Then came this week’s visit by Pope Leo XIV to France, which has been marked by the Bishop of Rome’s constant, special solicitude for those whom medicine once branded “retarded.” Will it spur Christians, and perhaps others, to return the R-word to the realm of taboo? And would such a social shift have any wider positive effect, besides marginally curbing the coarseness of daily language? 

Let us pray. And not just for the sake of being decent. But because in the age of AI and “agentic” machines, a culture that mocks and denigrates human frailty — that reduces worth to intelligence and agency — may soon target many people, including those who today consider themselves gifted and use the R-word with abandon.

Much has been made of the surprising resurgence of French Catholicism, amply on display in the 800,000 souls who attended the Roman pontiff’s Mass at the Place de la Concorde and the long lines of penitents waiting to pour out their troubled consciences to priests in open-air confessionals. Yet if there is a unifying theme to Leo’s French trip, which continues through Monday, it is the inviolable dignity of the vulnerable, including the elderly, the infirm, and people suffering from mental and intellectual disabilities.

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On his way through the streets of Paris, Leo stopped the pope-mobile to bless a severely disabled girl, creating what is likely to be one of the defining images of his reign. At his Paris Mass, the altar servers included six young men with Down syndrome. And speaking at Lourdes, where an apparition of the Virgin Mary has long drawn those seeking healing beyond what medical science can achieve, Leo launched a jeremiad (in the true sense of the word) against abortion and assisted suicide. The former, selective abortion, has all but eliminated people with Down syndrome from some jurisdictions. The latter, assisted suicide and euthanasia, increasingly ensnares people with intellectual disabilities like autism.

“No human law should ever make you lose the certainty of your dignity,” the pope told the patients and their carers at Lourdes. “You are not a burden. You are the beating heart of our humanity and a precious treasure for the Church.” He added: “It is precisely in the name of this inalienable dignity of the human person that we must reject the temptation to cause death under the guise of false compassion. It is impossible to regard causing death as something normal.  What is legal is not necessarily moral.”

Defending vulnerable life is, of course, nothing new for Catholicism. The Didache — one of the earliest compilations of Church teaching, generally dated to the late first century — includes the injunction: “do not abort a fetus or kill a child that is born.” In modern times, that consistent, maddeningly unbending ethic of life has occasioned some of the Church’s most morally heroic moments, even and especially amid its failures. 

In the Nazi period, for example, when too many of the German bishops kept mum about the Holocaust and otherwise failed to resist Hitler, one prelate stood tall for the cause of life. I’m speaking of the bishop of Münster, Clemens August Graf von Galen, who, on Aug. 3, 1941,  delivered a homily condemning Aktion T4, the Third Reich’s program of involuntary euthanasia targeting the physically and neurologically disabled and mentally ill. 

A massacre of the innocents was afoot, von Galen charged, “because in the judgment of some official body, on the decision of some committee, they have become ‘unworthy to live,’ because they are classed as ‘unproductive members of the national community.’ Poor human beings, ill human beings, they are unproductive, if you will. But does that mean that they have lost the right to live? Have you, have I, the right to live only so long as we are productive?”

That productivity aspect is the heart of the problem today. In the postwar period, overt eugenics and overtly coercive euthanasia were out of the question, having been tainted by association with the Nazis. But the Church now detects the same impulses lurking under the guise of “choice” and “compassion” and the obscene phrase “death with dignity,” used to describe doctors dealing death. Scratch through such cant, the recent pontiffs have argued, and you find the same ideas: that worth lies in productive intelligence, the capacity for autonomous choice or “agentic” activity (to use today’s parlance). The distance isn’t far from that premise to the conclusion that some lives just aren’t worth keeping around. 

In his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’, Pope Francis warned against a “dominant technocratic paradigm” that only finds value in “a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object.” People with intellectual disabilities frequently fall short of this paradigm, but so do many others. So do babies in gestation and young children. So do the elderly. And so do people undergoing chemotherapy. All of us spend great stretches of our lives in various states of vulnerability and incapacity and unproductivity.

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Which brings us to Leo XIV. The new pontiff has so far devoted the lion’s share of his teaching to the moral challenges posed by AI. He and the Church aren’t opposed to automation. On the contrary, emancipating man from “arduous, repetitive, or dangerous” labor, as his encyclical on AI put it, has long been an aspiration of classical and Christian civilization. Insofar as AI achieves this emancipation, it is to be welcomed — but not when it intrudes upon distinctly human activities or if it recasts our conception of human worth.

That last danger is already present in practices like selective abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide, and is likely to be greatly magnified in the age of AI. Indeed, during his visit to France, Leo explicitly linked the two. Speaking on Friday at a gathering of UNESCO, he commented, “The paradox has become increasingly evident: while ‘intelligence’ is attributed to computational systems, we struggle to recognize the inalienable dignity of human persons, whose lives are judged according to the criterion of efficiency and, when deemed no longer productive, are rejected and discarded.”

A large language model can never replicate human intelligence, which, as Leo has noted, includes wisdom and other depths that are impenetrable to the machine. Yet in terms of raw computation and recall, my Claude app is already far more capable than I. Compared to it, I am a “retard.” Is it that hard to imagine a not-too-distant future in which an LLM in the employ of my insurer decides I should no longer receive medical care in light of my mental shortcomings?

Renouncing the R-word won’t forestall such a future, of course. That will take collective political action. And there are plenty of people who are perfectly polite in ordinary discourse, even as they pursue monstrous ends in politics or business. But each time we do use that word, we not only trample the dignity of some of the most defenseless people among us, but strengthen the technocratic paradigm that, left unchecked, could soon discard many or even most of us.

Replace the general term “babies” with “babies still in the womb”, and this was the underwhelming shape of an argument offered by the abortion provider, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) this week, defending the parliamentary reform that recently decriminalized late term abortion for women, right up until birth. As is now clear, there has been a significant rise in women attempting late-term abortions of babies at home, using the pills-by-post scheme first introduced during lockdown. In future, providers not acting within existing abortion rules can still be prosecuted, as can other participants. But after a vote in the Lords last week, it seems that the woman herself will be officially off the hook.

BPAS thinks this is as it should be, and favors what we might call the Victim Strategy as its rationale. That is, it urges us to picture all such women as in desperate circumstances, with limited responsibility almost by definition. Any cases involving the deaths of babies after 24 weeks — whether intentional, natural, or accidental — are to be pitied alike, and offered nothing but sympathy and support. Prosecution is inappropriate a priori.

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On this approach, the death of a baby is only ever something that happens to a woman and never something she does. The BPAS website reminds us that women who attempt late-term abortions include “victims of domestic abuse, human trafficking, and children”. Sharp-eyed readers will notice that the interests of even smaller children, also in desperate circumstances, somehow don’t figure at all.

At the same time as this justification was being offered, a rather different one was being given by the former chief executive of BPAS, Ann Furedi, who has also written a book on the subject. Let’s call this one the Omniscient Gambit. It starts with the same premise: only tiny numbers of women seek late-term abortions. It also assumes, with equally strange confidence, that this fact is unlikely to change even despite decriminalization. But rather than conjure up the frantic mental states of the woman concerned, Furedi urges us to see her as uniquely mentally competent.

We should trust the pregnant woman’s decision-making, Furedi says; for “[t]he best person to answer the question of whether to have an abortion should be the woman who has to live with the consequences”. And in an earlier article on the recent increase in abortions generally — 300,000 in 2023, as opposed to 630,000 live births — Furedi writes: “Women who use abortion to back up their contraception are not immoral or reckless. They are making the decision that’s best for them.”

The Victim Strategy and the Omniscient Gambit can’t both be true. Women seeking late-term abortions for healthy babies cannot be disempowered, traumatized wrecks, but also clear-sighted rational actors whose decisions society should respect. If the number of late-term abortions grows after the removal of the criminal deterrent, then presumably the defenders will stick to their respective sweeping stories even so. Women who induce late abortions are too emotionally delicate to withstand judicial scrutiny, but somehow also powerfully agentic. Either way, their personal involvement in the deaths of their babies is no matter for the law.

Away from the lobbyists, the most obvious thing to predict about such cases is that they are bound to differ. Feminists originally fought to get people to see women as having a fully human nature. In practice, this means that women vary from one another — but it seems the old myth of a feminine hive mind can still occasionally be useful. In reality, for some of the women deliberately ingesting abortifacients at a late stage of pregnancy, there will be mitigating factors in light of their circumstances and personal histories. For others there will not — as is the case when assessing potentially criminal activity, generally. The police and the CPS used to be able to investigate, and could make allowances where appropriate; but soon no longer.

Another problem with both Victim and Omniscient defenses is that they treat women’s behavioral patterns with respect to late abortion as static, no matter what changes in the law, social norms, or new technologies are introduced. Both assume that the circumstances of rare cases in the past will be a reliable guide to what people do in future, even as the numbers of abortions generally have been leaping upward since the pandemic. Clearly, moral attitudes towards abortion are not fixed. If they were, it would be hard to understand why lobbying groups like BPAS spend so much time and money trying to change them.

It seems we have here another example of the “Let’s Be Free” people and the “Let’s Be Kind” people teaming up to wreak havoc upon settled moral intuitions. I first noticed the dynamic during the gender wars, and wrote about it then: of gimlet-eyed sexual libertarians taking advantage of the cover provided by mumsy rainbow types with lanyards. While the former pushed the boundaries, the latter preached compassion to unfortunate minorities and accused anyone who objected of cruelty. To their credit, some present defenders of late-term abortion were staunchly against the primacy of gender identity all along, including Furedi. Others — like MP Stella Creasy, for instance — seemed completely taken in. Promoting the chemical alteration of young people’s bodies by doctors was said to be both the exercising of a fabulous right to self-expression and a life-saving kindness for the unfortunate. Letting men have access to women’s services and spaces was both taboo-busting liberation and a favor bestowed on the basically pitiable. Whenever the freedom narrative became too alarming in its consequences, the kindness narrative was there to do some strategic shushing and patting, soothing any nascent doubts.

Although it doesn’t work in exactly the same way, a related dynamic operates in the assisted death discourse. (I go into the matter in some detail in my new book, published next week.) Avowed freedom-lovers tend to frame assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia as simple exercises of autonomy. They are nobody else’s business but the person concerned. Like the pregnant woman seeking an abortion, we should trust someone seeking his own death to know what is best for him. As with the pregnant woman, any officials expediting the deed need not inquire as to the individual’s particular reasons. A person’s grounds for self-extinction should not be the law’s concern.

Presented baldly like this, the argument is scarcely compelling as a justification for medical involvement in suicide. In the case of abortion, the risk to maternal health is sufficient to justify clinical oversight. It is partly this fact that allows the pro-abortion lobby to keep repeating the line that abortion is always “vital healthcare” — even, ludicrously, when they are talking about self-administered late interventions which may pose significantly greater risk to the woman’s health than giving birth.

But in the case of a desired suicide, the grave risk to health is priced into the project — indeed, it is its whole point. So it is still unclear why doctors are morally obliged to assist. At this point, though, the “kindness” people helpfully enter the scene, insisting it is urgent that doctors facilitate things — not as a matter of respecting autonomous wishes, generally, but rather as a matter of merciful intervention for ill people in particular.

They say we ought to be putting poor suffering souls out of their misery when their lives are no longer worth living. Unlike the subjective freedom narrative, then, this one puts a definite value on a so-called undignified life. Thanks to the dust thrown up between these two different stories — and the tendency of each group to use the language of the other when it suits — any proposed safeguards aimed at establishing whether death really is the most merciful option for a suffering person are stifled at birth. Cautious measures — insisting on an adequate reflection period; requesting that an applicant receive a palliative care consultation; excluding people with learning difficulties as too suggestible; and many others — are judged to be obstacles to the realization of personal freedom, and then dismissed.

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Why our legislators should be so befuddled by the twin siren calls of freedom and kindness is an interesting question. Clearly our legal and political institutions are weak and easily distracted, helplessly prey to pressure groups with catchy but ultimately shallow slogans. The focus on getting access to a particular “freedom” — by “right”, even — is often just a disguised demand for some concession, regardless of the secondary effects on others. To disguise the implicit foot-stamping, it is useful to find a particular group of people for whom the concession superficially looks like a compassionate response. At this point, further leveraging can begin. In Canada, euthanasia was first granted only for the terminally ill; but soon enough, disabled people were able to receive it with no terminal diagnosis. As things stand, the mentally ill will get access in 2027. Today, 5% of deaths are now at the hands of doctors, a number that is going up each year.

And as for full-term abortion here, it seems likely that — having removed the women at the center of the story from the possibility of prosecution — there will be later attempts to legalize the process fully, removing providers and partners from criminal sanctions too. Indeed, Creasy has been trying to do this for some time.

Though decriminalization is currently being presented by BPAS as a kindness towards damaged and exploited women-children, I predict that institutional memories will be short. After some time has passed, the act at the heart of the debate will be framed once again as a vital freedom for all kickass girlbosses, at which point surrounding prohibitions can fall away. How can it be rational, it will be asked, to punish providers, doctors, or romantic partners for helping with a process that is not actually a crime for the main participant? Not wishing to go against women’s “reproductive freedoms” or indeed their “vital healthcare”, many politicians once again will not know what to say.

Do Not Go Gentle: The Case Against Assisted Death by Kathleen Stock (Little Brown £22) is published on April 2nd.

Or here is another puzzle. Why does the British Pregnancy Advisory Service — the UK’s main abortion provider, and uncompromising in its mission to facilitate women’s reproductive choices, whatever they are — explain on its website that their clients may take “pregnancy remains” away afterwards for a “private service, burial or cremation”? Why might anyone want to do such a thing?

It is easy enough to arrive at the answers to these questions in your head, provided you don’t have to say them out loud. The first says: ending the lives of fetuses simply because they are female is nowhere near good enough a justification for such a momentous action. Abortions should only be done for a highly restricted set of reasons. They should not be just nodded through for any reason a pregnant woman likes.

And the second says: a woman might want to have a private service or burial afterwards for her fetus, because she recognizes that her decision helped to cause the death of her child — or of her potential child, if you prefer. Either way, she may well be grieving the loss.

Underpinning each of these answers are further facts, equally difficult to spell out in polite society. A life is deliberately ended during the abortion process, whatever else is saved or enabled. Deliberately causing death is a morally serious matter, deserving deep consideration and adequate justification. For some, it is tempting to picture any pregnant adult woman contemplating this as in an unsought, perhaps even coerced situation, with no real responsibility for the outcome. But in a society that contains sex education, consensual relationships, free contraception, and the morning-after pill in pharmacies, this is just not true for many.

Putting things like this does not mean that abortion must be wrong. In a fraught situation with no winners, even the right decision can produce awful outcomes. Sometimes life forces you to opt, very reluctantly, for the least worst thing rather than the best.

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But thanks to the hegemonic, sanitized account of abortion circulated by influential medical and feminist organizations, this difficult conversation is not even available. Instead, enormous efforts are made to make the decision sound no more important than choosing to get a haircut, or opting to let it grow out. On this view, as summed up in the new Scottish report, “women should have the right to their own reproductive choices and are best placed to make pregnancy decisions based on their personal circumstances”. It’s just healthcare, after all — or so the experts keep insisting — and the fact that the health of the occupant in the womb is not obviously improved by the process is neither here nor there.

From the bland starting point of these people, it would be weirdly arbitrary to oppose women having abortions on sex-selective grounds. Why shouldn’t they have one for any reason they like, since the action is essentially trivial anyway? So morally negligible is the process supposed to be, that for years several Royal Colleges have been arguing it should be fully decriminalized, even up to full-term. In June this year, the House of Commons agreed.

During parliamentary debate at the time, ethical concern was mainly reserved for pregnant women who had illegal late-term abortions at home, and who then faced the supposedly cruel threat of prosecution afterwards. Implicit was the idea that such women could only have done harm to their own health, and not to anyone else’s; and hence that there was no need for any law to punish them, nor to deter future others from doing the same.

And now a Scottish “expert group” is arguing not just for decriminalization, but for a significant relaxation of current medical requirements too. Up to 24 weeks, you should be able to abort for any reason you like — including “because it’s a girl”, or indeed “because it’s a boy”. Post-24 weeks, current regulations restrict abortion to cases where the baby or mother’s life or health is gravely threatened; but the authors say that this too should be changed.

According to their recommendations, two “appropriately trained registered healthcare professionals” — not necessarily doctors — should now decide whether a post-24 weeks abortion is “appropriate”, vaguely taking relevant circumstances into account. Unspoken here is the fact that “appropriately trained” assessors will not be able to rule any such decision out; for on what grounds could they, or their trainers, object? It has already been conceded that abortion is a decision only relevant to the woman concerned. She is simply exercising her autonomy, with no downsides for anyone else important.

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It is not that this conspiracy of silence is badly motivated. Indeed, perversely, the staunch commitment to maintaining levels of denial pays secret tribute to the weightiness of the decision, coupled with the knowledge that so many women have already made that choice. There is a lot of guilt, shame, regret; not for everyone but certainly for some, albeit that most therapists will not openly acknowledge it either. In a spirit of sisterhood there is an urge not just to keep away from a painful place, but to try and make it less painful by positive reframing. Other women will try to make you feel better about a terrible haircut. Of course they are going to do it here too.

Signs of the desire to avoid reality are everywhere in the Scottish report. As usual with these things, there is a fussy focus on language. At one point, the sex of pregnant women is referred to as “assigned at birth”, technically making sex-selective abortion impossible anyway. Abortion is — to repeat — just a matter of receiving “healthcare”, a domain which suddenly and conveniently has no ethical dimensions whatsoever.

There is also a lot of cherry-picking, camouflaged in technocratic language. International “best practice” on abortion should be followed, we are told, except when it comes to endorsing the more conservative gestational age limits common in Europe. The concerns of dissenting “stakeholders” worried about existing age limits are waved away. Any attempt to bring the question back to morality is placed out of bounds: “the moral status” of the fetus, we are told, “fell outwith the scope of the review”.

In this way, the authors pretend to themselves they are not doing ethics, when quite obviously they have already taken a view. Admittedly, it is historically a complicated subject. Over the past few decades, there has been much philosophical discussion of whether fetuses count as babies, or human beings, or persons in their own right. It seems to me that, at least by the time we are urgently resuscitating their identically aged peers in neonatal intensive care units, they are clearly all three.

But even if younger, non-viable fetuses were only a kind of pre-human animal — animate and perhaps sentient, but otherwise unfortunately deficient in the personhood stakes — they should surely still be of some moral concern. They would not therefore be nothing. As a society, we care a lot about animals, and disapprove of harming them for no good reason. Why not here too?

I know how these conversations tend to go. Along with anger at the heresy — not to mention irrelevant comparisons to draconian US regimes — there will likely be deference paid to the supposed real-life judgments of actual women. People don’t tend to get an abortion lightly, I will be told. Actually, I know that is not always true. But to the extent that it is, it can only confirm my basic point: unlike many of those professionally interested in the subject, others understand that there is a weighty decision to be made about a prospective death, and not every motivation is a good one. The state putting limits on unacceptable decision-making is therefore as it should be. This is not the same as a “ban”.

It will take courage to talk openly about the social and personal losses of abortion, as well as the gains. Doing so need not entail placing unhelpful blame or stigma on woman who have had one (or two, or three); nor upon the medics who carried it out. It is clear that a well-oiled system, governed by a code of silence towards half of the story, has colluded to produce present behavior. But unless someone challenges the vision, we are not so much faced with a slippery slope as an utterly frictionless one.

The numbers are leaping up annually — perhaps fueled by the continuation of the pills-by-post scheme, first instigated during Covid and then kept on. We already have highly permissive rules, and yet they keep being challenged by people with simple-minded fixations, who show no signs of wanting to slow things down.

In order to complain about this respectably, you are not supposed to approach directly, but have to find some circuitous route: to talk hyperbolically about the evils of sex-selection, or about the dire specter of population decline. You can’t mention the most obvious ethical difficulty: hundreds and thousands of deaths. By all means, let’s talk about the effects of abortion on adults. But – if we have to use mindless bureaucratic language – let’s not pretend that there aren’t other stakeholders here too.

It’s a logic also championed by the women in Donald Trump’s administration, who deliver home truths from the Oval Office through the fog of hairspray. In a crusade against liberal values, these women have positioned themselves as defenders of the sex, speakers of common sense and protectors of children: they are the successors of the Right-wing women Dworkin observed in 1983.

