THE FACT THAT the anti-abortronists mounted a concerted attack on a woman's right to choose over the last month or so was not really S S:a -= 5= =a: atices in the broad5es: gress mere =a7! to the assault is * vzvę mdre _—.-2 -.*-= esi = e gress was also signifia': - ginng an extended platform to enza- sed anti-abortionists as well as to those who wished to ofter moral quid. ance to or judgement on the individuals under the spotlight Melanie Philips in 'The Observer' took up the debate on the fate of the embryos and went on to criticise both the whole basis of the embryology bill and a woman's right to abortion.
She argues .this is the rights agenda that says it is a woman's right to have a child if she wants one and her right to dispose of it if she does not. Human life nas become instrumental, a means to the end of the happiness of someone else.
Unborn babies are seen as a matter of personal property. The idea that there is a potentially distinct human being which calls upon obligations beyond the individual ego has been lost. How could it be otherwise if it is a woman's right to rhoce' She ignores the fact that it is not society that carries and then gives birth to children but individual women.
It is not the demand that women have the right to control their own bodies that is an 'instrumental' one but the notion that our wombs are at the disposal of policy makers and ideologues.
She ignores the reality of the millions of women who have died from backstreet abortions when even the limited access to the NHS that has existed since the 1967 Act was not available.
While she does not use explicitly religious terminology her argument is couched in mystical terms which are deterministic in their approach.
Human beings and most particularly women have to make do with the lot that The National Abortion Campoign demonstrates is given them. Underneath this there seems to be a hostility to the notion that science can ever bring progress - that it can be used for the benefit of society and of the individuals that make it up.
If these are the arguments of post-feminists then it is surely clear that womens' oporession is alive and well.
The fact that such a debate is happeriing in the press demonstrates once again the need for a concerted battle for women's liberation.
Socialist Outlook |07 • September 7 1996.