As part of her campaign to force the government to reduce the 24 week limit within which women can legally have abortions, the MP Nadine Dorries yesterday unveiled 20 reasons for 20 weeks.

Today, we publish 24 reasons for 24 weeks, as part of our own campaign to fight for women’s rights to abortion.
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In the pages of the Daily Mail yesterday, anti-choice poster-girl Nadine Dorries MP was given a platform to put across her misogynist, reactionary views.

She and a claimed ‘coalition of 200′ MPs are calling for a reduction in the time limit on legal abortion from 24 to 20 weeks, despite a lack of evidence that fetuses can survive outside the womb before that point and despite the fact that most women are against further reductions in the time limit.
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(I was asked to give a speech, yesterday, at the Housmans Bookshop in London. This is an extract from what I said)

A sea-change is taking place in contemporary feminism, particularly in the cities. Feminism is moving out of the universities and back onto the streets, as women of all backgrounds realise that practical action, class agitation and the rights of ordinary, working women are, and always have been, the future of the movement.

Midway through writing this article on Monday, I had a pregnancy scare. My period was a couple of days late, I was spotting but not cramping, I was off my food… I panicked.

It didn’t take me long to decide that I would want to terminate the pregnancy, and that meant a litmus test for my socialism: should I spend my limited savings, money that could be going towards vital schooling, on a quick, safe, private abortion, or should I go through the stress and psycho-physical trauma of asking for an abortion on the NHS?
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John Prescott has made eating disorders news again by coming out as bulimic. This, of course, is a perfect opportunity for me to latch myself on to my favourite look-at-this-damn-issue horse. Eating disorders need celebrity chic to be news these days, but they don’t cease to be a dangerous epidemic when someone famous hasn’t just bared their soul in a lucrativebook deal.

The thousands of brilliant young, and not so young people who are killed or mentally crippled by bulimia, anorexia, bulimarexia, binge-eating and other disorders every year fail to make regular headlines for one reason only: it’s a ‘girl’s illness.’
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Have you got worries?
Are you struggling to deal with the hefty demands of modern womanhood?
Are you unable to sleep in patriarchal space?
Are you exhausted from supervising the intricate gender fuckeries of your friends, family and pets?
Are you probed by Margaret Thatcher in your dreams?

Help is at hand, as Pennyred turns feminist agony auntie. Post your woes, rants and distressed frothings in the comments, or email to laurie.penny@gmail.com and my secretary will deal with you, once he’s finished ironing my thongs.

Replies shall be swift and terrible.

Back in the meatspace I’m now a journalism student, and I learnt something very interesting at hack school today:

You do not mess with the police.

No, really.
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Maths prodigy Sufih Yusof outed herself last week as the latest girl-genius to hang up her blue stockings for suspenders and a push-up bra. Sufiah, an Oxbridge scholar at the age of thirteen, sold her story of academic destitution leading to high-class prostitution to several major tabloids after being outed by the News of the World.

The story, of course, is an old favourite just screaming to be partnered with extensive photographs of the economics PhD in various states of graphic undress, brandishing whips and dildos and pull-outs about loving sex with random strangers.
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Last week the National Union of Students threw out a proposal to drastically restrict its campaigning and representative powers by an approximate ten-vote margin. Frustrated by this narrow defeat at the annual conference, Labour Students, ‘independent’ Labour affiliates and other centre-right groups have already drawn up plans for an extraordinary conference to attempt to pull the changes through.

If they do go through, NUS democracy will be re-focused upon “celebrating the achievements” of the union, with a cutback in constructive debate and a much larger role for external, unelected political and corporate ‘advisers’.

NUS radicalism has been so eroded over the past decade, however, that there’s barely been a murmur of fuss has been made about all of this outside the narrow alley of student politics: as a former NUS rep for Goldsmiths commented, “It’s been coming for a long time.”
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Violent pornography has become part of our cultural language. Its conceits are used to sell everything, from clothes to cars to women’s underwear. But is censorship the answer?

A recent article of mine on The F Word in response to new UK porn laws laid down by the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill 2008 generated a surprising amount of controversy. In brief, part of the Bill sets out to ban various forms of ‘extreme’ pornography, including bestiality, necrophilia and some ’snuff’ porn.
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A victory this week for the Safety First Coalition, as legislation attempting to further criminalise prostitutes was thrown out, once more, by the House of Lords. The legislation, which would have involved forced rehabilitation or prison for repeat offenders and greater powers given to the police to arrest and incarcerate hookers, has been officially axed from the extremely dubious Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill. (Keep your eye on this one).

Call me sally-state-the-obvious, but when a person is in the sort of situation where prostitution starts looking like a viable career option, the fact that it might be illegal is probably going to be the least of their worries. Right, I’m going to take a job which is widely seen as degrading, unstable, hugely dangerous, exposes me daily to disease and isolates me from my friends and family - no, but wait! I might get a criminal record!
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