The Maga line-up is fierce. There’s South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace, who has carved out a reputation as a thorn in the side of the “lunatic Left’s” gender politics. Then there’s Karoline Leavitt, a blonde sharpshooter who, at just 28, holds ruthless court during the White House’s press briefings. Leavitt has made her name puncturing liberals with all the deference of a Twitter troll: when a New York Times reporter sent her an email, she replied: “As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios.” And, of course, there’s Kristi Noem, secretary for homeland security, nicknamed “ICE Barbie” for her beauty-queen brown balayage and tough talk on immigration. Her greatest hits include the catchphrases “Leave now or pay up” and “It’s a warzone down there”.

Uncouth though it may be to point out, these women all epitomize the Magababe look. The “uniform” of the top women in the Trump administration — barrel curls, lacquered lashes, pageant-queen contouring — is not coincidental. Barbara Res, who worked closely with the President for two decades and built Trump Tower, recalled in her admittedly vengeful memoir that he tended to hire “Barbies” and would “criticize his female employees for their looks”, for being too fat or too thin or otherwise unappealing. Gritty glamour is a winning look on the new Right: owning the libs turns voters’ heads when delivered through glossed lips.

Many of the Maga maneaters’ British counterparts appear to have noticed this, and have begun emulating both their look and their language. Take Michelle Dewberry, one of the most astringent voices on the contemporary Right, who won the second series of The Apprentice in 2006 and now presents the GB News show Dewbs & Co. Dewberry echoes Noem, Leavitt et al’s argumentative mode: in her brusque Hull brogue and bright red lipstick, she interviews sacrificial Left-wingers with the air of a stern mother dressing down a tipsy teenager after they’ve stumbled in from a party. Reform councillor Laila Cunningham, another straight-talking footsoldier of the glamorous new Right, is equally happy to devour Blairites on primetime TV like a gleeful lioness.

Like Noem, Dewberry often plays the no-nonsense mum card. Last week Noem, decked out in false eyelashes and a Border Patrol baseball cap, said it was her status as “a wife, a mother and a grandmother” that guided her in going after immigration crime “for American families”. Dewberry made a similar case: “I’m not a Reform representative, I’m just a mum”, she said, while discussing potential school shootings in Britain should Nigel Farage adopt the American approach to gun laws. With the air of an exasperated woman in a playground, she said the Lib Dem leader Ed Davey should be “ashamed of himself” for conjuring the image of British children cowering under desks to hide from marauding gunmen.

Of course, being “just a mom” is surprisingly versatile political dynamite. Fuming moms have advocated for almost every pressure group under the sun, from banning vaccines to boosting gun control. “Mom politics” — duty, protectiveness and common sense — has always had a place in British conservatism, from Thatcher’s economics of the thrifty housewife to the shock troops of Mumsnet who have, more than most women in Westminster, set the agenda on sex-based rights. If Reform’s top women — who call themselves, emetically, Farage’s Fillies — are determined to emulate Maga’s success among middle-aged American women, it will also be by appealing to them as mothers. Cunningham, a likely future star of the party, knows this, and has already used a Mail thinkpiece about her own children being mugged to make a Jenrickian case for tough justice. At a press conference on women’s safety last month, she called herself a “vigilante mom”, a title Andrea Jenkyns, the Reform mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, has also embraced. In this, they are canny: after all, who better to wrangle a chaotic toddler party than a vanguard of moms?

Their leader, Farage, has himself made a bold grab for the female electorate. He has (correctly) acknowledged that protecting women and girls will be the “next big issue in British politics”, and the question has lingered over this year’s two biggest culture-war flashpoints so far: the anti-migrant protests and the preservation of single-sex spaces. As the migrant hotel ruckus rumbles into the autumn, Reform’s candor on these twin concerns will be a tonic to those sick of progressive deflection. Last month, Jenkyns used a Reform for Women press conference, alongside the MP Sarah Pochin, to declare the vulnerability of women and girls a “national emergency … enabled” by the government’s asylum policy. While Labour has been squeamishly evasive on whether unchecked illegal immigration does in fact endanger British women and girls (duh), they have shamelessly handed the argument to the hard Right. Kemi Badenoch has been characteristically forthright, saying “As a mom, nothing matters more than protecting children”, but it may seem too little too late from a party which, after all, oversaw vast numbers of illegal migrants arriving in Britain.

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At present the weakest link in Reform’s case for common sense on women’s issues is Vanessa Frake, whose defenestration as justice adviser must be in the post after an off-party-line refusal to say she’d remove trans-identified men from women’s prisons in August. Farage distanced himself from her remarks shortly after, keen to hold the line: in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of “woman” in the spring, he described the move as an “outbreak of common sense”.

But Farage’s Fillies do have an Achilles’ high heel. Aping transatlantic politics is not straightforward, and following Maga’s tactical roadmap on female voters may have unanticipated consequences for the daughters of the very moms Reform is targeting. If mishandled, the supposed “common sense” approach which worked for Maga could unravel politicians’ credibility on issues which call for more complex consideration. One such issue is our country’s 60-year-old abortion law: Pochin, Reform’s only woman MP, has held the UK’s 24-week limit responsible for “murdering babies”, evangelical language which until recently would have been laughed off stage in Britain. Farage has called the limit “utterly ludicrous”. To be clear, just 0.1% of abortions in the UK happen at or beyond the 24-week mark; 88% of abortions are performed at less than 10 weeks. Of the 260 abortions carried out at or beyond 24 weeks in 2022, all but four were for fetal abnormalities. But such data points do not matter for those inherently opposed to the procedure at all, and it is this willful misdirection which resulted in the repealing of abortion access in the US.

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In other areas, too, Reform’s offering to British women looks like it will be thin gruel: the focus on foreign sex offenders and trans toilet invaders belies relative silence on women’s safety in general. Can this party really be trusted, for example, to secure higher conviction rates for rape? Or to improve the provision of childcare to keep women in the workforce? On domestic violence or maternal health? When an employment bill proposed giving workers protection from customer harassment, Farage decried the death of “pub banter” (banter which presumably involves estimating a barmaid’s bra size). For all that Reform’s movers and shakers claim to champion women, they have very little to say on any of these problems.

Until Labour can point out these policy flaws, the Reform woman will only rise and rise. It would be both stupid and unproductive to chastise ordinary British women for joining their ranks when Dworkin’s prophecy has so far come true: on the biggest, shoutiest issues, Reform seems to have a better offer for women. It is Labour’s job to show that Farage’s Fillies cannot be trusted to protect women’s interests beyond the easy wins on gender ideology and migrant crime: if they fail, they will have their own daughters to answer to.

For American Gen Zers, edgy abortion jokes are an attempt at defiance in the face of ever-eroding rights: Roe v. Wade was repealed in the US in 2022. Britain, on the other hand, seems to be at a high point of reproductive laissez-faire. Last month, Parliament banned the investigation or prosecution of those who terminate their own pregnancies, regardless of how far along they are. But opening up the abortion debate in Britain risks providing ammunition for an insurgent Right, given that Nigel Farage had already pledged to restrict terminations to under the present 24-week limit. The Conservative father-of-the-House, Sir Edward Leigh, told the debate that “sex-selective abortion” could be an unintended consequence of the amendment, while another MP, Rebecca Smith, warned that the legislation would be used to “further… expand abortion time limits”. The arguments that toppled Roe in America are closing in here.

Edginess and complacency are a gift to anti-abortion campaigners, flattering the delusion that women want the right to choose because of pure selfishness. This month, the singer Lily Allen recalled on her podcast, Miss Me, that she used to “get pregnant all the time”, adding a line that Frank Sinatra did not sing: “Abortions, I’ve had a few. But then again, I can’t remember exactly how many.” Her braggadocio assumes that her audience is on board with bodily autonomy at all costs — unfortunately for Allen, a self-styled Mockney everywoman, she has for once rather misjudged things. Writing in The Spectator, Melanie McDonagh said we should be “outraged” by Allen’s comments. The right to choose is no longer untouchable, so Allen’s flippancy seems, at the very least, in poor taste. And carelessness about getting pregnant at all — needless to say repeatedly — may, in years to come, have very different consequences.

Abortion is one of those issues in which both sides feel that they are forever losing. For many conservatives, unable to discriminate between a clump of white cells and a kicking, screaming baby, the situation is one of mass, government-sanctioned genocide. For observant feminists, the gains of the Sixties and Seventies are forever teetering on the edge of extinction in the face of successive populist potentates desperate for an electoral wildcard. The archetypal patient in each scenario is by now fixed: for many conservatives, she is a selfish and promiscuous party girl who uses abortion as a form of contraception; for defenders of the right to choose, the model example cowers at the other extreme, a victim of rape or domestic abuse, or of a medical condition which will kill her or her baby. The attendant arguments on both sides are by now so well rehearsed, not only by politicians but all children who take religious studies or do school debating clubs, that the in-betweens — those pregnancies determined by pure desire or the frailty of relationships — fall through the cracks. These everyday scenarios are important because they are the ones where choice is the most at risk.

For the television writer Lena Dunham at least, who made the move from New York to London and wrote a show about it — Too Much — those precise scenarios still deserve scrutiny. “It’s like her Rosebud,” she says of the moment the protagonist relives the circumstances of her own termination. For Jessica the memory is the equivalent of Citizen Kane’s watchword and the foundation of every subsequent dysfunction in her life. The scene plays out with excruciating, deadpan horror: “OK, well, I’m pregnant, so I guess I’ll go get an abortion or something,” she floats. The blithe response? “Yeah, that’s probably the right idea.” Jessica cries through her abortion, then adopts a rescue dog and a suspicion of men.

Casually devastating moments like these are Dunham’s bread and butter. The most provocative questions of young womanhood — fatness, nakedness, promiscuity and maternity — arrive in deceptively naive dialogue (like this, whatever that). The writing of these issues may be superficially straightforward, but their message is not: fans of Girls, Dunham’s HBO masterpiece, will remember similarly flippant dialogue from an antagonist, Mimi Rose, who mentions it in conversation with her boyfriend Adam. “Nah… I can’t go for a run today because I had an abortion yesterday,” she rattles off. Later, she rolls her eyes at his shocked response: “It was a ball of cells. It was smaller than a seed pearl.” In this moment, Mimi Rose is the villain: Girls may be a monument to Millennial feminism, but it is fully alive to the fact that when women have every choice available to them, these choices retain their emotional consequences.

Writers — particularly female ones — cannot dramatize abortion without these scenes becoming mission statements. Eleanor Bergstein’s 1987 romcom Dirty Dancing may be best remembered for a dance move, but it contains a secondary plot point about an accidental pregnancy. Even in the sleepy Catskills resort of the film’s 1963 setting, pre-Roe politics invades, and the character Penny goes through an illegal and dangerous backstreet termination. Years later, Bergstein said: “The studio came to me and said, ‘OK, Eleanor, we’ll pay for you to go back into the editing room and take the abortion out.’” She did not.

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Battle though she did to keep the scene in, one reason why she succeeded may be that the abortion was shown as traumatic and dangerous. Researchers for Abortion Onscreen found that on American television from 2005 to 2016, a character having an abortion had a 5% chance of dying — more than 10,000 times the documented rate for legal abortions. The taboo around depicting the procedure makes this conspicuous suffering necessary: dealt with too casually or easily, and suddenly all terminations are the products of a mutant feminism which has destroyed maternal empathy. But too weepy or traumatic, and you undermine the character’s right to choose at all.

The first time I saw abortion on screen was watching Alfie (1966) as a young teenager; in it, Alfie’s many dalliances result in an unplanned pregnancy with a married woman, and then a backstreet abortion. When he returns to his lover’s flat after the abortionist has left, he sees the fetus in the kitchen and weeps. The film was banned for violating the Hays Code over the depiction — “explicitly or by inference” — of the procedure; the production company then won an appeal against the board. A story on that appeal in The New York Times that year explained the exemption as an acknowledgement that “what the film trade calls ‘sincere, adult films’” kept winning such battles, and so undermined the code as a whole. “It must never be treated lightly, or made the subject of comedy,” the rule said. It is easy to see why the film won the appeal on these grounds: like Jessica’s “Rosebud” moment in Dunham’s Too Much, the abortion is the sharp point on which the narrative of Alfie turns. “I murdered him!” Alfie later tells a friend. The fetus was a “helpless little thing”, he says; years later the star Michael Caine himself described the “anti-abortion theme” as “one of the main reasons I wanted to do the movie”, adding: “I thought it was about time that the horror of these backstreet abortions was exposed.”

But what I like about this scene, in a film about the carelessness of a likeable young man, is that it shows something Caine might not have realized — that male empathy in questions of abortion so often comes only from identification with the fetus, in this case another male, which wakes him up to his otherwise entirely unremarkable cruelty towards the woman he has got pregnant. For some audiences, it might also show the inherent cruelty of abortions in general; for others still, it shows the even greater cruelty of a system which forces women to undergo illegal and unsafe procedures when humane and safe ones, with consensus-based, rational limitations, should be available instead. This latter message is, by the way, borne out by the real-world consequences of banning abortion in several states in the US, where a study last month showed that women there were more than twice as likely to have abortions later in pregnancy.

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The multivalence of Alfie’s moral message is not only why the film was able to navigate censors, but why it is good art: like in Dunham’s writing, shades of victimhood and villainy play Alfie’s face, his every decision. Filmmakers are no longer bound by the Hays Code; power struggles within the Motion Picture Association of America and rule-flouting by various films in the late Sixties put paid to it in 1968, two years after Alfie was released. But in the question of abortion, at least, something vestigial of the code remains: it is still shocking to see it used as a plot point on television, and the sense of moral gravity in its depiction is perhaps greater than any other progressive cause of the Sixties and Seventies. In the 2004 remake of Alfie starring Jude Law, the abortion was taken out.

There is wisdom in avoiding being flippant about abortion. If Farage hopes to scale back abortion rights in the UK, then it will once again become the responsibility of feminists to make our case; those staid arguments of school debating competitions will be replaced, once more, by real women and their unfree bodies. A self-aware, credible feminism is one which handles this question with moral curiosity and empathy, rather than dangling our rights as rage bait, ready to be snatched away, or bragging about countless procedures as though they were pedicures. Evangelists and populists salivate over this complacency, understanding better than most how poorly it can go down with the public. Very soon, British women may be asked again to defend our right to choose; when we do, we’ll only succeed if we approach abortion not as a joke, or as a provocation, but as a serious and essential pillar of liberty.

On Monday, in another stunning PR victory for that ever-darkening project popularly known as feminism, MPs went for option b, voting to decriminalize at-home abortion for women for any reason and at any stage of pregnancy. Thanks to an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill backed by several Labour ministers, providers will still face sanction for falling foul of existing rules, but women carrying out their own abortions will not.

As is now traditional with major social engineering enterprises, this arrived in Parliament with barely any warning, leaving onlookers blindsided as MPs sewed the thing up in a two-hour debate. Also as usual, the ability to think more than one chess move ahead was missing in action. Late-term abortions are dangerous for the mother as well as intentionally lethal for the baby. Without the deterrent of prosecution acting as a brake on misuse of the pills-by-post scheme — which parliament separately declined to withdraw, and which is easy for people to game — there will now be more deaths. As Jim Shannon MP pointed out, bravely attempting to inject a note of reality into parliamentary debate, after decriminalization was introduced in New Zealand, late-term abortions increased by 43% in the first year.

But such facts are of little interest to radical pro-choicers, who simply start with the principle that a woman should have total control of her reproductive capacity no matter what the costs to others, and take argumentative matters from there. One way to stop rises in both prosecutions and third-trimester baby deaths would be to modify the pills-by-post scheme, to make it harder to get them; but this too would pit you against the almighty cause of reproductive freedom, allegedly deterring women from having early abortions because they don’t want a face-to-face consultation with a GP.

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Unsurprisingly, this sudden glimpse of the cold libertarian priorities lurking behind a fluffy feminist curtain has produced some pushback. For a few plain-speaking and unabashed freedom-lovers, backing decriminalization means admitting that the painful deaths of other human beings will be a regrettable but necessary cost. But for abortion absolutists within mainstream feminism, intent on continuing to see themselves as caring people, an elaborate rhetorical game of hide-the-dead-baby has now begun.

And the task is trickier than usual. You can’t rely for cover, when it comes to late-term abortions, on the metaphysical ambiguity of personhood; not when the topic is someone who can recognize her mother’s voice, suck her own thumb, and have dreams. A narrative our activists have imported from American identity politics, about the pressing political threat of frothing evangelistic pro-lifers, is hard to make convincing — especially since the parliamentary vote wasn’t even a close-run thing.

So the preferred strategy is emotional misdirection. We are, then, decriminalizing all abortions for the benefit of the women wrongly prosecuted, who didn’t know they were pregnant, or who were suffering miscarriages at the time. (Any thoughts on the use of this general tactic for getting rid of, say, rape laws go unrecorded.) Or — if we really must think about the perpetrators the law was actually designed to target — can we please realize that they only ever get rid of their perfectly viable babies because they are “desperate” and otherwise faultless in intention, perhaps even positively altruistic? The fact there is already clear evidence of other psychological possibilities is ignored. In this moral universe, killing a full-term baby — rather than, say, putting her up for adoption — not only never makes you a monster, it quite possibly also qualifies you as a saint.

When disseminating this overheated stuff, you have to ignore other things you’d normally be keen to point out as a conscientious feminist: for instance, that new reproductive technologies, promoted in the name of freedom, can change social norms unexpectedly in ways that eventually harm both women and children. A lot is being made of the fact that only “a few” late-term abortions take place under current conditions; but since the status quo has criminalization already in place as a deterrent, current figures say nothing about what might happen later as the permissive environment beds in.

The growing acceptance of surrogacy is a case in point: the more acceptable it becomes, the more surrogates there are out there. And in fact, that gives rise to a further question: what happens when surrogate and abortion pill cultures collide? Transactions between strangers can go wrong; you need to do something with the goods if your buyer refuses. Or what about sex selection? That’s normally something feminists care about, but in this case, they are apparently too busy magicking up a vision of essentially benevolent female nature to notice.

It is hard to say how exactly well-intentioned people ended up here, but the phrase “bodily autonomy” getting madly out of control is one part of the story. At this point, it seems to be operating more like a hypnotic mantra than an important value to be weighed up against other ethical values. Within feminism, it turns otherwise inquiring minds into mush and makes their owners look like cult members. Indeed, from one angle, this new decriminalization initiative looks like the equally foolish historic venture of self-ID: supposedly about advancing personal freedom, pretending other people’s vital interests don’t matter, fond of histrionic cherrypicked examples, and bound to result in a loss of public support for the overall cause.

The state of the abortion discourse is also reminiscent of campaigns for assisted suicide — a matter on which MPs are also voting this week, as the Terminally Ill Adults Bill returns to the Commons for its third reading. Here, too, the fairly mindless invocation of freedom, autonomy, choice, control, rights, and other such happy-sounding phrases are cutting off attempts to build careful and responsible legislation at the pass.

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There is no better demonstration of this than the bizarre shape of Kim Leadbeater’s bill itself, based on one from Oregon. Despite all the surrounding stuff about freedom, at base this is a law motivated by compassion, whether or not it achieves it in practice. Thankfully, she does not propose to offer the much mythologized “freedom to die” to absolutely anyone who has suicidal thinking, but only to those who are terminally ill. The implied rationale for this selection is clearly that terminally ill people suffer terribly, in a way that justifies the compassionate offer of assisted suicide to them, and only to them (at least, at this stage).

With this background compassionate intention, you might assume it would be important for those in charge of the assessment process to probe the nature of an applicant’s suffering, in case it could be alleviated by less drastic means than an early death via the ingestion of poison. Could this person be helped with better medication, social support, or just talking his worries through with a friendly face? Is death really the best solution here? Yet according to the terms of Leadbeater’s bill, the applicant can go through the entire assessment process and reach his final destination with no professional ever asking him why he wants to die. The assumption of terrible suffering gets him in the room, as it were — entirely predicated on the terminal diagnosis — and after that, nobody should check its source. Conscientious amendments mounted at committee stage, insisting that the applicant at least be asked about his suicidal thinking, or even have to meet with a palliative care specialist first, were rejected.

