‘a progressive’ was more or less the equivalent to branding them a communist fellow traveller. Not any more; we are all progressives now, it seems.

Isn’t anybody willing to stand up for honest-to-goodness barking mad reactionaries these days? It’s not as if they are an endangered species, after all. Surely such a sizeable constituency surely deserves a spokesperson more articulate than Melanie Phillips.

Yet the way things are going right now, most politicians would rather confess diabolism or an entry on the sex offenders’ register than admit to being on the wrong side of this divide.

This silliness reached its apogee in an article in the Independent last Friday, in which Tory leader David Cameron - pictured - attempted to rebrand the Conservatives as ‘the true progressives’:
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Whilst the weekend papers were regurgitating the ‘revelations’ in Cherie Blair’s autobiography (did you know Gordon & Tony don’t really get on? Yeah, I was stunned too!), the former Prime Minister’s wife was plotting to make an even more audacious attack on his successor. Why, you might ask, didn’t this feature prominently on Andrew Marr’s Sunday show or get plastered across the tabloids as a ‘Bollocking For Beleaguered Brown’? Well, probably because she was attacking him on a matter of substance.

A cell in Borstal, taken by Flickr user Flipsy (Creative Commons)
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The personal tax allowance is to be raised by £600 this year in an emergency measure to compensate those who lost out by Gordon Brown’s decision to scrap the 10p tax band, the Chancellor announced today.

“… but tragically Brown seems incapable of escaping from the neo-liberalism straight jacket he and Blair donned after the crushing defeat in 1992 which meant the interests of the market would always come first”, writes Neal Lawson of Compass in today’s Independent.

Welcome to Casting the net, Liberal Conspiracy’s daily web review. As always, please feel free to share your own recommendations in the comments. Apologies for the absence of the review yesterday, it was my little boy’s birthday and we had many Spider-man related things to see to.

New Mandala - There is no way that the Junta in Myanmar can pretend Cyclone Nargis didn’t happen, or hide behind local bureaucratic incompetence. Then again, its downfall has been predicted all too often.
JayWalk - The Chinese responses to recent disasters, convey a change in its political approach.
Adam Bowie - On Chinese TV’s moderated footage of the carnage, and how twitter propagated the news of disaster.
Political Wire - Is insolvency about to throttle Labour?
OurKingdom - Did Labour use the politics of fear on the Crewe and Nantwich by-election. Desperate times…
Cassilis - Labour - and the left in general - just don’t get it: David Cameron’s new “compassionate conservatism” is real, rooted in history, and ideologically sound.
peezedtee - Eight reasons why it’s time to call time on Labour.
Pickled Politics - And three reasons why Obama will be president.