EDITORIAL •
Beware oI
"enlightened"
Tories!
WHEN the Tory government takes what might
"enlightened" stand, it is useful to look a little closer at the issues involved. Norman Fowler, axeman of the National Health Service and social security benefits, postures as the opponent of commercial exploitation of childbirth cardiac surgery unit at Guy's Hospital is forced to go begging to an American millionaire for a £272,000 hand-out to keep going for 12 months, Fowler gives top priority to rushing through new legislation to
Why? Behind the moral rectitude of opposing the cash transaction, the real Tory objection is that this arrangement falls outside their cloistered Victorian in which the ideal woman is a submissive child bearer, child rearer, and domestic subordinate to her husband. Children born quite deliberately out of wedlock have no place in such a scheme of things: but neither have abortion rights, adequate sex education or contraception for girls under 16. The Tory "model" family, far from being a focus for emotional support and satisfaction, plays a role as a moral straitjacket, confining the development of millions of women and young people within arbitrary limits and compounding the stress and distress of the 1980s. In fact the Tory Canutes are setting themselves the task of turning back a major tide of social development. "model" family with a and wife in the home caring for children is a mere 5% of present households. To reverse this would take more than legislation.
An additional factor in Fowler's haste to push anti-surrogate continuing Tory compulsion - which we also see in their attempts at anti-abortion laws - to dictate to women how they may or may not use their bodies. While it is seen as a matter of the highest principle for the (male) owner of a money-grabbing private hundreds of low-paid women health workers into 40 cent cuts in their wages in pursuit of "efficiency'" in the NHS, it is regarded as beyond the pale for a woman to decide of her own free will to accept a relatively modest fee for bearing a child for example of high-falutin' hypocrisy is not unique. Another example is the ultra-right wing's crusade against pornography in its various forms. For the blue-rinse brigade this is simply the thin "respectable" end of a wedge of censorship which thev would like to impose tar and wide as a means of imposing their archaic and objectionable political views and reactionary religious prejudices upon the population as a whole.
While socialists pornography as the
Socialist Viewpoint, No. 4, March 1985. Page 1
Suicide by two girls
HOME NEWS
since ruling on Pill
By DAVID FLETCHER Health serviceal.urreaponr
Contraceptive
Two young girls have committed suicide follo he Pill to girls under 16 without their p Appeal Court be on doctors prescr sponge 'a risk
Consen. ederain of the Bors: DOG LOVE for under-16s'
Abortion at 15 for!
girl refused Pill
by OLIVIA TIMES
Of
3. #
Aboul ( degradation of women and of men, we have nothing with the Whitehouse book burners, either in our long-term objective. Breaking the hold of pornography and smashing it as a multi-million pound industry is integrally linked to the struggle against all forms of women's oppression and anti-gay bigotry: that means fighting against precisely those same self appointed moral censors of the right wing. It requires a fundamental change in the conditioning and education of the male (and female) population: such changes, which we begin wherever we can, can only be completed on a mass scale when the levers of power are taken from the capitalists who exploit sexual and racial divisions in the working class for their own commercial and political advantage.
Fowler's new Bill has no more intention of liberating women than Victoria Gillick's High Court ruling liberated girls under 16. While socialists and feminists must seriously address the new problems raised by the development of science in the field of embryology, and the issues involved in surrogacy, we must ensure that our aims and objectives are clearly distinguished from those of the Tory backwoods and front bench men and women whose only concern is to shackle women more securely to the kitchen sinks.