This weird sabotaging of the implicit rationale behind the bill comes from the influence of legislators who can only see the good in something if it superficially appears to enhance personal freedom. In effect, after the initial terms of eligibility for assisted suicide were set, suddenly there was an incoherent reversion to the idea that a terminally ill person can get a death from a doctor for any reason, and authorities should stay out of it. As Rachel Hopkins MP said approvingly during the bill scrutiny phase, imagining herself as an applicant: “It is none of your business why I want to pursue this legal course of action.” A host of useful and responsible amendments were rejected on a similar basis.

Here too, then, as with abortion, excessive deference to the causes of autonomy and rights have hollowed out the original impetus to offer genuinely compassionate help, ensuring the opposite would be true for many. The result is an assisted suicide bill utterly unfit for purpose, that will simply kill off those who might have been compassionately helped in other ways. At some point, MPs will surely have to ask themselves who or what all this freedom is actually good for.

But wait, you might be thinking: isn’t Creasy pro-choice, and wasn’t there a drastic move towards liberalization of abortion law this week? To which the answers are, respectively, yes she is and yes there was. On Tuesday, MPs voted to support an amendment to the crime and policing bill which will mean a woman cannot be investigated or prosecuted for ending her own pregnancy, at any point.

Though it will remain a criminal offense for a doctor to perform an abortion beyond the current 24-week time limit, this reform will mean the end of women being cruelly harassed through the justice system for having a “suspicious” miscarriage, or procuring their own late-term abortions in desperate circumstances. It is also, undeniably, a radical move that threatens to undermine the two main guarantees of the UK’s pro-choice consensus: the idea of medical oversight, and the idea of time limits based on “viability”. It repeals sections of the Offenses Against the Person Act 1861, decriminalizing women who procure abortions.

Not radical enough for Creasy, however. The problem is that there were two proposed amendments under discussion. The one that was ultimately passed came from Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi. The other one was Creasy’s, which would have removed criminal penalties for medical professionals as well as women, and established abortion access as a human right. Even the pro-choice campaign and abortion provider British Pregnancy Advisory Service (Bpas) thought that would be going a bit far: Bpas publicly opposed the Creasy amendment, while supporting the Antoniazzi one.

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As far as Creasy was concerned, this was nothing short of a betrayal — not of her personally (God forbid), but of “progressive values” as a whole. After the vote, she wrote a column for The Guardian, in which she accused opponents of her amendment of urging “caution or even capitulation” in the face of the advancing Trumpian Right — “as if we can stop the public being dragged to the extremes if we speak in hushed tones or water down our ambitions for social justice.”

Most people would give their head a wobble at the point they found themselves implying Bpas (Bpas!) were quislings of the pro-life movement. Not Creasy, though. As far as Creasy is concerned, the UK is mere inches from being absorbed into the cultural battles of America, and only she can save us. “In the coming months and years, attacks on progressive values will intensify,” she pronounced, grandly. “As we face them, let this missed opportunity to reform our abortion legislation… remind us all that half measures are not what we are in politics to take.”

Such rhetoric is not just histrionic: it’s recklessly self-perpetuating. Britain is not America, in many things but particularly when it comes to abortion. In the US, abortion has been a highly politicized, highly partisan issue since the Seventies, driven in large part by the electoral clout of the evangelical megachurches. In the UK, abortion has historically had broad support, both across the benches and throughout the public. There are no votes in reopening the choice question.

There are, however, a lot of risks. “Opening the Pandora’s box of abortion reform is something no one should do without the confidence that they are able to manage the resulting chaos. Moves to decriminalize abortion, in response to the continued prosecution of women for having one, could unintentionally enable the restriction of access under a future regressive government.” Who wrote that? Ah yes — Stella Creasy, five weeks ago.

That note of caution was merely the entrée to Creasy’s embrace of maximal radicalism. For Creasy, anything that matters, matters because she can put herself at the heart of it. She attempted to bring her three-month-old baby into the chamber and framed it as maternity discrimination when she was refused (even though she could have appointed a proxy). She campaigned against online abuse by highlighting the fact that she, personally, had been targeted.

It’s depressing to compare Creasy now with Creasy over 14 years ago, when she had just entered parliament and The Spectator awarded her its Campaigner of the Year award for her work on payday loans. Since then, she has become ever more like a celebrity, and ever less like an MP. Her constituents broadly consider her diligent and hard-working, but her attentions are clearly divided between them and publicity. Creasy is the female politician most likely to answer a women’s magazine’s press request: her constituency is Walthamstow, but she was also representing Cosmopolitan, which recruited her to its decriminalization campaign.

You can get a sense of how politically isolated she is from the fact that her abortion amendment was drafted, not with support from other parliamentarians or from reproductive rights campaigners, but from the Good Law Project and Jolyon Maugham. Maugham’s expertise is tax law; the Good Law Project’s most notable achievement has been failing to win almost every case it put its name to. Why Creasy would choose such a partner for the delicate issue of abortion law reform is hard to fathom, unless you consider Maugham’s track record of attention-seeking to be an asset.

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Because Creasy’s amendment did get attention, much of it very negative. Outside Parliament, the anti-abortion group Centre for Bioethical Reform UK (CBR UK) erected giant posters showing a graphic image of an aborted fetus with the slogan: “Your MP is working very hard… to make this a human right.” Creasy, ever on brand, shared a photo of the placards on X with the caption: “This isn’t debate it’s incitement.” (Incitement to what was unspecified.) In fact, I suspect that CBR UK had given her exactly what she wanted: a chance to play the brave liberal, beleaguered by the forces of reaction.

The most unfortunate thing about Creasy’s amendment is not that it’s given everyone a reason to talk more about Stella Creasy. It’s that it flattened the debate about abortion reform into a choice between “extreme” and “even more extreme”. MPs went with the better option, but at the expense of having a full discussion about the overall principle (a principle that was never even mentioned in the Labour manifesto). That cannot be the right way to address matters of the gravest ethical concern.

Protecting vulnerable women from prosecution is a worthy aim, but the Antoniazzi reform is wide open to unintended consequences. Decriminalizing women, but not medics, creates a perverse incentive for scared women unsure about their date of conception to self-administer their abortion. That will lead, inevitably, to a small number of women going through the trauma of an induced late miscarriage on their own. Some will suffer complications. It will only take one horrifying headline for the public to get twitchy, and Nigel Farage is already making noises about reducing the time limit.

Because for all Creasy’s posturing about being the only one to truly recognize the threat from the populist Right, her actions suggest above all an unseriousness. Anyone who truly feared the rise of the reactionaries would see the UK’s abortion settlement as something too precious to be gambled with. Any student of reproductive rights in America would know that the more entangled organizations like Planned Parenthood became in the culture wars, the more inevitable their defeat was. Anyone who genuinely believed Farage could be the next prime minister would refuse to hand him an easy win.

Creasy is treating abortion rights as collateral in her own personal war for relevance. By putting them at stake, she can anoint herself as their champion, guaranteeing her own importance and righteousness. The backlash she is inciting carries a high cost for women who need abortion, but little cost to Creasy: if a future Reform government embarks on a clampdown, she will be able to say “I told you so” rather than own up to her own part in making abortion a frontline political issue. So long as she has the spotlight, Creasy never really loses.

The Democrats know what a powerful issue this is, driving turnout and bringing in donations. “When abortion is on the ballot, we win,” said Mini Timmaraju, president of the pro-choice organisation NARAL. And yet, Harris has yet to put forth an actionable plan to restore access to abortion across the United States. Her raft of vague promises to do something for women are familiar for Democratic voters — each of their party’s nominees, from Joe Biden to Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama, has promised to protect reproductive rights. The question remains: does the Harris administration have any intention of following through on her pledge to secure those rights?

The appeal of the issue hasn’t escaped Donald Trump, who, has made several contradictory statements about his plan for reproductive rights. Just this week he voiced support for the expansion of access to abortion in his home state of Florida — a statement his campaign was swift to retract and deny. He also said he planned to require insurance companies to cover fertility treatments like IVF in full.

Ever since the Supreme Court’s intention to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision was leaked in 2022, the issue has powerfully motivated voters, even in strongly Republican areas. In Montana, for example, abortion is legal until the 24th week of pregnancy, but the Republican governor and legislature have repeatedly tried and failed to pass laws to ban terminations. In response, a recent push to ensure that abortion rights were safeguarded from such interference was so popular that the petition to get the issue on to November’s ballot received more than twice the number of signatures necessary.

And Montana is only one of nine states currently organising constitutional amendments and initiatives for the autumn election. Kansas — also traditionally Republican — has already passed similar protections, and also did so with surprisingly large margins. It’s not clear if these attempts are enough to drive typically Republican voters to support a Democratic presidential candidate, but the state-level ballot initiatives have caused higher than usual voter turnout. And as polls are spelling out, Democrats, women and younger voters are particularly likely to see abortion as a motivating factor in their vote.

With this in mind, Trump’s sudden change of tune does prompt one question: could these pro-choice voters be a more important voting bloc for him than those on the religious Right who were instrumental in electing him in 2016? Certainly, the reproductive rights platform does seem to be shifting things this election cycle. In Texas, for example, Greg Abbott has seen his disapproval ratings rise since passing restrictions on abortion, and conversely, Marilyn Lands, who campaigned on a strongly pro-choice platform in conservative Alabama, has made headway by running on a strongly pro-choice message.

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Why is this? One explanation is that while elements of the Right have successfully campaigned on the more edgy “family values” matters, against things such as transgender healthcare for children and the teaching of critical race theory in schools, when it addressed more popular issues, such as the availability of IVF and gay marriage, it’s possible they started alarming some of the more moderate voters in their midst. There hasn’t been a major election since the Alabama Supreme Court made its controversial ruling about IVF treatments, so how big an effect this will have on voter turnout and support for political parties is so far speculative.

But equally, if the Democrats were to pick up centrists and undecideds by promising to reverse the damage done to reproductive rights, can they actually be trusted to deliver on their promises, given their past record? The general understanding of American political parties is that the Democrats are good for reproductive freedoms and the Republicans want to bring about some sort of Handmaid’s Tale dystopia. However, if we look past the language politicians use when they’re trying to get elected, and instead at what happens once they achieve office and have the power to pass legislation, we see a slightly different divide.

Since the Eighties, the Christian Right’s stance has evolved from being mostly apolitical to pushing rigid positions on the subject, leaving it hard for a pro-choice Republican politician to now gain any real support in the party. Susan Cullman has spoken recently about how marginalised someone who supports abortion rights can be in the party. More recently, only a handful of Republican governors promised to preserve abortion rights in their states — Maryland, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire — and all of them were or are leading states that tend to vote Democrat in Presidential elections. If Trump’s Republicans are looking to bring a more moderate position to women’s rights issues, there is a lot of ground yet to cover.

At the same time, however, there is precious little evidence to support the idea that Democrats are devoted to protecting reproductive rights, beyond appointing pro-choice justices to the Supreme Court. Not only have Democratic presidents failed since the Seventies to reinforce abortion rights — they have also failed to push back on legislation that has shut clinics down, dragged their feet in approving the drug regimen once known as RU-486 for administering abortions, and they have not pursued changing the law that forbids federal funds — such as Medicaid coverage — from paying for abortion services.

Over the years, such moves have restricted access to reproductive rights, making them available only to those who can afford them. The party thus seems to be cynically paying lip-service to those women who are voting for them. After the Dobbs decision in 2023, Joe Biden tweeted that “it’s time to restore Roe v. Wade once and for all”. It’s now a year and a half later, and there was no follow-up as to what that might mean, how Democrats might go about it, and of course no actual restoration.

It’s also important to remember that reproductive rights extend to more than simply access to abortion. And nor have these wider issues been addressed by the Democrats. These are things such as the maternal mortality rate — which is rising at an alarming speed and disproportionately affecting black and poor — and the difficulty rural communities face in accessing prenatal health care services. These are all issues that affect the working class, the vulnerable and the marginalised — the Democrats’ former constituency. Yet no one in the party seems interested in discussing them, let alone other hot-button issues such as surrogacy or subsidised childcare.

Instead, on both sides of the political aisle, all the focus is on abortion — but only in rhetoric and not in specific policy. It’s all very well for a presidential candidate to come up with a jaunty slogan like Harris’s “We are not going back”, but the time for pretty speeches and fiery rhetoric is over. What women need is a plan.

Meanwhile, it’s an election year, and pro-choice advocates hope to put abortion protection on the ballot in nine states — causing panic on the Right, since these measures tend to pass with overwhelming voter support. For Democrats, all signs point to this being the defining issue of the 2024 election. “President Biden and Vice President Harris believe health care decisions should be made by women and their doctors, not politicians. Period,” the White House posted this week, throwing down the first of what will no doubt be several gauntlets.

The current administration’s abortion strategy hinges on Kamala Harris, who is currently touring the country to highlight Biden’s commitment to women’s reproductive rights: on her first stop, she was photographed in front of a giant sign that read, simply, “TRUST WOMEN”. It’s an effective slogan, but also a provocative one, when even the activists who would grant the procedure sacred status don’t seem to entirely trust women to know our bodies, and accept the consequences of our choices.

In a world that simply trusted women, abortion itself would be less common, I think, because more trust equals more empowerment and therefore fewer limitations: women would be free to obtain birth control at low cost and without a prescription, a key issue that has been somewhat overlooked amid the heated battles over abortion. Add some straightforward sex education that teaches women from an early age how fertility works — as opposed to the fearmongering version in which pregnancy can happen anytime, anywhere, just from being in the same room as a sperm — and you would get an informed, empowered population capable of avoiding unintended pregnancies.

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Beyond that, the rules would be simple: a woman who wanted an abortion could obtain one within reasonable limits — guided by a scientific understanding of viability, perhaps. And, with the usual caveats — foetal abnormalities, for instance, or a threat to the mother’s life — a woman who sought an elective abortion outside the prescribed window would be in violation of… well, something. If not the law, then the social contract.

The question of just what consequences a woman could or should face for flouting abortion restrictions has always been a thorny one. Any attempts to enforce such statutes can result in innocent women being investigated for a crime after their wanted pregnancies ended in miscarriage — but even in unambiguous cases, society is at odds with itself about just who to punish and how. Two things are true: that most people support laws limiting abortion beyond the first trimester, and that most people are uncomfortable with the idea of holding women accountable for breaking those laws. (Partly for this reason, medics in the UK have recently been advised not to report women suspected of having an illegal abortion to the police.)

It’s a conundrum: a society that truly trusts women would also trust them to follow the rules or face the consequences. But then, we have always struggled with this, too. We like the idea of empowering women, but holding them accountable for abusing that power? Not so much.

It seems to me that in the abortion wars, neither side is willing to trust women — to see them as fully human, fully adult, fully capable of reckoning with the implications of the choice to terminate a pregnancy. Each in their own way would deprive women of agency, if not by stopping them from making the choice, then by never holding them accountable for it. At the root is a shared conviction that women cannot control themselves, a safetyist impulse aptly described by David Brooks in a recent column about the administrators who increasingly rule over every aspect of American life: “The whole administrative apparatus comes with an implied view of human nature,” he writes. “People are weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid. They need administrators to run their lives.”

Suggested reading

The danger of safetyism

By Matthew Crawford

Within the parameters of the debate over abortion rights, you could argue that both sides appear to agree that women are fragile. Much has been written about the horrors of the pre-Roe era; we know the deadly consequences of a world where women cannot safely and legally abort, and we have long scorned the callous politicians who chuckle that the best solution to unintended pregnancy is for women to just stop having sex, you sluts. Less discussed is what the pro-choice side telegraphs about its view of women, when it argues that they must not only be allowed to choose, but to have their options open indefinitely, no restrictions, no limitations.

Academics sniff at the notion that elective abortion should be disallowed after a certain point, decrying the entire concept of foetal viability as “overly moralistic”; the Guttmacher Institute insists that gestational age bans are harmful, full stop, and that abortion should be available to women “on the timeline that meets their needs”. Journalists sombrely report on the troubling implications of the prosecution of a Nebraska teenager who ended her pregnancy with mifepristone — waiting until the 23rd paragraph to mention the relevant and fairly shocking information that she was 30 weeks pregnant at the time.

These arguments lack the spectacular misogyny of the pro-life crowd’s shrieking about sluts, but they are still patronising to women. The implication is that a woman cannot be expected to make up her mind about whether she wants to have a baby within a certain timeframe, nor wrestle with difficult questions about what consideration, if any, the foetus growing inside her deserves. In this we might hear echoes of the old arguments used to control women: that we are fickle, hapless creatures who know little of our own biology and even less of our own minds.

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Pro-choice Republicans could rescue Kansas

By Jessa Crispin

Of course, it’s become fashionable to speak of women and our bodies this way: in terms of fragility. Our ancestors, on the other hand, recognised that the ability to bear children gives women immense power. In the ancient world, abortion was restricted less as a means of protecting women than to protect other people from them. A woman who terminated her pregnancy deprived her husband of an heir, and her crime was not murder, but a sort of theft; she had shaped his future, his legacy, in ways he could not control. The property and inheritance laws that made a woman’s survival dependent on producing children — specifically a son — were, among other things, a way of subverting whatever power might have come from being the one with a womb.

This makes for an ironic comparison with the contemporary narrative that women are in desperate need of protection — at a moment when we enjoy greater control over our reproductive abilities, and less stigma for exercising it, than we have ever before. For all that we seek to defend women from having to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, we still struggle with the raw exercise of power inherent in choosing to end one, or the possibility that with that power comes a certain amount of social responsibility.

When I was four, a tiny mole scurried out of a hole beside me while I was playing in the garden. It startled me, and I brought my foot down instinctively; I didn’t mean to kill it, but I did. My mother made me bury it, and while I did, she told me she knew I hadn’t meant to, but that it didn’t matter. That in a world populated by creatures smaller and more fragile than you, you are accountable for where you choose to step. 

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Roe v Wade deserves to fall

By Kat Rosenfield

I think about this sometimes — when people scoff that an abortion is nothing, just a bundle of cells, or when I see a woman holding a sign that says, “MY ABORTION WAS FABULOUS”. A mole doesn’t have hopes or dreams; a blastocyst has no sense of itself. If these are arguably lives, they are not especially significant ones, and perhaps this makes it easy to be cavalier: you are not ending so much, when you destroy them. You might even begin to imagine your choices carry no weight at all. 

And yet… “fabulous”?

I don’t expect much reckoning with these questions in the coming year, or ever, necessarily. Amid the urgency and tumult of the post-Dobbs landscape, several things are true: that abortion must remain legal, that every attempt to restrict it inevitably inflicts far worse harm than it manages to prevent, and that if the Democrats are smart, they’ll spend the next 10 months making sure there’s not a person in the country who hasn’t heard about the unimaginable horrors that have followed the draconian abortion bans in Texas and elsewhere.

But this is a way to win elections, not to illuminate the truth: that the instincts of pro-life and pro-choice alike are too often infantilising to women, and that trusting women requires abandoning the pretence that they need to be protected. Safetyism and equality are mutually exclusive: we must insist on women’s absolute right to choose when or whether to be pregnant, even when that choice intersects with some of the most complex moral questions of all time. At the same time, we must also stop pretending that pregnancy does not carry with it a unique and potent strength. Only a woman can bring forth a whole new person from inside her body — and only a woman can choose not to, reaching over the Fates’ shoulder to snatch those first slim threads of life back through the needle’s eye.

The history of abortion restrictions is a history of men trying to undermine this power, because they are terrified by it, and they should be. It is enormous. It is unfathomable. And like all power, it isn’t without its burdens. But it is ours, whether it’s politically expedient to admit this or not.

There is one big exception to this trend toward liberalisation in the Americas: the United States. Last summer, American women lost their constitutional right to end a pregnancy overnight. While abortion remains broadly legal in America’s more progressive, mostly coastal states, it is outlawed in 14 states, and restricted, at risk, or unprotected across most of the south and middle of the country. Today, three states will see quasi-referendums on the issue, which has come to define local elections across the country. As a result, American feminists are looking south of the border and asking: what can we learn from Latin America?

Years of organising precipitated the green wave. In 2006, Colombia loosened abortion restrictions; in 2007, Mexico City legalised the procedure. Those hard-fought successes gave the feminist movement the confidence to broaden its approach. Instead of focusing primarily on passing laws in legislatures, they took up a kind of kitchen-sink strategy: do it all, try everything, see what works. While some focused on using the justice system to effect change, others prioritised bringing young people into activism. Women spoke out about their own experiences in a push to destigmatise abortion — and feminist groups put pressure on politicians to highlight women’s rights. This combination accelerated the green wave.

