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.’
She is certainly concerned about the junk science being witlessly peddled by the likes of Queen Halfwit Nadine Dorries, but she is perhaps more concerned about those MPs who sit somewhere in the middle, do not hold hardline views either way on abortion, and may still be persuaded to vote in unhelpful ways. That’s where the danger probably lies, as attendees of this year’s earlier Abortion Rights’ lobbies are only too aware.
As Clark rightly pointed out at one of those lobbies, parliament is made up largely of men. Those men need to know that women won’t tolerate negative equity when it comes to abortion rights. ‘We must build such a campaign [that] the men who are going to vote on whether we have the right to make a choice have no choice but to accept that we need real rights…’ After all, as Clark says now: ‘we [already] know which way pro-lifers will vote.’
She isn’t especially minded to say how Labour MPs are likely to vote, though, which doesn’t inspire confidence, altogether: ‘It’s a free vote… Labour MPs have traditionally been pro-choice,’ is as far as Clark will go on that topic. I push her a bit further on it, because I think we need to know how things are going on the left.
Clark says that she has spoke to ‘dozens of MPs’ on the subject, but that she will not speculate on Labour’s general mood or inclination on the topic of time limit. ‘I won’t go down that path,’ she says firmly. This isn’t the best thing I’ve heard, to be honest - is this just clever political reticence, or does it mean that Gordon Brown is still permitting his limping troops to dither?
Suffice to say, Clark says, that the anti-abortion lobby has played a dirty game by trying to amend the Abortion Act via the HFEB, and by trying to argue that the 24-week time limit for abortion and foetal viablity are somehow related in the modern age. As we are all well aware, the anti-abortion lobby does women a great disservice by arguing ‘that the science [saving babies born at 24 weeks or earlier] has changed… despite the view that has been given by all the medical authorities. The whole debate has become about viability.’
Clark is right, but only partly so, I think. To my mind, the debate, when it comes down to it, is about Labour MPs having the bottle to vote in favour of liberal abortion law and against any attempts to amend the law as we have it. That is their natural territory and they still have the numbers to hold it. Gordon needs to grab his men by the balls in the manly way that he did when chasing the Labour party leadership.
In my humble opinion.
Write to your MP about defending a woman’s right to choose, and do it now if you can, because it sounds from the above like a few of them are still not quite sure which way is up.
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