Pro-life demonstrators confront pro-choice counterparts. Credit: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty

Earlier this week, a billboard next to Stella Creasy’s office bearing a picture of a 9-week-old foetus was taken down. Creasy, who is pro-choice, was being specifically targeted, as the board included the website link ‘stopstella.com’. She is also pregnant. The ad was pulled not by order of the Advertising Standards Agency (it met their requirements), but by the owner of the board, Clear Channel.
I felt the full force of this sad and difficult news story. Three years ago, while heavily and painfully pregnant with my second child, I emerged from Westminster tube to find an array of 10 feet high posters of dismembered foetuses. The tiny hands and feet I’d been looking at on a scan the previous day were displayed in agonising detail, post-abortion. I arrived at our nearby office soon after, white-faced and in tears. I promptly vomited. The image on the ad recently taken down was less graphic, but I can imagine Stella may still have been having similar days.
I host a podcast about dealing with difference and having difficult conversations, and this topic is excruciatingly hard to deal with. It is a deeply personal one. And for millions of women and couples, their choices either way are inescapable parts of their life stories. The issue also forms one of our deepest moral divides, and one of the hardest to find common ground on.
Two intensely serious moral goods are at stake. First is the freedom of a woman to control her own destiny in a world which is stacked against her; the freedom to choose the things she is prepared to ask her body to endure, and not be forced into the fundamentally self-sacrificial role of motherhood.
The second is the right of a vulnerable, voiceless and at least potentially tiny human to exist. Both these arguments have serious moral force, but they seem mutually exclusive. Each side picks the one they feel carries the most moral weight. If they — we — are honest, we admit that this choice is inevitably at the expense of the other. When dishonest, each seeks to erase the cost to the other and with this comes the utter erosion of trust.
This week, I’ve also been reading a new Rowan Williams lecture on political tribalism. He is typically brilliant at spearing our ludicrous tendency to see everyone as tribal except ourselves and says: “Political tribalism is above all a shrinkage of the scope of mutual recognition: I resolve not to think of the other’s view as sharing any of the moral anxieties or emotional tensions I experience.”
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