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The mothers who Ireland forgot

By Clair Wills

In the United States, advocacy has long been focused on the courts, and for good reason: the legalisation of abortion came via Supreme Court decisions, and efforts to curtail access were most successful when implemented legislatively and upheld by the legal system. But groups working in the community here and building cross-movement relationships are routinely under-funded and under-resourced.

Another crucial tactic in Latin America has been to emphasise that outlawing abortion doesn’t end it; it just makes it less safe. Many nations where the procedure is illegal have high rates; indeed, while it remains restricted in much of Latin America, the region has a significantly higher rate than Europe, where abortion has long been legal in most nations. Those places where abortion is restricted also tend to see far higher unintended pregnancy rates. In these countries, women often turn to abortion-inducing pills which they source from feminist groups, or from pharmacies or hospitals where they’re sold under the counter or prescribed for other purposes. If they can’t access the pills, which are overwhelmingly safe, some women resort to far riskier methods — drinking poisons, inserting sticks, or going to untrained freelance providers who make promises they may not keep. There are also much higher rates of maternal death and injury due to unsafe procedures.

This is why feminists routinely state just how common abortion is — even where it is illegal. The difference between legalising abortion and banning it is a choice between making procedures that will inevitably take place safe or potentially deadly.

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American feminism has turned its back on women

By Hadley Freeman

Latin American feminist groups have also emphasised the importance of abortion access, most recently in Mexico. There, the Supreme Court decision is a step towards legal abortion nationwide, but states throughout the country will still need to lift their own bans on the procedure for Mexican women to have full access. American feminists are taking a similar tack: with abortion now criminalised in many states, there has been a renewed effort to invest in funds which will pay for women to get from abortion-hostile states to ones where the procedure is legal.

They are also fighting each state ban, as well as trying to get the issue on ballots. In every single case where abortion has been voted upon, pro-choice has won. In the conservative states of Kansas and Kentucky, voters rejected proposed bans; in California, Michigan, and Vermont, voters elected to enshrine abortion rights into their state constitutions. As a result, opponents have been working overtime to keep abortion off the ballot — voters, some Republicans argue, simply shouldn’t have a say. Pro-choice activists disagree.

Meanwhile, healthcare workers continue to provide safe abortions. A new report suggests that rates have slightly increased nationally since the Supreme Court decided to overturn Roe v. Wade. They have also increased in liberal states, as thousands of women have travelled there to terminate pregnancies. American women are also going to Mexico — particularly those living in states along the southern border where abortion has been outlawed. At first glance, this seems like a throwback to the pre-Roe era, when scared women would cross the border for procedures that were often dangerous. Now, though, women who go to Mexico to end a pregnancy are most likely to procure on abortion pills. With the latest ruling on abortion from Mexico’s Supreme Court, more Americans may head south seeking safe, legal terminations. But first, states across Mexico will need to update their local laws to fully legalise the procedure.

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Texas has betrayed women

By Jill Filipovic

The Latin American Green Wave is one model for how feminists worldwide might move forward. But the global movement has also been influenced by developments in the Americas, and has been paying especially close attention to the US. “One of the lessons from Dobbs is that rights are not guaranteed; there can always be setbacks,” two activists told me. This is why, they say, any fight for abortion rights has to recognise “the importance of not having a single source of recognition of the right to abortion”.

The Mexico Supreme Court did not wave a magic wand and make abortion legal and accessible for all women  any more than the US Supreme Court made abortion universally inaccessible. When it comes to the question of whether a woman can get an abortion when she needs one, legal changes are hugely significant — but they are not the sole determinants of whether a woman, or girl, will have to continue her pregnancy against her will. And that, perhaps, is the most powerful lesson that American feminists have learned from women in Latin America. If abortion is truly a woman’s right to choose for herself, then the ability to have an abortion must be in women’s hands, whether or not her government grants permission.

It reminded me of the box of documents that sits on the table in an inner room of Lorna Brady’s house in the TV series, The Woman in the Wall. Lorna’s box contains newspaper articles about the mother and baby homes scandals, polite denials from officials she has begged for information, and a whole series of birthday cards she has written year after year — and never been able to send — to the daughter who was taken from her when she gave birth, in the mid-Eighties, in an institution run by nuns in the fictional village of Kilkinure, County Mayo.

The real-life Bernard Canavan searching for his mother and the fictional character Lorna Brady (played by Ruth Wilson), searching for her daughter, are two sides of one bleak story — about institutional power, and a society inured to the sacrifice of women and children to religious dogma. It’s a story that the Irish public is still struggling to come to terms with.

It was Peter Mullan’s 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters that brought Ireland’s female carceral regime to an international audience. The drama followed the young women and girls sent to the infamous Magdalene Laundries in the Sixties because they had been raped, or because they had boyfriends, or because they had fallen pregnant outside marriage, or — very often — because they were the children of single mothers. Because, in short, the church deemed them “fallen”. The last of these institutions only closed in the Nineties.

Then, in 2013, came Philomena, based on Martin Sixsmith’s best-selling book, The Lost Child of Philomena Lee. The child in question was like Bernard Canavan: adopted from a Mother and Baby Home at age three, against his mother’s wishes — though in this case he was adopted to the United States, and he never saw her again.

These stories had long been the subject of public debate in Ireland. In the mid-Nineties, journalist Mary Raftery’s exposé of the treatment of children in orphanages and reformatories, States of Fear, caused a national scandal. There have been multiple autobiographical accounts of the cruelty meted out to the incarcerated women and children, and a number of campaigns for justice and reparation. A series of Irish government commissions have investigated state involvement with the Magdalene laundries and child abuse in state-run children’s homes. In 2014, the bodies of nearly 800 babies and small children were discovered in a septic tank on the grounds of a former mother and baby home in Tuam, County Galway; the scandal was met with promises from the government to make amends. And in the past few years, best-selling novels by Sebastian Barry, Roddy Doyle, and Claire Keegan have all explored the legacies of this inhuman system.

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By Aris Roussinos

The Woman in the Wall is the latest take in a long line, then. And, like other attempts, it has come in for some criticism. The use of both gothic horror and police procedural in Joe Murtagh’s telling has been deemed inappropriate. There are certainly sensationalist elements: a woman gets plastered inside a wall, there’s a haunted house with poisonous weeds and otherworldly screaming, a flock of crows lead to a dead body in an attic. Lorna’s home is poorly lit, with an ethereal red glow — especially the room containing the box of documents. And she’s suffering the kind of post-traumatic stress that leads her to sleepwalk and attack people and things while unconscious of her actions. But the viewer’s sense of dread seems appropriate to me. The horror genre becomes a form of realism when capturing the trauma of these institutions’ survivors, who are not living in a world where rational choice will save them. Something else is needed.

Murtagh makes this clear by flooding the daylight scenes with media debates about the violence of the history and the claims of survivors. There are radio call-in shows, meetings with politicians, conference halls and reports of discussions in parliament about the Laundries and mother and baby homes. There’s even a scene in which a group of women debate whether or not to sign compensation forms. In this Ireland, nothing seems to be hidden. The nation has turned its back on the cruelties of the past, and no one, apart from a few ancient nuns with a shaky grip on reality, is trying to defend the defunct institutional regime. Still, this is a detective drama — there are elements of the 2015 sexual abuse cover-up film Spotlight — and the viewer naturally asks, what more is to be discovered?

Several things, it turns out. First, that despite all the media coverage the ordinary inhabitants of Kilkinure still don’t think all that historical unpleasantness has much to do with them. They have a lot to learn. We watch the slow realisation of the local policeman — a sympathetic, at times comic character — that he was part of the system that kept young girls imprisoned against their will.  The implication is that the whole town colluded in choosing not to acknowledge what they knew was going on in the Convent. There’s knowing and there’s knowing, says the sergeant.

The series would have us believe that, in addition to incarcerating young women and girls, and forcing them to do unpaid labour, the homes offered up their children for illegal adoption, in exchange for money. The claim that mother and baby homes colluded with Irish adoption societies to sell children, often to the United States, was not substantiated by the Report of the Commission on Mother and Baby Homes. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. In 2021, a group of ten adoptees sued St Patrick’s Guild — from where Bernard Canavan was informally adopted in 1948 — for facilitating illegal adoptions. The home was accused of “kidnapping, forgery…and conspiracy for wrongful concealment”, in the course of a series of “well-practised and systematically perfected child abductions”.  At least 126 illegal adoptions between 1946 and 1969 have been verified and there are estimates that the true number could reach 15,000.

And beyond the scandal at St Patrick’s there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that babies were sent to the United States from homes across the country in exchange for donations in the Forties and Fifties. But Murtagh’s drama goes further, depicting a shady extreme-religious outfit that is involved in stealing babies from mothers against their will, and selling them to fund their organisation, right up until the Eighties. It’s a system that echoes the Franco-era Stolen Babies scandal, currently being investigated by Amnesty International, in which thousands of babies were taken from their mothers and given to families supportive of the regime.

The claim that a similar system operated in Ireland, and maybe still operates, seems so outlandish that it nearly topples the fictional world Murtagh has built. But when the guards uncover a link between the Irish baby-selling business and the bombing of an abortion clinic in the US, the viewer is reminded of today’s network of extreme Right-wing religious groups, powered by an absolute sense of the rightness of their moral mission even to the point of committing murder. In a bold move by Murtagh, the Irish version of these ideologically-driven conservative family warriors masquerades as a harmless lobbying group, that sits right at the heart of the political establishment.

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Ireland is a Freudian dream

By Terry Eagleton

When The Magdalene Sisters was screened in 2002, the focus of the scandal was on the cruelty of the nuns and priests in overall charge of the institutions, and the secrecy with which they operated; in Philomena it was on the terrible legacy of a mother losing a child and a child losing his mother. Now that the Irish media is awash with public debate about this history, and has grown used to government commissions, state apologies, and reparation scheme, the focus of the story has shifted – to the way that all those words of regret and sorrow may be just another way of covering up what really happened.

Survivors of institutional abuse still find themselves struggling to be taken seriously — having to argue through the courts for the right to access their own records, for example, or for their own evidence of their experience to be accorded the same weight as that contained in institutional records. In 2021, Philomena Lee was one of several high court challengers to the claim in the final report of the 2020 Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes that there was “no evidence” to suggest her consent to her son’s adoption was not full, free and informed. She was given no time to consider a document that she was told to sign, which relinquished her rights to her son.

The backdrop of the latest versions of the story is the disturbing possibility of a coming backlash against the women and children who suffered. After all, in the United States Amy Coney Barrett has argued against abortion provision on the grounds that women should be required to give birth in order to give their children up for adoption to families that want them.

In the face of this bleak future, these empty apologies, victims of institutional abuse have little to hang on to, besides the ring-binders and cardboard boxes which hold evidence of experiences that they know to be true.

A newly energised distaste for artificial intervention in the human reproductive cycle seems to be emerging internationally, accompanied perhaps by enthusiasm for those halcyon days when babies would be found on doorsteps, women died giving birth in fields, and gay people couldn’t officially be parents. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s government is attempting to push through a bill that would imprison couples seeking surrogates abroad for up to two years. In February, it emerged that the Taliban was removing the contraceptive pill from Afghanistan’s pharmacies.

But extremism about reproductive matters is not just found among social conservatives. In response to the jailing of Carla Foster — the British woman who used mail-order abortion pills to terminate her viable baby at around 33 weeks — feminist barrister Charlotte Proudman argued on Good Morning Britain last week that “abortion needs to be decriminalised and treated like any other healthcare procedure”.

This familiar construction — that every abortion must automatically count only as fairly benign “healthcare” for the woman concerned, no matter what the surrounding circumstances or who else is affected — is surely a grossly over-simplified extension of the term. There is a separate discussion to be had about whether imprisonment for Foster was counterproductive (in my view, it was). But to most onlookers, there is an important distinction between abortions carried out early or in response to serious maternal or foetal illness, and those carried out very late upon healthy babies and mothers.

Equally, it seems bullishly myopic to insist that a baby has no distinct interests from those of its mother in cases like this, or that, in principle, maternal behaviour towards an unborn baby could never cross a reasonable threshold for illegality. The much-cited fact that women like Foster must be “desperate” to act as they do would not seem to help much. Desperation wouldn’t usually mitigate violent behaviour towards an infant after birth, so why should it do so immediately beforehand?

In fact, in any pregnancy there are at least three people with interests in the outcome — and more, if you count grandparents, aunts, uncles, and siblings. Wherever there are separate interests, those interests can clash. This produces the potential for great practical complexity. Yet in debates about reproductive ethics, some on both sides would seek to rank the core interests involved hierarchically — as if what was at stake was essentially no more complicated than a game of Top Trumps.

Among some social conservatives, the preferred decision procedure seems to go: prioritise the foetus or unborn baby, and then the interests of the father — after which you may, with grudging reluctance, get round to the interests of the mother (if she’s still alive, vaguely sane, and there’s anything left to decide). In contrast, feminists of the Proudman school would apparently put women first, with foetuses and unborn babies a firm second and fathers barely getting a look-in at all.

Each side would insist on their own ranking as the only acceptable one in any circumstance. And as a result, each tends to get mired in contradiction, since the purity of their preferred intellectual structures cannot withstand exposure to the complexity of real-life situations.

Special pleading, and the suppression of knowledge of human suffering, abounds in every direction. On the conservative side, a human life should be protected — except if it’s the life of a pregnant woman at risk of complication. Personal autonomy is an important value but not for women made pregnant through rape. Surrogacy is unacceptable because children need their biological mothers unconditionally — but equally, abortion could be avoided by having unwanted babies adopted.

But the extremists among feminists also have their own incoherencies. Some seem to assume that unwanted foetuses have no important interests of their own prior to birth (assuming they make it that far), but planned and longed-for babies possessed theirs from conception. Fathers are thought to have responsibilities and duties towards their offspring but no accompanying rights. A mother may grieve copiously over a miscarriage she didn’t want, but a woman getting a termination is considered none of the father’s business.

Wherever there is stubborn adherence to some principled ordering of values, there is usually a slippery slope argument close behind. On the conservative side, one slope allegedly descends from permissiveness about abortion towards a hardened attitude to the weak and vulnerable more generally. On the feminist side, a slope supposedly rolls down from the criminalisation of late-term abortion towards the complete outlawing of all abortion, or other unacceptable legal infringements on pregnant women’s bodily autonomy.

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American feminism has turned its back on women

By Hadley Freeman

But social slippery slopes aren’t like slides in a children’s playground, that operate only according to the laws of physics. Social slopes depend partly on what feelings or attitudes already exist in some place. There is a difference between the merely theoretical danger of descent from X towards Y in some possible but distant scenario, and the pressing danger of it, rooted in actual specifics of the local context.

In a thoroughly patriarchal society that hardly cares about female interests or experiences — Taliban society, say — the distance between introducing one infringement on women’s behaviour and a cascade of others can be short. But that doesn’t mean it’s the same everywhere. In a relatively liberal society, putting a judicious curb on one aspect of behaviour needn’t make a cascade in the wrong direction particularly likely, or lead to more widespread infringements in the mainstream.

Some feminists won’t be persuaded by this point, because they will insist that, no matter what the geographical or historical location, all women still live in a constant emergency state at the hands of men. This is the unacknowledged emotional rocket fuel behind their pretence that nearly all the moral currency in a pregnancy is owned by women, exclusively. Women fear that if it were openly admitted that the foetus or the father had interests at stake too, then — given women’s lack of relative power — it would be next stop Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale for all of us.

Indeed, to shore this story up, feminists are likely to point to the dystopian happenings in the States. If there, why not here too? But to put it bluntly, the UK is not the US, no matter how much Yankophile progressives love to blur the differences. We have a different constitutional system and far fewer evangelical or even just plain old Catholic tendencies. We have sex-based and pregnancy-based legal protections. In practice, nearly all abortions became exempt from criminal prosecution in 1967. If residual criminalisation in the UK really were a slippery slope towards gestational servitude, surely we’d have slipped down it already.

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Pro-choice Republicans could rescue Kansas

By Jessa Crispin

The temptation to think in universal absolutes about the ethics of reproduction is high, and especially because the subject matter is so heated. Nearly everyone involved has an emotionally laden angle, rooted in past personal experience of an abortion or from feelings they have about pregnancy and children generally. Religious faith, too, brings the illusion of absolutes, whether that’s faith in God or a faith in universalised patriarchy that can’t tell the difference between Kabul and Kensington.

It would help to alleviate the tension, perhaps, if all sides could admit that there are no clean hands here, just as there are no clean lines. There never could be, and that’s not our fault. In some cases, it really is a zero-sum game between the interests of the mother and those of the foetus, or even between those of the mother and those of the father. But in advance of inspecting the local context, you can’t say which decision will be, if not good exactly, then perhaps the least bad.

Bill Clinton’s 1992 slogan about abortion — “Safe, legal, rare” — was a great one, partly because of its refusal to offer easy absolutes. The word “rare” is reassuringly vague, located somewhere between always and never, and tending towards an acknowledgement of the costs of abortion without ruling the practice out as illegitimate. Zealots may see this as an unsatisfactory fudge, but I think it accurately reflects the true picture. Human reproduction is sometimes a horrible mess, and it cannot be completely tidied up. We shouldn’t seek to avoid the discomfort of this fact by pretending that an easy algorithm exists to help with the moral calculus.

The GOP’s restrictionist abortion platform appears to have played a major role in its subpar results in the 2022 midterms, even as spiralling inflation seemed sure to boost the party’s fortunes. In the months since, its vulnerability on reproductive rights has continued to play out in a number of statewide contests — most recently, in the commanding victory of pro-choice liberal challenger Janet Protasiewicz in Wisconsin’s State Supreme Court election.

All of this has proven frustrating to those who are convinced, with some reason, that the GOP should be winning — not only because of Biden’s economic woes but because of the Democrats’ commitment to unpopular positions on culture-war topics, from transgender athletes to racial preferences. How can the Republicans be bleeding votes on one culture-war issue when they hold a decisive advantage on so many others?

The answer, in part, is that there is no longer just one culture war, but (at least) two distinct battlefields with different terrains — let’s call them Culture War 1.0 and Culture War 2.0. Culture War 1.0, exemplified today by the abortion debate, dates to the conservative backlash to the sexual revolution in the Seventies. It has seen the cultural Right fight a series of losing battles — with the overturning of Roe v. Wade last year standing as an exception that proves the rule. Culture War 2.0, consisting of a varied array of race and gender-related conflicts that have consumed public life in recent years, dates back barely a decade, but it did not truly come to the fore until the convulsions of 2020.

The GOP’s attraction to this second iteration are obvious. The positions increasingly embraced by the Democratic coalition on the relevant cluster of issues — for example, that a woman is anyone who identifies as such, that biological sex is not real, or that present discrimination is needed to counteract past discrimination — are broadly unpopular outside certain affluent, highly educated settings. Moreover, those leading the charge against the new liberal consensus are often disaffected liberals and establishment centrists, which suggests there is a potential for the Right to make inroads beyond its traditional base. Abortion, in contrast, is of greatest concern to religious voters, who make up a rapidly declining share of the electorate.

So, why do the Culture War 1.0 politics of abortion remain so resilient within the GOP, even as it threatens to torpedo the party’s chances in many contests? The answer lies in the difference between these two battlefields. Consider Florida governor and likely presidential contender Ron DeSantis’s recent decision to sign a bill limiting abortion to the first six weeks of pregnancy. DeSantis has capitalised more than any politician to date on Culture War 2.0 issues, having declared war against critical race theory and gender ideology in schools, and against the progressive turn taken by corporations like Disney. These aggressive moves have polled well in Florida, even beyond the Republican base, and helped propel him to a midterm victory last year that set him apart from the mediocre performance of his party.

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By Edward Luttwak

Why, then, has DeSantis embraced abortion restrictions, which poll poorly in Florida and have proven a losing issue even in solidly conservative states such as Kansas and Kentucky? In a recent commentary on DeSantis’s decision, political scientist Eric Kaufmann voices an exasperation shared by many Culture War 2.0 advocates: why would the GOP’s rising star make such a “withdrawal of political capital” given that barely a third of Florida voters support the measure? According to Kaufmann, the pursuit of abortion restrictions reflects the preferences of the anti-abortion GOP donor and activist class — whose support would obviously be vital in a presidential primary — over and against those of moderate swing voters.

Kaufmann hints at an alternative approach centred around a Republican version of what some Democratic strategists dub “popularism”: ignore the moral manias of activists and insiders, and foreground proposals that poll well with the electorate — such as ending affirmative action and banning the teaching of critical race theory and gender theory in schools. A number of major Republican pundits have lately offered a similar assessment; as Ann Coulter exasperatedly tweeted: “Stop pushing strict limits on abortion, or there will be no Republicans left.”

But the weakness of popularism, whether Democratic or Republican, is that it emphasises polling at the expense of organisational and institutional dimensions of power; that is, it conceives of politics as a contest between aggregate individual opinions. Political success, for the popularist, comes from identifying positions that appeal to the largest number of individual voters and highlighting them to draw these voters in on election day.

This might seem obvious, but what it misses is the fact that any political coalition is made up of what are derogatorily called “interest groups” — not atomised individuals weighing their stances on a laundry list of issues (the model of citizenship implied by public opinion surveys), but individuals embedded in social formations with shared interests and preferences, and a particular positioning in relation to institutions: churches, parties, NGOs, the media, and so on.

This basic reality accounts for many phenomena that often seem mystifying in our polling-obsessed political culture. What accounts for the many policies that command broad support according to surveys but have no chance of being enacted? The answer often given is that the preferences of the wealthy and powerful override those of the broader electorate, and there’s surely something to that. But in the case of abortion — as opposed to, say, marginal tax rates — there is no obvious reason why rich donors would favour outright bans, or on the opposite side, the maximal liberalisation of abortion laws. The question, here as elsewhere, is how partisans of a particular cause that isn’t overwhelmingly popular have managed to organise and cultivate support in order to achieve their desired ends.

The anti-abortion cause remains politically potent within the GOP because it has emphasised the slow, unglamourous work of building networks of single-minded activists and establishing institutional power where it mattered. The fact that it achieved a key goal despite its relative unpopularity — polling prior to Dobbs suggested fewer than a third of Americans supported overturning Roe — is the crucial sign of the movement’s formidable force.

And yet, Culture War 2.0 will likely prove irresistible to GOP candidates in general elections in the coming years, as the need for culture-war appeals clashes with the unpopularity of Culture 1.0 issues with moderate voters. As The New York Times recently reported: “Polling suggests that the public is less likely to support transgender rights than same-sex marriage and abortion rights” — the same goes, as Kaufmann notes, for teaching critical race theory in schools and racial preferences in admissions and hiring. Surely, given losses like Wisconsin, such a pivot would be prudent.

But in the long run, Culture War 2.0 may prove a paper tiger, because beneath its polling strengths and prominence in the news cycle, it lacks organisational depth, clear institutional ambitions, and even coherent political objectives. Organisationally and institutionally, it heavily consists of political influencers of various sorts: podcasters, YouTubers, Substackers, and the like. To the extent the movement includes people engaged in contests over power, rather than the battle of ideas, these tend to be imperfect proxies for a generalised opposition to contemporary liberal ideology. Overturning Roe, for instance, strikes at the heart of a practice the anti-abortion movement views as evil. In contrast, bans on teaching critical race or gender theory in schools, transgender athletes competing in school sports, or even youth gender transition only chip away at the object truly targeted by Culture War 2.0: the nebulous “woke” ideological complex, which, due both to its vague contours and speech protections, cannot itself be banned.

All of this is compounded by the fact that Culture War 2.0’s broad coalition is internally incoherent in its long-term aims — in what it hopes will supplant progressive hegemony. It includes people who desire colour-blind policies and adherents of “race realism”; people who want to abolish gender and people who want to reinforce traditional gender roles. The strength of Culture War 2.0 — its broad base of support — is thus also its weakness.

That is not to say any of this is permanent. Culture War 2.0, as already noted, is new; the movements under its umbrella could theoretically evolve into forces as durable, well-organised, and ruthless about the pursuit of institutional power as the anti-abortion movement was over the decades leading up to Dobbs. But the incentives of the media and political landscape differ immensely from the period when Culture War 1.0 took shape: winning the news cycle and achieving maximum virality now take precedence. The anti-abortion movement, incubated in a different cultural landscape, learned to ignore most of this in its single-minded pursuit of a clearly defined, difficult objective. Rather than dismissing insiders, donors and interest groups, those attempting to build any political movement would do well to follow suit.

If 21st-century politics is shaping up as class war, the American midterm elections have concretised a troubling facet of this political landscape: this class war is also a sex war.

Writing about the dynamic as a feminist is uncomfortable in the extreme because it’s difficult to do so without being accused of misogyny. This is not least because among the very online Right, there really is more than a tinge of misogyny to the term most commonly used to denote progressive-leaning Virtual women: AWFLs.

Coined by Right-wing commentator Scott Greer, AWFL stands for “affluent white female liberals”, and generally connotes not just the demographic but its perceived characteristic worldview — a mixture of progressive moral piety, self-righteousness, hypocrisy and unexamined class snobbery.

Whether or not you agree with this hostile evaluation, the AWFL class has been growing in relative power and influence for some decades. This is for wholly non-conspiratorial reasons: very simply, technological advancements have delivered new opportunities for well-qualified knowledge workers of both sexes, even as the same changes have automated and de-industrialised away the physically more arduous work previously performed mostly by working-class men. This virtualisation of work has, overall, benefited women much more than men.

Accordingly, women have seized the opportunity. American colleges have been majority-female since the late Seventies, and today, women outnumber men at undergraduate level in most colleges, with the disparity as large as 60%-40% in some elite institutions. And this has turned out a steadily compounding supermajority of knowledge-class women, which forms an increasingly heavy-hitting part of the rising Virtual elite.

The gradual extension of ever more spheres of work to relatively equal participation is, to a great extent, an effect of the transition away from physical toward knowledge work — but is routinely framed as “progress” in an abstract sense. In suggesting a more material interpretation of this change, I’m not making the opposite argument, that this represents decline. More women in public life is not in itself a bad thing, unless you really are a misogynist. But as female graduates have embraced professional life across knowledge-economy and bureaucratic roles, and their influence has compounded over time, this shift has redrawn the political map in important ways — not least by tilting visible public discourse Left, in ways that only ambivalently reflect the electorate overall.

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Sex strikes won't win the midterms

By Kat Rosenfield

At undergraduate level, women are especially heavily represented among arts and social sciences courses – topics so overwhelmingly progressive that only 9% of undergraduates vote Republican. These overwhelmingly Left-wing female graduates then cluster in the institutions that set and manage social and cultural norms, such as education, media, and HR. In American nonprofits, for example, 75% are female, while HR, the division of corporate life most concerned with managing the moral parameters of everyday working life, is two-thirds female.

And those progressive graduate women who aren’t busy shaping public morals via nonprofits and HR departments are busy doing so for the next generation in schools: 76% of American teachers are women. Inevitably, given that all US states require teachers to hold at least a bachelor’s degree, these are also uniformly drawn from the female demographic most likely to be very liberal.

When Meghan McCain’s husband talked about how the Democrats will soon be dominated by “millennial girlboss energy” types and described the prospect as “crazytown”, progressive firebrand Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was strictly correct to point out that women make up less than a third of the Senate, and millennials only 7%. But this is to miss the point.

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Why I'm voting Republican

By Andrew Sullivan

The AWFL demographic, relatively underrepresented in the Senate, is overrepresented across media, journalism, nonprofits, HR departments, academia, and school teachers. Their views can expect enthusiastic signal-boosting and institutional support from such bodies. They’re also the demographic most overwhelmingly likely to vote Democrat. No wonder their political priorities increasingly shape Democratic political platforms: their high visibility makes it easy to mistake them for the entirety of the Left.

Even the staunchly liberal New Yorker has worried recently that this constitutes a blind spot, while the far-Left Jacobin described the emphasis of New York’s Kathy Hochul on abortion rather than inflation as “girlboss politics”. Much was made of a WSJ poll last week, that suggested, albeit based on a small sample, that even white suburban women (an affluent demographic that overlaps with the derisive “AWFL” designation) were swinging against the Democrats based on economic concerns.

But results so far suggest that this swing, if it’s come at all, has been muted. And perhaps this makes sense. For the changing nature of work isn’t the only way this political bloc relies on technology for its ascendancy. For this group, it seems intuitively right to push for a world where sex differences are no longer politically important — to the extent of agreeing that a woman is anyone who identifies as such. It should come as no surprise that AWFLs are also the strongest supporters of trans rights: for this class, there are no obvious upsides to disturbing the idealist vision of men and women as interchangeable, or as a menu of body parts to be mixed and matched according to personal taste.

For knowledge-class progressive women, though, a still more central issue where tech and their interests converge is in the core material obstacle to workplace equality: the female reproductive role, including gestation, childbirth and breastfeeding. For the so-called “gender pay gap” is, in truth, a motherhood pay gap. Thus, for a chance to compete in the knowledge workplace on the same terms as men, women’s bodies also need tech support.

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How Turbo-Wokism broke America

By David Samuels

So such women are structurally dependent on medical interventions to keep their bodies free from the rigours and long-term obligations of pregnancy, childbirth and dependent children. In other words: for AWFLs overall, abortion really is an existential issue. And making the midterms a referendum on that issue appears to have paid off. For suburban women, and indeed the electorate overall, it seems gas prices remain some way downstream of the tech-enabled reproductive “freedom”that knowledge-class Clinton feminists routinely frame as a precondition for personhood as such.

But it remains the case that material sex differences continue to matter a great deal among (for example) manual workers, mothers, athletes and incarcerated women — just as gas prices and other material pressures can often rank higher than abstract questions of “rights” — something that becomes more pressing the further you go down the socioeconomic hierarchy. We can guess at some of the emerging tensions in news that married men and women as well as unmarried men broke Republican – but unmarried women swung the other way by a whopping 37%. These fissures are not going to go away.

For now, the coalition between Clinton feminism, Virtual class interests, and the American electorate seems to be holding up, albeit with some creaking. But for how long? For “progress”, understood as the march of technology, has losers as well as winners. And when “progress” is routinely conflated with “feminism”, you can expect groups who aren’t doing so well under its auspices to take this at face value too – and blame feminists for their suffering. I can see no possible direction for this to take save a backlash that will likely spill far beyond the class at whom it’s really directed.

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How race politics liberated the elites

By Matthew Crawford

A few days, ago, answering the question about women’s rights and gas prices, one young woman said: “Everything in the world has got significantly worse since we gave women the right to vote. So I honestly think we should just lower gas prices.”

Perhaps this is just one voice. But perhaps it isn’t. If, as I fear, we’re just barely into the foothills of a new class war, and with it a burgeoning sex war, we can expect a great deal more of this from those ranged against the progressives.

Plenty of us – including plenty of knowledge-class women – don’t feel much sympathy for the lawn-sign political programme. But save on the fringes, few of us have any great wish to live through a vicious misogynistic backlash either. Feminists in this uncomfortable position urgently need a new language to describe and defend women’s interests outside AWFL feminism. If we don’t find it, I worry that in due course, political polarisation really will make us choose between gas prices and women’s rights.

The factory workers constructed and inscribed the black granite for the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. They created a national monument at Arlington for the Pentagon victims of the September 11 attacks, and they did the same for the heart-stopping 9/11 monument to New York City. They do it too for individual men and women who have been killed in action. When I was there, the Iraq war was raging and they were busy.

Two things struck me about Granite Industries and its place in US life. The first was how remote America’s beating heart can be. Vermont is mainly forest. In winter, it glistens in gorgeous silence as the snows come and go. This company plays a central part in American life and yet exists in an unexplored, unpopulated corner of the nation.

The second thing was how corners of the nation can be not just unexplored but genuinely separate from the rest. Yes, America is a collection of states, and yes, the constitution does not refer to a single nation. But the lived experience of these facts is still somewhat alien to those of us who come from centralised nations, and frankly alien to some Americans, particularly on the Left, who have convinced themselves in recent decades that the Unum is more important than the pluribus.

It’s a fascinating fact that the very same people who value diversity seem not to be keen on it in an area of American life where it has traditionally existed: the relationship between the states and the central federal government. There is evidence aplenty that this diversity is growing to an extent that is unavoidable, occasionally dangerous, but in some ways positive.

To state the obvious first: American states are hugely different even in areas where the geography, the weather, the feel to a visiting Martian, might be similar. Vermont and New Hampshire are good examples. When I drove to see the headstones that day, we crossed from New Hampshire. There’s a sign, “Welcome to Vermont” — but there doesn’t have to be. The last thing you see on the New Hampshire side of the interstate is a Walmart and dozens of other large stores and car parks and accompanying tat.

Then just trees. This is because New Hampshire has no sales tax. So no big stores see the point of basing themselves on the Vermont side of the border where you have to pay a hefty 6% on anything you buy. In theory Vermonters have to declare stuff they bring home but, well, that’s in theory.

There is otherwise little difference between the states — both mainly trees perched on granite. But New Hampshire is a proto-libertarian paradise whose state motto is “Live Free or Die” (there used to be a Free State Project that tried to get libertarians to live there) and Vermont is one of the most taxed and regulated states in the Union whose most famous politician is a self-described socialist, Bernie Sanders.

Good luck to them both. That’s the kind of difference that all America can cope with, even celebrate. What happens now though if the differences become even wider and extend into areas of life that touch everyone?

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Why does America hate itself?

By Justin Webb

One of the greatest political victories of recent times in America was that of the Federalist Society founded at Yale Law School in 1982. Its aim was “checking federal power, protecting individual liberty and interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning” — in other words, upholding the legal concept of “originalism”. It set about its business of changing the judiciary and advancing its own members with gusto and guile and, via the Supreme Court justice picks of Donald Trump, has won its battle, indeed for a generation, won its war.

But coverage of the victory has concentrated on the wrong aspects of that core mission statement. Yes, originalism and individual liberty have consequences for law, but what of the first part, the checking of federal power?

This is what the court has begun to do and this is what might change America: de-nationalise it to an extent that goes far beyond the odd tax difference. The court may pull it apart or allow it to come apart gradually, but either way points to a new dispensation with some basic rights that all Americans can enjoy, but not nearly so many of them.

It’s worth stressing that the nationalisation of so much of American life was a bipartisan affair even if the Republicans rhetorically railed against it. The prominence of business regulatory issues on the GOP’s agenda meant that in some areas they were the keenest of federal regulators. Large companies tend to prefer comprehensive standards to a hodgepodge of local rules. But now of course the party has largely said goodbye to big business and howdy to the mom-and-pop world of low tax and local regulation. This change allows state control to be a genuine aim.

Individual states will be where the action is in this new world. The end of Roe v. Wade made no difference to the rights of women to have abortions in those states that want those rights protected. Indeed, in Kansas it may well have reinvigorated a local sense of the importance that abortion should remain legal. But what the court undoubtedly did is check federal power.

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The death of American dignity

By Justin Webb

The idea of national progress — an idea that extends back to FDR and the New Deal — may well be coming to an end. American history is rightly seen as a series of broad periods of consensus with one party or tendency in overall power. The most recent is the post-war welfare state, which not only improved the lives of Americans in material ways but also gave them the right to a decent life. This helped to forge a sense of national destiny, as such rights must be for everyone or else they don’t count as rights. That is what is threatened now. How odd if Trump — flawed in so many ways — goes down in history as the bringer of such profound change.

Of course, there are dangers. “States’ rights” used to mean rights for racists: a rallying cry for the slave-owning South. Might it again? Might states that don’t care much for national democracy go their own way? In Arizona, the Republican candidates for Governor and Secretary of State are both refusing to commit to accepting potential defeat in the midterm elections next month. They seem to be suggesting that Arizona opts out of democracy as it is currently understood. In the event of them winning office, it is difficult to see Arizona accepting anything other than a Republican victory at the next presidential election.

Unilateral secession is not permitted of course under the post-Civil War settlement. But what about plain rogue-ness? The Supreme Court is about to hear a case that would give added power over federal elections to state legislatures and might encourage them to refuse to certify results they didn’t like. It’s freedom for states to be sure, but is it democracy?

None of those threats is easily dismissed. But nor should the potential upside be ignored in a situation where — as a matter of simply empirical fact — Americans have grown apart and done so with some enthusiasm on both sides. Some will see federalism as a rescue mechanism: a multi-speed America where California can press ahead on climate change, Florida can cut tax on business, some states can decriminalise marijuana and some not. In the battle over trans rights some might favour natal females, perhaps in girl’s sport, and some might back the rights of trans women. Choices, choices, choices. Above all this becomes an America where you might want to do something, ban something, enforce something, but in my state we tell you to sling your hook. And the Supreme Court backs me.

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How Turbo-Wokism broke America

By David Samuels

America is huge. You can get a U-Haul truck and move. Millions do. You can also write home from where you have gone and tell folks how much better things are where you live. If you are convincing, they may press for change where they are too.

In 1968, Vermont became the first state in the continental USA to ban advertising billboards. You need a clear view of the trees, they decided. Some thought it was the beginning of communism, and would soon beenforced nationwide. In the end a couple of other tree-filled states joined in, but most of America is still a billboard heaven.

The point is this: you have no right to billboard-free life in America. But you do have a right to live in a state that bans them. If you feel strongly about universal billboard rights you are going to hate this: but you might have to live with it, and in time you’ll settle down.

The midterm elections next month will lead — via Democratic Party losses in the House and possibly the Senate — to more talk of the end of American democracy. Election deniers will be on the march. Yet although America is indeed troubled, there are still options short of conflict. Perhaps that’s the way to see the new federalism: as balm, in troubled times.

Like the rest of America’s ruling class, Clinton fears we are hopelessly divided, possibly forever. The media tends to agree. Books and op-eds are churned out, hyping everything from the “polarisation spiral” to predictions of a coming civil war. We are past the point of no return, pundits warn. Apparently even scholars of polarisation are polarised, according to the New York Times. As Tiffany Cross put it on her MSNBC show a few weeks ago: “People keep saying a civil war is coming. I would say a civil war is here. And I don’t mean to be hyperbolic.”

The trouble it is, it is hyperbolic. It’s true that our political and media elites, and those who run corporations and Big Tech companies, are increasingly partisan. But that’s because they have a lot to gain — in terms of money and power — from making Americans hate each other. Nevertheless, despite the billions and billions of dollars being spent trying to divide us, polarisation remains an elite phenomenon. When it comes to the fundamental values this nation was founded on, Americans are much more united than they are divided.

The evidence is everywhere. Last week, for instance, Gallup reported the latest approval rating for interracial marriage between black and white people. The polling company first started asking Americans about their feelings on the subject in 1958, when approval was an abysmal 4%. As of 2022, it stands at 94%, and there is almost no difference between white and non-white respondents. The regional difference has also evaporated. Southern Americans now approve of interracial marriage at the same rate as their eastern, Midwestern, and western neighbours. As recently as 1991, approval for interracial marriage in the south was at just 33%, compared to 54% in the east and 60% in the west. Today, those figures are 93%, 94%, and 97% respectively.

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The media's betrayal of the poor

By Batya Ungar-Sargon

You could argue that people haven’t become less racist, but simply less willing to admit their racism to pollsters. But even that is a huge leap forward. 93% of Southern Americans want pollsters, and presumably also their neighbours, to believe that they have the same views as the liberals they probably mocked just 20 years ago. Racism has become socially taboo.

Something similar has happened with gay marriage. Approval among Republicans has absolutely soared in recent years — from 16% in 1995 to 55% last year, including 61% of young Republicans. Many believe that at least ten Senate Republicans will join the Democrats in enshrining the right to gay marriage into law. At a time of intense polarisation — when even baby formula divides the house — this is a major feat.

And then there’s abortion, an issue that the media and our politicians assume is hugely divisive. In fact, the vast majority of Americans agree on the major points. They oppose abortion bans and want it to be generally legal in the first trimester, and in cases of rape, incest or where the mother’s health is threatened. On criminal justice, too, there is no longer a partisan divide. In recent years, Republicans have been at the forefront of criminal justice reform. Red states like Oklahoma, Georgia and Idaho have been quietly releasing prisoners and reforming their justice systems for the better part of a decade. Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch has consistently sided with liberal judges in criminal justice cases. And President Trump’s First Step Act released 5,000 black men from prison, although those men seem to be the only ones who took any notice.

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Tribalism has come to the West

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Even when it comes to police brutality, Republicans have been becoming more vocal. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham announced he was seeking proposals to improve policing and combat “racial discrimination regarding the use of force”. Soon after, Senator Tim Scott, the only black Republican senator, introduced a police reform bill — which was later killed by Democrats.

Scott and Graham were joined by none other than the then-leader of the Republican Senate majority, Mitch McConnell, who told reporters in the wake of Floyd’s murder: “We are still wrestling with America’s original sin. It is perfectly clear we are a long way from the finish line.” And at a lunch for Republican senators, Tom Cotton of Arkansas stood up and said: “Young Black men have a very different experience with law enforcement in this nation than white people, and that’s their impression and experience, and we need to be sensitive to that and do all we can to change it.”

Meanwhile, the most vocal Democrats on the subject are those who support progressive prosecutors and bail reform efforts — policies often billed as divisive. But they are not divisive; they are just wildly unpopular — like Republican efforts to ban abortion in all cases. Democrat and Republican Americans alike oppose these measures, especially now, amid a crime wave. Our elites want us to believe these issues divide Americans, but they simply don’t.

The Pew Research Center recently released a study that they claimed showed signs of “partisan hostility” growing. “Growing shares of both Republicans and Democrats say members of the other party are more immoral, dishonest, closed-minded than other Americans,” the study claimed to find. But the questions they asked respondents weren’t about members of the other party as much as they were about the parties themselves, or politicians: “Do you have a favourable or unfavourable opinion of the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party?”; “How well do each of the following phrases describe the Republican or Democrat Party?”; “How much do you like or dislike Republican or Democrat political leaders who…” People aren’t turning on their fellow Americans so much as they are on political parties and leaders.

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America needs to calm down

By Simon Cottee

And it’s not just this study that suggests so; a 2019 study by James Druckman and Matthew Levendusky in Public Opinion Quarterly found that “when answering questions about the other party, individuals think about elites more than voters”. When the elites of the party were separated out from average Americans, the researchers found that on every measure, “respondents are more negative toward the elites of the other party than they are toward voters”. And Anthony Fowler, a professor of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, has done numerous studies that fly in the face of the polarisation narrative, finding that voters are more moderate, more informed by policy, and more willing to change their views than many in power would have you to believe. “To be sure, there are real policy disagreements among Americans,” writes Fowler. “But for every extreme liberal or conservative who agrees with their party on most issues, there are far more people in the middle who think that Nancy Pelosi is too far to the Left and that Mitch McConnell is too far to the Right.”

Every week, I talk to working-class Americans across the country who work with people who disagree with them on politics. They tell me the same thing over and over: we don’t have the luxury of hating co-workers who vote for the other party. We rely on them too much. Party politics just doesn’t matter as much as having a good working relationship. It’s our elites who want us to believe that we are divided, simply because it benefits them.

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How bin Laden won

By Aris Roussinos

It’s clear how this works in politics: if you can convince you constituents that the person you’re running against is a fascist — or a groomer — then the race is over. Because if the choice is you or Hitler, you pretty much have it in the bag. And if you can also convince people that your opponents’ supporters and voters are fascists and deplorables, who cling to their guns and their Bibles and their bigotries, well, who wants to be in that category? Divisiveness in politics is a shortcut — a workaround to actually having to deliver the promises you make your constituents.

Something similar has happened to the mainstream media. With the collapse of the local newspaper industry, a new business model has emerged that is diametrically opposed to the goal of getting the widest circulation. The business incentives of digital media see success in terms of engagement rather than circulation or ad revenue, and the tools of digital media make it possible to target content to specific audiences based on income and zip code. Online publishing software tells you exactly what these audiences are clicking on, how often, and for how long — so you can give readers more and more and more of it. Of course, the most engaged readers online are always the most extreme, which means that our news outlets gain most by catering to them.

Social media companies work in a similar way. The currency there is attention, and the stronger you feel about something, the longer you stay on a page dedicated to it, and the more likely you are to click on an ad. Every time you hate a stranger on the internet, someone makes money.

At a time when the death of Elizabeth II is uniting her nation in grief, it’s hard to watch our own head of state fall into this trap. President Biden — who campaigned on unifying the country, and promised to represent not only those who voted for him but also those who did not — has made a habit of casting his political opponents as extremists. Recently, for instance, he has smeared MAGA Republicans as “semi-fascists” and a threat to democracy. Not exactly the behaviour of a unifier.

The thing that was miraculous about the response to 9/11 was not that Americans united, because we were not divided. It’s that our leaders did: they showed the grace that ordinary Americans show every single day, working alongside each other in nursing homes in Florida and factories in Iowa and construction sites in Minnesota. For once, our leaders were worthy of our support. For once, they were representing us. Today, by contrast, they simply demand that we defend them — to the extend that it means indulging in meaningless fantasies about a looming civil war.

“Not yet a human” was written in capital letters on her tummy. The message was clear. Human life begins at birth. Only then does what exists within her become the bearer of its own set of rights. Until then, the rights that are attendant upon being a human being are hers and hers alone. The criteria for being a human being are rooted in values like independence and rationality, often understood as consciousness.

Others reference a very different set of values. On the Tube, the woman opposite me wears the pin badge “baby on board”, an invitation to treat her carefully, perhaps to give up my seat if the carriage is busy. Like many people, I do. And by doing so, I acknowledge that “baby on board” has some sort of moral call upon us, a call to treat her in a certain way in virtue of the baby that she is carrying. Two women; two very different moral messages.

Those who locate the beginnings of human life with conception or with birth — and at all points between — are making a moral decision not a biological one. Often, they do not disagree upon the scientific facts at all. They just disagree which of these facts are morally relevant.

I had wanted to write about abortion without saying what I thought about it morally. But that is probably impossible. I do not have a clear and definitive idea of when a human life becomes a human life. I have a sense that something emerges over time, with an increasing moral call upon us to treat this body of cells as something more than inert matter. Which is why abortion shortly after conception does feel morally different to later terminations. But the law requires a definite line. Rights is a legal term and requires legal precision.

Other moral approaches have the capacity to be more nuanced. So it is perfectly possible that one may affirm the right to have an abortion without maintaining that it is morally unquestionable. I am somewhere here. To agree with Bill Clinton that abortion should be “legal, safe and rare” is to acknowledge — to insist upon — the right as well as to maintain that there is something about it that should be “rare”.

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American feminism has turned its back on women

By Hadley Freeman

Rights and morality do not always perfectly track each other. This is why, if you ask me about rights, I am instinctively more pro-choice, and if you ask me a moral type of question, I am less so. Rights are not capable of doing all the moral work that we want them to.

But there are other implications to the question of what constitutes human life. For if we take independence and consciousness as the most important concepts for what it means to be human, we are faced with the question of what to do when these concepts can be replicated artificially. What if robots, for instance, supported by some advanced artificial intelligence, meet these criteria for being human?

After all, they may indeed display independence and something remarkably close to consciousness — which is why academics are already writing about the need for robot rights. This seems to me to be crazy: I think of robots as having no more claim to my moral concern than toasters do. Yet if we subscribe to a set of beliefs of what it is to be human that can be generated artificially, then we are not far from thinking robots to be “more human” than, say, a brain-dead person on a life support machine. Or indeed a foetus.

Back in 2017, the government of Saudi Arabia bestowed citizenship — and thus legal personhood — on Sophia, a robot. It was a marketing gimmick, of course. As many pointed out, this appeared to grant a robot more rights than half of the people living in that country: there was something profoundly disturbing about granting a glorified toaster more of a legal claim to personhood than many of the women living under that despotic regime. Examples like this make me think there was greater wisdom in the idea of humanity being the bearer of a soul than in the current belief that it has to do with higher consciousness and the capacity for independent living.

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The Left killed the pro-choice coalition

By Kat Rosenfield

Religion is much disparaged in the abortion debate, and I understand why. The denial of abortion rights to those who have become pregnant through rape or incest is cruel and heartless. Christianity is supposed to be “good news” — but how can forcing an unwanted pregnancy be “good news” for a woman? Yet if we defend women’s rights in such a way that a minus-one-day-old baby less human than a toaster, then we are all in terrible trouble. “Not yet a human” is a dangerous slogan, especially when we start to think about how its criteria for being might be rolled out — or denied — to others in very different circumstances, such as the seriously ill. “Not yet a human” is perilously close to the statement “No longer a human”.

We used to think the essence of human life was to be in possession of a soul, something ineffable and God-given. It wasn’t so much a question of reasoning from mental capacity to humanity, more an attitudinal statement about how our lumpy flesh ought to be venerated as ultimately precious, as opposed to merely being a thing. There is much to be said for this approach, but in a more empirically minded age, the fact that we could not see it or weigh it made the soul intellectually suspect. So now we are more likely to think in terms of the brain and brain development.

The point about the religious attitude is that it insists that human life is not fungible, not fully replaceable with something that may share all of its outward characteristics. I absolutely believe in a woman’s right to choose. I do not believe in anyone’s right to deny the humanity of another. But we must not defend the former by insisting upon the latter. “Not yet a human” will always be a terrifying phrase.

Everyone knew Roe was shaky. Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a lifelong pro-choice advocate, expressed regrets that the abortion question hadn’t been decided by a stronger case, one that centred on a woman’s right to bodily autonomy rather than the nebulous notion of “privacy”. Instead of surviving on the merits, the validity of Roe became largely a question of precedent: the best argument for the continued upholding of the decision was the fact that it had, so far, been upheld.

This was exciting to some, terrifying to others, and destabilising for the entire nation. For pro-lifers, the case was an annoying obstacle that forced them to chip away at abortion protections through piecemeal measures — such as outlawing certain types of late-term abortion or burdening clinics with so many onerous regulations that they were forced to close their doors — while praying that the Supreme Court might eventually skew conservative enough to let an outright ban make it through. For pro-choicers, Roe was nothing less than a bulwark against a return to the bad old days when desperate women died of septic shock and punctured wombs after trying to terminate their own pregnancies with coat hangers.

On all sides, extreme rhetoric ruled the day, fuelled by a sense that abortion protections were perpetually hanging by a single thread. Yet nobody ever seemed to really believe the thread would break — until this week, when a leak from inside the Supreme Court revealed that the justices intend to rule in favour of overturning Roe.

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This glimpse of the future of abortion rights is grave, even if women’s ability to access the procedure currently remains unchanged. Unless one of the five justices in favour of the ruling changes his or her mind, the toppling of Roe is inevitable.

And yet, in the long run, perhaps this is a good thing.

This is not to downplay the short-term negative impacts of the decision, which will cause deep and immediate disruptions to women’s lives, to the healthcare system, and to local government that must now legislate abortion access on the state level. In some states, including New Jersey and Delaware, laws already exist to protect abortion rights in the event that Roe is overturned; in others, such as Texas and Mississippi, the Supreme Court’s decision will trigger laws that either severely restrict or fully eliminate legal access to the procedure.

Overnight, the distribution of reproductive rights will become wildly uneven: women who live in more liberal states will still be able to obtain an abortion easily. Women who don’t — or who can’t easily travel to a state with fewer restrictions — will almost certainly face terrible hardship in the event of an unwanted pregnancy.

American politicians, who could avoid taking a stance on abortion as long as Roe remained in place, are now staring down a campaign season in which it will be among the most pivotal issues in play.

But given the choice between a national reckoning on abortion and another 50 years of waiting nervously to see if Roe will crumble under its own weight, does anyone really prefer the latter? Women’s bodily autonomy should never have depended for so long on a single Supreme Court decision, especially one with such well-documented weaknesses.

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The leaked draft, written by Justice Samuel Alito, notes that “Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division” — and he’s not wrong. The Supreme Court is a lousy tool for making lasting policy, and the perception that abortion rights were always just one winning court case away from a 180-degree reversal has allowed this issue to be dominated by the most extreme voices on both sides.

On the Left, radical pro-choice activists have demanded unrestricted abortion basically until the moment of live birth, engaged in coarse cheerleading such as the #ShoutYourAbortion hashtag, and cheered for a Yale student who announced that she had aborted half a dozen pregnancies as a form of performance art. Meanwhile, on the Right, deranged anti-choicers had shrieking meltdowns over the “sluts” who wanted access to birth control, suggested that exceptions for rape and incest were biologically unnecessary because the body would “shut that whole thing down”, and waved giant placards with images of mutilated babies outside women’s health clinics.

Amid all this, it was easy to forget that the general American public has far more complex views on this issue, and far more in common with each other than with the loudest activists on either side. The majority of Americans are, in fact, quite pro-choice — when it comes to abortions within the first trimester, which 61% of people believe should be legal in all or most cases. But the majority also greatly favour restrictions to later-term abortion: 65% believe that second-trimester abortion should be largely illegal.

So the fact that, in all this time, Democrats have failed to advance pro-choice federal legislation that might have codified abortion rights into law seems short-sighted. They have chosen instead to let Roe be the only thing standing between us and the impending chaos of abortion access being decided state-by-state. And the fact that they’ve done so even as the Right pushed through the Hyde Amendment (which prohibits federal funds such as Medicaid from being used to pay for abortions) and the federal ban on certain late-term abortion procedures is nothing short of foolish.

This reckoning should have happened years ago, if not decades.

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The next best thing, though, is for it to happen now. And with the fate of Roe no longer hanging in the balance, with the binary question answered, maybe we can have a more nuanced conversation than we’ve had for the past 50 years. Imagine if, rather than endless back and forth shrieks of “Woman hater!” on one side and “Baby killer!” on the other, we started on the common ground shared by a substantial majority of citizens — and actually began the difficult but important work of codifying abortion access into law.

Democratic politicians, particularly, have long been elected amid promises to be staunch advocates for a woman’s right to choose; Joe Biden even vowed during his presidential campaign to introduce legislation that would explicitly enshrine the protections provided by Roe as actual law, not just case law (although he’s now pivoted to using the fall of Roe as a clarion call to elect more Democrats in November).

But with all eyes on the Supreme Court, these promises were largely symbolic; now, for the first time in decades, Americans will be looking to their elected representatives to take meaningful action on this issue. If ever there was a moment for Congress to stop its dysfunctional peacocking and actually do its jobs — including the sort of across-the-aisle collaboration that has historically been a vital component of passing legislation on contentious issues — it’s this one.

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None of this promises to be easy, especially against the fraught backdrop of our polarised political landscape. A successful resolution requires pro-choicers to confront the unpopularity of later-term abortion and be willing to compromise by allowing restrictions on it — perhaps in exchange for easier access to early-term medical abortions, and definitely in exchange for free, over-the-counter access to hormonal birth control.

Pro-lifers, similarly, would need to abandon their quaint obsession with sexual moralising, and support family planning and other policies that make it as easy as possible for women to avoid unwanted pregnancies. Everyone would need to reacquaint themselves with the concept of compromise for the sake of the common good.

Whether our elected representatives would do what they should do to build a legislative consensus on this topic remains to be seen. And between the majority support for legal first-trimester abortion and the availability of mifepristone (including by mail) for terminating pregnancies up to 10 weeks old, we can at least be thankful that a return to the bad old days where women died in agony after botched back-alley abortions is probably no longer in the cards.

But there is still a price to allowing this issue to revert to the states. It will deepen the divide between red and blue America, to the extent that something as fundamental as a woman’s right to save her own life by aborting an ectopic pregnancy will depend on where in the nation she lives. Even in a country as big and diverse as this one, some issues require national unity lest they tear us apart.

And perhaps it’s too late for all of this; perhaps the leak of this draft decision, an unprecedented violation of our democratic norms and a very bad sign for the integrity of the Supreme Court, is the writing on the wall. Maybe our legislators have simply lost the ability to cooperate across the aisle, to build a consensus on anything, ever, let alone an issue as explosive as this one. Maybe this is the real deal, the pre-apocalyptic dysfunction that heralds a long and catastrophic decline.

But it is also an opportunity: to pull ourselves back from the brink, to find momentum amid the chaos, to build a coalition that may differ wildly on the issue of abortion rights but shares a desire to see the country survive and move forward. Because as much as we may mourn it, the era of Roe is over. What matters is what comes next.

Much has been lost in this cinematic adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s autofiction L’événément (2000). However, one mourns little. That slim book largely consists of self-indulgent and painfully predictable reflections on l’événement of l’écriture. Across her curiously prolific output of almost identical autofictions — punctuated by a few, mostly early, highlights — the author’s 1963 abortion holds especial place as the subject of not one but two texts: her début Les Armoires vides (1974) and its tedious reprisal, the source material for the present adaptation.

In brief, Ernaux, the daughter of a Normand grocer, the first person in her family to attend university, is a few months from graduation when she becomes pregnant by a bourgeois student from Bordeaux. Having the child will, she believes, doom her dreams of finishing her education and becoming a writer. In the months that follow, and with no help from the father, she desperately pursues a back-alley abortion; she finally ends up finding a marmish hospital nurse who performs such operations—for 400 francs—in her Batignolles apartment. Her procedure lands her in a hospital after dangerous haemorrhaging, a near-death experience without which, she tells us in the last pages, she wouldn’t have wanted to ever be a mother. 

One can safely guess why Happening is considered good: it is “urgent” and “timely,” as we have been helpfully informed by critics everywhere. The film received its US release by IFC films on May 6, three days after the release of a draft ruling penned by Justice Alito, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, which would overrule Roe v. Wade. One could not have prayed for better timing.

Before that leak, director Diwan was questioned — particularly, by potential financiers — as to whether her film had any real social urgency. Indeed, in February, the French parliament extended the legality of abortion from 12 to 14 weeks after conception, despite fleeting opposition from Emmanuel Macron. Whatever timeliness might have been lacking in the French release, the stateside one has now been ensured a rapturous reception, a felicity not lost on the director: the screening I attended was preceded by a brief recording of Diwan and lead actress Anamaria Vartolomei stating that the film was of imperative importance, given these times we find ourselves in, that if we did not understand what illegal abortion was like, it would be impossible to preserve the right to legal abortion, et cetera.

It’s as simple as that: the point of this film is to show an illegal abortion, so that one might be convinced to support the right to legal abortion. This is of a piece with a pretty popular middlebrow idea of the role of art (see this much-cited study demonstrating fiction’s power to create “empathy”.) And yet, it’s hard to imagine this film convincing anyone who is currently against, say, the legacy of Roe to really change their tune; as I understand it, most of those who want Roe repealed subscribe to a contestable but fairly simple chain of inference: life begins at conception, therefore killing a foetus at any point is murder. Murder is immoral, and immoral things must be illegal. Thus, killing a foetus at any point must be illegal. 

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This calculus doesn’t provide much room for manoeuvre, and the presumed Dobbs opinion, for example, doesn’t partake of the harm reductionist logic behind this sort of scare-tactic filmmaking. The only person for whom a film such as Happening could move the needle is, I guess, an anti-Roe person who hasn’t realised that back-alley abortions direly endanger the lives of the women who receive them (does such a person exist?). And is that exceptionally sheltered pro-life person, if she does, going to be watching a French art film? 

More likely, Happening is an example of preaching to the choir, and there, I wonder whether it might defeat its own purpose. After all, many rallying cries to Americans around abortion rights relate to incursions on the right to end pregnancy in the second trimester; for example, the Mississippi law at issue in Dobbs bans abortion after the 15th week, i.e. almost four months into pregnancy, and, one might note, after well over 90% of abortions are actually performed.

In Ernaux’s memoir, when the foetus is finally expunged after the insertion of two illegal probes, the narrator recounts that “a baby doll” falls out of her; the film is just as gruesome, showing the lead actress hunched over a toilet, red-faced and sweaty as what is visibly a child dangles from her and she breathlessly begs her bourgeois hallmate to cut the umbilical cord. 

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Your casual abortion advocate might not tend to think, when she contemplates laws like that Mississippi one, about the fact that a late-second trimester foetus has foetus has fingernails, limbs, etc. Is this scene actually going to make anyone support abortion rights more? This is one problem of the illegal abortion genre — the harder to procure an abortion, and the riskier it is, the more awful the actual act appears.

What about that scene in the notable 2007 Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (a far more original work) in which the abortionist warns the woman not to throw the foetus, “whole or in pieces” in the toilet, which it’ll clog up, or outside, where dogs might eat it? Perversely, some might leave the movies newly doubting the trimester-viability-undue burden framework of Roe v. Wade (as modified by Planned Parenthood v. Casey). And perhaps they might not come out supporting, say, the Democratic bill enshrining Roe and Casey, a bill so expansive that, say opponents like Sen. Susan Collins, it might preempt state bans on even sex-selective abortions.

Happening isn’t a film to change minds — it’s about rallying the troops to protest, vote, or at least make some targeted political donations — but one should wish for more from their art than a Pavlovian bell. One might wish to experience the uniqueness of a human experience, or something of the sort. Instead, despite what Indiewire may have protested in its Sundance review, this film is squarely didactic, with dialogue so implausible and condescending as to almost insult the audience: Girl to doctor who refuses to perform abortion: “I want to continue my studies; that’s the most important thing for me.” Doctor to Girl: “No scandals in my office!”; Girl: “I would like to have a child one day, but not instead of a life; I would hate the child for that!”; Proud teacher to student, after she has an abortion and resumes performing well in class: “Have you been sick?”; Student to proud teacher: “Yes, with that illness that only affects women, and turns them into housewives!”

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The message here is that Anne is a “brilliant student” who must have an abortion to preserve that career. But her brilliance is alluded to by gestures so heavy-handed — a facile lunchtime conversation about Camus and Sartre (“Camus really pierces you — Sartre, it’s more complicated!”); watching her friend teach her how to masturbate (a scene not in the memoir) with a Sartre poster in the background; raising money for the abortion (a scene not in the memoir) by selling, inter alia, Sartre’s Le Mur for 3 francs — that one can do little more than laugh. Given that the price for Anne’s literary career is a dangerous abortion, one might wish the output to be a little more impressive. 

This cinematic Anne is far from a captivating character, far from a reflection of a complicated young woman, far from a figure to remind one of women’s need for self-determination and their infinite capabilities. She is simply a boring, paint-by-numbers “smart girl,” one among many predictable indicia that this is an “art film” (handheld camera, lens flare, and — it’s European — a lot of nudity). Despite all the laudatory reviews and Diwan’s discussion of her portrayal of “silence” in film, it unfortunately remains the fact that having a lead actress with large eyes, and a screenplay full of short lines and pauses does not a meaningful statement make. 

Instead, Diwan’s film is ultimately so withholding as to say, well, nothing. The AV Club has hailed this film as “life-affirming”; but one wonders what there is to affirm, since our lead does, well, nothing besides look for an abortion and go to bars to talk to pretty unappealing men. In comparison, the scenes of the horrible, claustrophobic fate awaiting her — her parents listening to the radio and eating and laughing together — don’t seem half-bad.

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I suppose this is a central failure of “the abortion film”. A director of any intelligence — and in this category, I include both Diwan and Eliza Hittman, whose Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) was something of a let-down after her earlier triumphs —  is attuned to the reality of sex for the very young and not-rich woman, to the ways her desire to have sex is far from the entirely free, unbounded, pleasure-driven free-for-all conservatives often imagine and vilify. Rather, fornication is often a quietly humiliating and disappointing compromise, whose pay-off for girls is far from clear. But the young women of these films have almost nothing to celebrate. Agit-prop can be exuberant; one watching an East German film, for example, might sober up into clarity, but at the time feel completely transported by the dream of worker solidarity. But despite online calls to “shout your abortion”, obtaining an abortion isn’t actually a moment of joy (indeed, the idea it is plays into reactionary fantasies of gleeful abortion-on-demand). Nor, in these films, does fornication seem worth fighting for. 

Art about sexually “immoral” young women can be profound; take Maurice Pialat’s A nos amours (1983), or Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009), which Diwan told her actors to watch. In those films, we care about the constraints on the young women at their centre precisely because their lives are not mere suffering; these are lives full of the joy and chaos of sex and the ecstasy of dancing and the shock and wonder of becoming, with whatever infirmity, an adult. These films treat their audiences like adults deserving of characters, not mere symbols of good and bad, and worthy of art, not mere homages to the audience’s own virtue. 

No one may permit themselves to voice any of these misgivings. A film like this demands its accolades, assuming the right political boxes are ticked — and no one will seriously question whether that box-ticking achieves anything. For a film so uninventive and so empty, it’s astonishing that the most criticism it has had is a timid observation from the Washington Post that since we know this is a memoir by someone who, obviously, survived, “the nerve-racking nature of the events depicted is somewhat mitigated”.

That’s an understatement. The film develops no character, inhabits a gratingly artificial time capsule, and engages only in the most sophomoric political reflection. What does one really gain from seeing it? Neither entertainment nor edification. But by sitting through this and subsequently remarking on its “urgency” and “timeliness”, one gains a tidy bit of proof that they’re a very good person.

“In these times,” then, Happening’s critics are hamstrung. 

Along with debates about manufacturing, distribution and regulatory capture, the situation has reignited the never-ending debate about whether or not breastfeeding has a moral dimension. Is formula feeding selfish and lazy and liable to reduce a baby’s IQ and give them lifelong obesity? Is breastfeeding a noble sacrifice?

Much of the autonomy — especially bodily autonomy — women take for granted in the modern developed world is not delivered by feminism, so much as it’s rationalised by it. The freedom itself is an effect of technologies that mitigate, substitute for or otherwise even out physical differences between the sexes.

We’re barely into a 21^st century that so far is marked by pandemic, inflation, fragmenting supply chains, rising energy costs, global instability and concern over the ecological costs of developed-world lifestyles. In that context, the thorny question of tech and women’s freedom cuts across Left and Right in ways that are only just becoming apparent.

When I talk about “technology”, I don’t mean an iPhone that unlocks when I present my face to its camera. I mean those things so much part of everyday developed-world life they’re part of the backdrop. We don’t routinely think of nappies, washing machines, birth control or formula milk as “technology”. But they are all based in science and engineering, produced in high-tech factories, distributed via complex global supply chains.

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You’d think this would be value-neutral. It’s not, though, for such technologies have social impacts too. For example, the Sixties wasn’t the first age to see men and women challenging restrictive social codes: the 19^th century also had a “Free Love” movement. But earlier such movements could do nothing about the asymmetrical risks involved in casual sex, which could be relatively consequence-free for men while threatening women women with unplanned pregnancy and then (assuming she survived childbirth) the question of what to do with the baby.

Not unreasonably, regardless of what free-thinkers and radicals said in pamphlets and meetings, most ordinary communities went on strongly encouraging women to insist on commitment before having sex. It wasn’t until a tech fix for this asymmetry — reliable birth control — became available society-wide that wider social norms started to shift. At that point, commitment-free sexual pleasure became a feminist issue: Germaine Greer declared in The Female Eunuch (1970) that women are “not naturally monogamous”, while Erica Jong’s 1973 bestseller Fear of Flying dreamed of an equal female right to the “zipless fuck”.

A vast amount of the subsequent social fabric, from marriage and parenting norms to dating culture, are downstream of the tech that enabled the sexual revolution. And if you took the tech abruptly away, it’s likely that many people accustomed to post-Pill norms would struggle until the culture adapted.

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In a similar way, the norms of developed-world mothering are difficult to uncouple from widespread availability of formula. It saves the lives of babies who might have starved in a pre-formula era; it’s a plan B for mothers who, for whatever reason, find breastfeeding hard (and it is hard); it grants a measure of freedom and flexibility that’s unavailable to a mother breastfeeding exclusively.

As such, it also impacts the wider social fabric. This has many upsides, but hasn’t come cost-free. The existence of formula milk means even new mothers are able to work outside the home, a fact that shapes not just social expectations but also the economy. It’s perhaps no surprise that in the US, where there’s no statutory maternity leave, one in four mothers returns to work a mere two weeks after giving birth; and those American mothers at the bottom of the economic ladder, and thus least likely to have an employer with generous maternity leave policies, are the most likely to use formula.

According to some conservative American feminists, though, this is by no means the most consequential tech fix, either in terms of its contribution to bodily autonomy or in its downstream social impact. The legal scholar and pro-life campaigner Erika Bachiochi argues that this dubious honour goes to legal abortion: a technology and social change whose contribution to female autonomy has been immense – as has its downstream impact.

In her 2021 book The Rights of Women: Reclaiming A Lost Vision Bachiochi argues that even as legalising abortion increased women’s autonomy, it also reduced the pressure on men to take reproductive responsibility: for example one famous study shows that shotgun weddings all but disappeared after legalisation. Additionally, placing sole reproductive responsibility on the pregnant woman eliminates any need for society more generally to provide any kind of compassionate safety-net.

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Small wonder, then, that three out of four American women who have an abortion give poverty as the reason: a tech fix for sometimes gruelling social and economic difficulties. Anyone who spends more than a few minutes on “Shout Your Abortion“, a website dedicated to normalising the practice by telling women’s abortion stories, will see how ambivalent many women were in practice about the choices that were open to them, and the one they took.

This dilemma feels all the more concrete since the recent US Supreme Court leak, that suggests judges are poised to overturn America’s nationwide right to legal abortion. Much has been written since by pro-choice feminists defending abortion access as a cornerstone of women’s freedom. And in the same sense as formula and birth control, it’s a technology that does indeed grant women greater freedom. But more broadly even than changes to marriage and sexual mores, Bachiochi argues that its wider social impact makes abortion a Faustian bargain for women, by placing placed mothers permanently on the back foot.

For in making the right to terminate a pregnancy a cornerstone of freedom and thus personhood, she argues, feminism embraced a male-standard idea of what people are as the default: unencumbered, atomised, free of caring obligations. Normalising this individualistic idea of what a person is has left everyone with caring obligations (ie especially mothers) structurally disadvantaged, even as it legitimises undervaluing and underpaying those who do caring work.

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And even as caring work is structurally undervalued in an economy predicated on tech-enabled freedom, women are then castigated for choosing the ‘less caring’ tech fix – or blamed and scorned for their vulnerability when the tech is no longer available. The singer Bette Midler epitomised this attitude when she tweeted in response to the formula shortage: “TRY BREASTFEEDING! It’s free and available on demand.”

An even more callous Midlerism drips from every right-winger who has ever banged the drum for ending abortion access, while showing zero interest in the wider social context in which women opt to abort. This might mean improving perinatal healthcare access or social safety nets, incentivising paternal responsibility, or even advocating for a less hypersexualised society. But with the honourable exception of Catholic feminists such as Bachiochi, and a handful of post-liberals, American conservatism seems keener on leaning wholesale into the tech-enabled freedom and individualism consistent with a world where abortion is legal – just with an exception where women’s bodies are concerned. Examples are legion, but one that caused particular outrage amid the Dobbs furore was a video clip showing (male) members of New York’s Fire Department crowing: “you have no choice […] not your body not your choice, your body is mine”.

Given such an unforgiving backdrop, it’s understandable that many feminists prioritise defending abortion (or formula) over fighting an uphill battle to transform every other social factor that makes dependent babies and caring obligations such a frightening prospect for so many women. All other things being equal, I can see how a tech fix might seem women’s only option in a truly pitiless predicament.

But if the Right is hopelessly confused on technology and freedom, oscillating between wanting to ban gender surgeries and abortion and calling for us to colonise Mars, the Left is equally muddled. This progressive cognitive dissonance over technology and women celebrates tech’s liberatory upside, while hand-wringing guiltily about its innumerable ecological costs. Disposable nappies, for example, make up 30% of all landfill waste and take 500 years to decompose. Formula milk has a carbon cost. And the contraceptive pill many otherwise eco-conscious feminists rely on for sexual liberation is a disastrous pollutant.

Tech-optimists argue that we can fix all this with more tech. More likely, say the doomers, that in the future more of us will have to manage without – a prospect the current formula shortage is doing nothing to dispel. If the doomers are right, who will pick up all the labour-intensive domestic work currently eased by technology? Of course it’s possible that climate change will do what half a century of feminist activism never achieved, and level the still wildly uneven burden of housework between the sexes, but I’m not holding my breath.

In any case, regardless of what happens with formula supplies or US abortion law, it seems more than likely that these are not the only technologies that seemed to promise a level playing field between the sexes in the twentieth century, only to grow scarcer in the twenty-first. For even if Left and Right are differently muddled as to which liberatory technologies they defend and which they decry, the overall portfolio of such technologies is indisputably less certain than it seemed even a decade ago.

If I’m right, a women’s movement fit for the 21st century will need to work out what it means to defend women’s interests (and especially those of mothers) in a world with far fewer labour-saving devices, and potentially far less reproductive autonomy. Not a feminism of ever-increasing material abundance and freedom, but a new feminism of scarcity.

If Roe v Wade is overturned, as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft suggests it will be, abortion rights will again be decided on a state-by-state basis. Several states have legislation already waiting for such an opportunity to criminalise procuring, assisting with or providing an abortion. Doctors, patients and assistants would all be subject to heavy penalties and time in prison. Certain states, like Texas and Missouri, even want to make a crime out of crossing state lines to obtain an abortion where it is still legal.

But the demise of Roe v Wade has always been a question of not if but when. Democrats have used the language of abortion rights to attract votes and funds for decades, but they have time and again failed to pursue the legislative action that would codify those rights into law. Even with their majority in the House of Representatives and Senate, and a Democrat in the White House, it seems unlikely that any move will be made in this direction before the midterm elections in November. With abortion rights left in the hands of the courts, it was only a matter of time before the balance of power between Left and Right was reshuffled, and we ended up where we are now.

Which is why, paradoxically, I believe the only hope for reproductive rights in the United States is pro-choice Republicans.

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To which a lot of East Coast Democrats might reply: is there any such thing? But I have seen my home state of Kansas shift from a place fiercely divided by the abortion debate to an unlikely safe haven of reproductive rights for the region — thanks to a handful of Kansas Republicans who have consistently broken with party leadership to keep abortion safe and legal.

It hasn’t been easy. Anti-abortion protestors have long been active Kansas, but in 1991, when I was a young teenager, the newly minted Operation Rescue upped the ante — guided by the slogan: “If you believe abortion is murder, act like it’s murder”. Responding to its organised campaign, Summer of Mercy, thousands of protestors descended on Wichita, Kansas, accusing the city’s most visible abortion doctor George Tiller of being a “baby killer”. They harassed clinic workers, patients, and pro-choice activists. The authorities, meanwhile, were remarkably hands-off. In fact, they were so courteous that the Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry praised the Wichita Police Department in the press.

The protests went on for six weeks, during which they dominated regional media and spread through smaller towns in the area. The animosity, and the rhetoric, escalated. Operation Rescue declared that it was waging a “Holy War” against a group of heathens who were undertaking a “holocaust of the unborn”. At the time, the divide between religion and politics was starting to disappear; Evangelicals swarmed to the Republican party. And during that Summer of Mercy, the Methodist church I attended as a teenager began to preach about the sin of homosexuality, the abomination of abortion, and the Satanic forces in Washington DC. Before that, we may have gotten some light “the man is the head of the household” nonsense, but it was mostly sermons about loving thy neighbour and the Good Samaritan.

When the out-of-state organisers left, the tension did not dissipate. Clinics in the region were subject to physical attacks and vandalism. In 1993 there was an assassination attempt on Dr. Tiller. He was shot five times. Hit only in the arms, he went back to work the next day. But another attempt, in 2009, killed him; the assassin, Scott Roeder, would claim to have been radicalised during the Summer of Mercy.

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These extremists did not represent Kansans, and they did not represent Republicans. But just as Democrats exploit the language of abortion rights, Republican politicians were — and sometimes still are — liable to use the inflammatory “baby killer” language of Operation Rescue to secure votes and donations, in this case from their most extreme religious followers. (If someone shot a doctor or burned down a clinic, these politicians would then distance themselves by professing a belief in non-violent action.)

Unlike Democrats, though, those Republicans have been solidifying their rhetoric with law. The Midwest in particular has, in the last 20 years, introduced more and more restrictions to abortion rights, shutting down clinics with nonsense regulations and shrinking the window of time in which women can pursue terminations of their pregnancies. Oklahoma, just south of Kansas, had 18 abortion clinics in 1982, but that number has dwindled over the years down to three. The decline has mostly been because of nuisance laws that demand unnecessary standards in clinics when it comes to staffing, equipment and physical location. The state has also passed a series of onerous laws regarding the treatment of patients, like requiring information about clients to be entered in an online health registry and requiring patients be falsely informed that the foetus can feel pain during the procedure.

Meanwhile Kansas has, for the most part, held firm. True, the authorities passed a series of laws in the early Nineties requiring parental notification and mandatory 24-hour waiting times between consultation and procedure. But the state legislature did not follow its neighbours in increasing wait times up to 72 hours or passing “heartbeat” laws that outlaw abortion after the sixth or eighth gestational week. Several Kansan Republican legislators have attempted, repeatedly, to bring in such changes. But, despite the fact that Republicans have almost always had a majority in the legislature, these bills frequently die quietly in committee or get shelved until the legislative term expires. And they fail not because of Democratic grandstanding, but largely because pro-choice Republicans use the rules of the legislature wisely.

Clinics in Wichita and the Kansas City suburbs have therefore become regional magnets, providing services for women from Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Nebraska faced with increasingly unreasonable obstacles to care. Two years ago, the number of out-of-state women receiving care in Kansas clinics outnumbered the patients from within the state. And, in 2019, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that abortion rights are guaranteed in Kansas’s constitution.

Since that ruling, some state Republican legislators have fought for an amendment, but it has consistently been members of their own party who have blocked this action. In the latest attempt to amend the constitution, four Republicans broke ranks to vote against the measure: 84 votes were needed to put the amendment on the upcoming ballot, and they ultimately only got 80. And while none of them are attending pro-choice rallies wearing Planned Parenthood t-shirts, these Republicans are in line with the voters of Kansas, 86% of whom do not think abortion should be made strictly illegal.

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This reflects the reality in America more broadly. While at most 30% of Americans affiliated with the Republican party would consider themselves to be pro-choice, around 40% believe abortion should be legal in most cases. And so the Republican party is long overdue a reckoning with its own constituency; by pandering to extremists, conspiracy theorists and religious fundamentalists, it has left millions of Americans essentially politically homeless. Any harsh moves to the far-Right on the abortion issue is likely to alienate even more voters, even if it delights the party’s Evangelical fringe. 70% of Texans, for instance, already think the laws restricting abortion access to the first six weeks of pregnancy are too harsh. Only a very small percentage of voters will be satisfied with the further expansion of state control over the private familial and sexual decisions of the citizenry.

If the Republican party were to govern according to the beliefs and wishes of its electorate, it would be consistently against the eradication of abortion rights. Instead, it is letting the radical margins hijack the abortion debate. If it really does seek a “national settlement of the abortion issue”, as Justice Samuel Alito claims to, the Republican party should look to Kansas, which provides a blueprint. The stereotypical pro-choice activist may baulk at the idea that such a conservative state in such a religious region has become a bulwark against the erasure of reproductive rights. But it’s hardly a surprising turn of events: the state has, after all, seen some of the bloodiest results of this political debate.

But smuggled in amid what Bergstein calls “the fun stuff” is the bloody heart of the film: the white working-class character Penny (Cynthia Rhodes), who has to have an illegal abortion. After being taken to a “butcher” with a “dirty knife” and a “folding table” — Bergstein made sure to included graphic language in the film — she nearly dies, screaming in agony. She doesn’t, but Bergstein had to fight hard to keep the Penny plot in the movie when the studio wanted to remove it: “It had to be in the movie because I could see young women were taking the rights for granted and I wanted to show them what life really could be like in the US.”

They may well be about to find out for themselves. I happen to be in the US this week and waking up to news that a leaked draft shows the US Supreme Court has provisionally voted to overturn Roe v Wade, felt strangely similar to another morning six years ago, when I woke up to learn that Donald Trump was now my president. Suddenly, on both mornings, I was in the land of the unimaginable, a development that was, really, all too foreseeable.

It seems probable that the leak, which will likely be investigated by the FBI, was from a young liberal or conservative clerk working in the court, hoping to excite their bases in the midterms. So reacting to it runs the risk of letting the tail wag the dog: it was done to incite, and incited we all are. And yet. Anyone who cares about women’s rights can’t help but react to it, and getting this confirmed insight into how close American women are to losing their autonomy should shock everyone.

Roe v Wade was always fragile, and, especially in recent years, Republicans have forged an identity out of railing against it. It is stunning to remember now that the party once supported abortion rights, including Gerald Ford and, as governor of California, Ronald Reagan. Justice Harry Blackmun, who was appointed by the unquestionably Republican Richard Nixon, wrote the majority opinion for Roe v Wade. Today, the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court was largely done with the aim of overturning of Roe v Wade. Democrats can and should rail against how nutty the Republican Party has become in the past four decades, especially on social issues like abortion. But they can’t pretend the Republicans ever hid who they are. This has all happened in the open sunlight.

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And yet, despite that, too many took women’s bodily rights too much for granted for too long. I don’t exclude myself here. I consider myself a full-throated and wised-up supporter of abortion, but I look back on, for example, my admiration for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her stubborn refusal to make way for a younger justice, who would have been appointed by President Obama, and I cringe at my short-sightedness. Yeah, you go, Girlboss! Gimme more of those photos of you working out with your personal trainer! Ginsburg was a remarkable figure, but by working until she died, and thereby allowing Trump to appoint his third justice, she imperilled so many of the rights she fought for, and that is a tragedy.

Focusing more on the pleasing optics of an elderly lady doing press-ups than on the real risks to women’s rights was a decadent position for me to adopt, and America, the richest democracy in the world, has been distracted by too many decadent positions. Six years ago, I thought there could be no clearer proof of this than the 2016 election, when too many self-described lefties proudly disdained voting for Hillary Clinton, insisting there was no difference between her and Trump, even though one grabbed women’s pussies and the other protected them. Women’s rights? Boring, old, annoying. Like Hillary.

Once Trump was elected, I thought this would lead to a resurgence of feminism, and at first it seemed to, with the global Women’s Marches the day after his inauguration. But this nascent wave was soon overtaken by other issues. According to a 2019 survey from a non-partisan group focused on women’s political education, mass shootings, climate change and racial inequality are all of more concern to Gen Z women than abortion access. “A lot of the language I heard was about protecting Roe v Wade. It felt grounded in the Seventies feminist movement. And it felt like, I can’t focus on abortion access if my people are dying,” one 26-year-old female activist told the New York Times in 2020, explaining why she didn’t feel as impassioned about abortion as she did about police brutality. “Women in the Seventies understood very clearly that having control over reproduction is central to women’s ability to determine their own futures, to get the education they want, to have careers. As people got used to having access to abortion — and there’s a false sense that we’ve achieved a measure of equality — that radicalism women had in the early years got lost,” said Joanna Schoen, the author of Abortion after Roe. Abortion rights are seen by young women as a given — which is understandable, since they have been for their entire lives — and also a bit uncool, something associated with their mothers.

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Institutions that could have helped here instead became blithely distracted. In 2021, the president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood, Alexis McGill Johnson, wrote a hand-wringing editorial about the “harmful choices” made by Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, who died in 1966, including the allegation that she was a eugenicist. Sanger’s beliefs remain a matter of debate — while Sanger did support some eugenicist beliefs, her real goal was enabling women to control their fertility — but I’d like to focus on two paragraphs McGill Johnson wrote, because they really give an insight into American feminism’s focus in recent years:

“What we don’t want to be, as an organization, is a Karen. You know Karen: She escalates small confrontations because of her own racial anxiety. She calls the manager. She calls the police. She stands with other white parents to maintain school segregation. And then there are the organizational Karens. The groups who show up, assert themselves, and tell you where to march. Those who pursue freedom and fairness, but also leverage their privilege in ways that are dehumanizing.

“And sometimes, that’s how Planned Parenthood has acted. By privileging whiteness, we’ve contributed to America harming Black women and other women of color. And when we focus too narrowly on ‘women’s health’, we have excluded trans and non-binary people.”

Look, eugenics are bad — no argument from me there. But when an organisation that is supposed to support women uses a blatantly misogynistic term like “Karen”, I’m not convinced it has found that right side of history yet. And when an organisation like Planned Parenthood — PLANNED FREAKING PARENTHOOD — puts the term “women’s health” in sarcastic single quotation marks, and prefaces it with an apology for focusing “too narrowly” on the aforementioned apparently non-existent issue, you know something has gone wrong in American feminism.

Many will disagree, but I find it hard to separate the disintegration of a woman’s right to bodily autonomy in America from the rise of gender ideology and the focus, as Planned Parenthood would put it, on trans and non-binary people. Everyone in America, howsoever they identify, should have rights, and it’s wonderful that the younger generation feels so energised by so many social justice issues. But none of this should have been at the expense of women’s sex-based rights.

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The right to abortion is specifically about who has control over women’s bodies. How, though, can this be discussed, let alone defended, when too many liberal US politicians and liberal media sites can’t even bring themselves to say the word “woman”, even when covering this issue? “Birthing bodies have the right to freedom,” Representative Francesca Hong, a US Democrat, tweeted early on Tuesday morning, apparently unaware that the bodies being fought over here don’t want to give birth — that’s the point of abortion. Hong made sure to put her pronouns in her Twitter bio, but not the word “woman” in her tweet. The ACLU similarly couldn’t say the dreaded W word in its thoughts on the matter, but, then, what to expect of a once great organisation that insists female athletes should compete against male ones, and whose deputy director for transgender justice tweeted that banning a book he didn’t like “is 100% a hill I will die on”.

Republicans, and more specifically the Christian Right, were keen on crushing access to abortion long before pronouns became a grammatical hill to die on. But by tangling itself up in knots over “birthing bodies” and “cis privilege”, the American Left has made it much harder to talk about women’s rights, and therefore much harder to protect them. Abortion is a women’s issue, and one that needs to be talked about specifically with regards to women, because they are the ones who will die here if Roe v Wade is struck down, and, contrary to gender theory’s teachings, you can’t identify out of that.

Maybe focusing on vaginas and misogyny feels super uncool and smelly and Mum-like to some, but this leak should remind everyone how necessary it still is. Decorating one’s social media bio with zeitgeisty memes and emojis is fun, like being spun around on the dancefloor. But it’s time for American feminism to do the heavy lifting again and carry the watermelon.

As the mainly female group shared their despair at the new administration, the older grey-haired man sitting on my left — conservative suit, flamboyant tie — smiled quizzically, before calmly remarking in his Southern drawl: “Well then, I suppose I am the only one here who supports our new President?” He was.

I can’t reproduce my conversation with this doctor from Arizona as accurately as I wish. I wasn’t taking notes and his story did not seem as significant to me then as it does now. But this is the gist of it.

In his small hometown, he ran not only the abortion clinic but two gun stores; he was a member of both the National Abortion Federation and the National Rifle Association. He was, he explained, a man whose values were shaped by the writings of Ayn Rand, whom he had met as a student in the Sixties. He said, and this is the one bit I do remember verbatim: “My support for a woman’s choice about abortion comes from the same place as my support for her right to bear arms. An individual’s freedom matters.”

This is not a conventional view for today’s supporters of legal abortion, many of whom seem to believe personal freedom, autonomy and self-determination are the preserve of the neo-con Right. I am not sure my gun-trading friend would now be welcome in a similar meeting. Perhaps, given what I am about to say, I would not be either.

How we talk about, indeed how we think about, abortion has changed fundamentally since it was dragged from the dowdiness of shame and secrecy to the centre of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Access to abortion was clearly about self-determination and moral autonomy. Yes, abortion was — at least in early pregnancy — a simple medical procedure that was a benefit to personal and to public health. But to those campaigning for its legalisation, abortion was so much more than healthcare. It symbolised a choice for a woman when her life was in crisis; it symbolised a new sense of personal agency, the personal power to shape nature’s plan.

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Birth control gave us control of our reproductive destiny, freeing us from the socially constructed, imposed gender-role of mother and carer. It mattered not whether a woman actually used birth control — what mattered was that she could choose to do so if she wished. With contraception to prevent pregnancy and abortion to end it, the spectres of birth and motherhood were pushed away — unless we invited them to us. It’s hard to see what else could make a bigger contribution to a woman’s liberty.

Of course, not all who claim they’re committed to freedom and liberty believe that women should be free to choose to have an abortion. No doubt an abortion doctor would be as alone in a meeting of defenders of the Second Amendment as our gun-shop owner would now be among clinic staff. But when we go beyond the feelings and self-identification of different tribal members, there remains a consistency of a principle: that the state should step back and stay out of private personal decision-making.

Crucially, this foundation is not contingent on a woman’s situation or experience — her race, or class or privilege. We live intersectional lives but some beliefs and principles remain universal concerns because we are more than our own experience. Indeed, the pro-choice principles that won abortion access only did so because they united women beyond personal experience or need.

They mobilised those who would never become pregnant because they were older, or infertile, or expressed sexual feelings in a way that didn’t risk pregnancy. Men joined us in solidarity because they understood how an involuntary pregnancy is a living nightmare. The social movement was built on an idea of what was worth fighting for.

Today, the focus is different. The sails of the movement now seem to be buffeted by winds from a different continent. Freedom of choice, once our principle, has been thrown overboard — not to anchor us as it once did, but to cut the movement loose from a legacy of white supremacy. “Freedom”, as in the personal moral freedom that gives each of us command of life, is dismissed as a privilege of the advantaged, not to be extended to all but instead to be “checked”. “Choice”, in particular the choice between abortion and motherhood, is now dismissed as elitist or consumerist or too binary.

Today’s destination is no longer a world where we have freedom to decide what is right and wrong in the private personal domain. Instead, it is a world where self-determination, autonomy and personal freedom are dismissed as privileged and arcane and insufficiently inclusive. It is as though these ideas, by being anchored in a Western philosophical canon, are forever tainted with a stench of old, white patriarchs.

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Of course, how we experience reproductive rights and wrongs are woven with the rest of our lives. But, when every aspect of life is thrown into the pot of oppression and denial — racism, poverty, homelessness, educational disadvantage, disability, sexual marginalisation — it is unclear with whom solidarity can be won.

Does my older, white, male, privileged Republican abortion doctor have no place in this movement? Does the rich, white, conservative Texan woman with a $300 haircut and Gucci shoes not suffer the same degradation as her cleaner when she is told that the law no longer permits her to end an unwanted pregnancy? Where does privilege begin and end in this intersectional quagmire? Who is inside our tent, and who is outside it? Crucially, who decides?

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) grew out of Margaret Sanger’s American Birth Control League, changing its name in 1942. While its origins are tainted in eugenics (like every other mainstream medical organisation formed in the early 20^th Century), it has provided birth control and sexual health care for generations of women since, particularly poor women without insurance.

So what is a poor, white, woman — with no job, no education, no home to call her own — to believe when she reads the following statement given by the President of PPFA to the New York Times last April: “By privileging whiteness, we’ve contributed to America harming Black women and other women of colour. And when we focus too narrowly on ‘women’s health’ we have excluded trans and nonbinary people…”

Might not she herself feel excluded by the very organisation on which she relies no less than a poor, black woman? And when she reads that once-champion of women’s choice go on to say that “we’ve claimed the mantle of women’s rights to the exclusion of other causes that women of colour or trans people cannot afford to ignore”, might she not howl with despair that her own colour and absence of “queerness” casts her aside?

From the perspective of today’s reproductive justice warriors, pregnancy by its very nature is problematic. After all, it defies the progressive framing of every issue around social constructions, to the exclusion of hard-wired reality. Pregnancy is starkly binary: you either are, or you aren’t. It’s old-fashionedly objective and challenges self-definition: feeling and defining yourself pregnant or unpregnant won’t make it so. It relies on, and resides in, mature, female physiology — even if you don’t define yourself as “woman”.

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Is this why so many young activists insist that I cannot or should not talk about pregnant women when I talk about abortion? Because pregnancy makes it obvious that a woman is more than just “a body with a vagina” or “someone with a cervix”? Her woman-ness is so obviously, physically real that a world committed to social constructionism simply collapses.

And does the fact that pregnancy happens to an individual, not to a community — and so calls for a personal decision that speaks to an individual’s sense of right and wrong — disrupt a narrative that seeks to frame itself as communitarian? It is not a community’s womb that becomes pregnant. It is not a society’s belly that grows, or a people’s breasts that are made heavy as they fill. All of this happens to an individual.

There is something grimly ironic about the tendency among today’s activists to deny this: namely, that their retreat from an old-fashioned commitment to individual choice leads right back to the eugenicist basis from which those of us committed to individual freedom have tried to wrest the birth control movement. A personal choice must be personal — otherwise it isn’t a choice, but social engineering.

Already we see social movements insisting that personal choices are being made for the “wrong reasons”. Advances in antenatal screening, for instance, are blamed for allowing women to make the choice to terminate pregnancies affected by conditions that a pregnant woman understands as disability, but which justice warriors see as “difference”. They protest that women are making discriminatory choices, that the world will be less diverse. But why, a woman might ask, should they get to decide for her? When it comes to her body, choice isn’t something that a woman can simply abrogate: it’s what makes her her.

The freedom to make moral choices is the most important freedom we have; the freedom to act on those choices is the most important freedom we can claim. And while Trump may be gone, that freedom is still far from guaranteed. In the battles ahead over who decides about abortion, I know I can count on the pro-choice, gun shop-owning white Republican to have my flank. I wish I could feel so confident about the twenty-something activists shouting him down.

Ann Furedi’s latest book The Moral Case for Abortion: A Defence of Reproductive Choice is available for pre-order on Amazon or directly from the publisher, Palgrave Macmillan

America’s abortion debate has always been fraught, but this past year it has been particularly eventful. Whether the introduction of “heartbeat rule” restrictions in Texas, a challenge to those restrictions by The Satanic Temple, or the recent Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health case challenging the constitutionality of a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks, it’s been a bumper time for heated debates about the morality, legality and broader social implications of allowing women to terminate pregnancy.

Bachiochi and her opponents are speaking from either side of what is perhaps feminism’s central question: how to balance individual freedom against our human obligation to dependents. It’s a debate Bachiochi traces back to the very dawn of modernity, in The Rights Of Woman: Reclaiming A Lost Vision. Her title is a homage to her subject Mary Wollstonecraft, whose A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) is widely viewed as the first proto-feminist text of the modern age.

The ‘pop’ history of liberal feminism tends to start with the campaign for suffrage, and tells a linear story of progress toward autonomy for both men and women, on exactly the same terms. Wollstonecraft is consistently claimed for this camp, as a foremother of modern feminism. But Bachiochi, in her book, sets out to reclaim Wollstonecraft from the progressives.

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Wollstonecraft’s 18th-century world vibrated with new thinking on reason and individual liberty, which was driving revolutionary ferment in France and America. But, Bachiochi points out, these debates also wrestled with an intractable fact: autonomy is a more straightforward proposition for men than women. Women, in Wollstonecraft’s day, had little control over their fertility, save by practising sexual abstinence. Babies and children take a lot of looking after. How, then, were ideals of individual liberty to be balanced with the evidently asymmetrical burdens of human reproduction?

The godfather of modern liberalism, Jean-Jaques Rousseau, solved the question of sex asymmetry in Emile (1762) by excluding women. Only men were eligible for autonomous liberal subjecthood, while women should be educated to serve as pleasing, compliant and fertile support humans.

Wollstonecraft demurred, as well she might. But she didn’t do so by arguing that men and women were indistinguishable. For if this idea remains contentious today, amid bitter political rows over male-bodied trans athletes in women’s sport, it was self-evidently absurd in an age without reliable birth control and heavily powered by manual labour. Rather, she acknowledged men and women’s asymmetrical physiology, especially where reproduction is concerned.

For most women, she argued, motherhood and family life are both ennobling in themselves and compatible with other activities in the wider world. Wollstonecraft blamed untrammelled male libido for many woes, stating that “the grand source of many of the… evils that torment mankind, as well as of the vices and follies that degrade and destroy women” was down to “want of male chastity”.

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But while Wollstonecraft saw the sexes as physiologically different, she saw that we share a common dignity and personhood. Both sexes also share a capacity for reason, virtue and human excellence. Confining women to the simpering supporting-cast role proposed by Rousseau was therefore both unjust and foolish.

Instead, she argued, girls should be educated alongside boys and to the same rigorous standard. Both sexes should treat family life as the central ground for the cultivation of virtue. It generated “duties which give birth to affections that are the surest preservatives against vice” — ones that demanded “exertion and self-denial”. It was thus, she thought, particularly beneficial for men, curbing libertine or selfish urges in favour of “a sober manliness of thought, and orderly behaviour”.

In Bachiochi’s book, we see Wollstonecraft’s legacy percolate through the 19th-century American women’s movement — in which the tension between individualism and life in common hums. On one side, liberal voices such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued that marriage should be reframed as a contract, to make it easier for abused women to escape oppressive husbands. Others more committed to the notion of marriage as covenant argued that this would in practice mainly liberate men to abandon their wives and children.

The solution, the latter suggested, wasn’t more individualism but better-behaved men. Drawing on Wollstonecraft’s call for a common sexual standard, applicable to both men and women, 19^th-century feminists proposed resolving the sex asymmetry via “voluntary motherhood”. Even within a marriage, this group declared, men should remain sexually continent except where a woman was willing to become pregnant. And this discipline, they thought, would be especially beneficial to the cultivation of male virtue, as well as mutual conjugal respect and the responsible exercise of patriarchal authority.

Demanding more of men was a far surer means to improving women’s lot, they insisted, than technologies to manage fertility. “Voluntary motherhood” advocates worried that far from protecting women, contraceptive technologies would make it more difficult for women to refuse unwanted sexual contact, liberating men to exploit and even rape women without fear of practical consequences.

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These bleak misgivings turned out to be prescient. As the writer Virginia Ironside wrote recently of her own youth in the Sixties: Armed with the pill, and with every man knowing you were armed with the pill, pregnancy was no longer a reason to say ‘no’ to sex. And men exploited this mercilessly.” And, Bachiochi argues, women consenting to unwanted sex was not the only downside of the pill.

Contraception may have reduced the rate of accidental pregnancy as a total proportion of casual sex, but the existence of contraception so radically changed social norms that much more casual sex took place. And contraception was only mostly effective – so the absolute number of accidental pregnancies went up. This in turn drove feminist demands for legal abortion — a practice Wollstonecraft, and most 19th-century feminists, viewed as abhorrent and indistinguishable from infanticide.

And as feminist campaigns to legalise abortion gathered steam, their arguments turned chiefly on personal autonomy. Betty Friedan argued in 1967 that a woman’s “right to control her reproductive process” was core to the “personhood and dignity of woman”. The feminist jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg went further, saying that the right to terminate a pregnancy was key to affording women “equal citizenship status”.

But this had repercussions for how our societies make sense of motherhood. In effect, Bachiochi argues, making “equal citizenship status” contingent on the power to end a pregnancy entrenched in law a Hobbesian view of the “state of nature”: a vision of “radically autonomous and self-interested male and female individuals”. Indeed, I’ve written on several occasions about the liberal world’s blind spots concerning motherhood, dependency and care. But on abortion, I’ve always been in the “safe, legal and rare” camp. So I found this book challenging, for Bachiochi makes a persuasive case that as long as we uphold women’s right to end a pregnancy, we conclusively favour the Hobbesian vision of selfhood over one that makes room for dependency and care.

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As the pro-life feminist Clair de Jong put it in 1978, “Accepting the ‘necessity’ of abortion is accepting that pregnant women and mothers are unable to function as persons in this society”. US President Joe Biden’s recent description of mothers as “locked out of the workforce” by caregiving responsibilities is typical. Mothers are, in effect, illegible to the prevailing conception of personhood — which is based on market participation — except when we detach ourselves from caregiving, which is seen largely as an obstacle to that participation, and therefore to self-realisation.

An unborn child is absolutely dependent on its mother, and she cannot be replaced. Within an atomised understanding of what humans are, we have no way of weighing competing interests in such a context. And if personhood relies on us having absolute autonomy over our bodies, we must begrudge any claim, however slight, of a dependent baby still contained in that body — lest its rights-bearing nature conflict with ours.

Polls consistently show us to be ambivalent on this question, across both sexes. More women than men believe life begins at conception, while in this 2017 poll, 41% of UK women supported reducing the gestation limit to 12 weeks or lower, compared to 24% of men.

We can only resolve this via positions most people find intuitively repellent, such as the claim that signs of trying to avoid pain aren’t evidence of life. Or even, as the Nobel Prize-winning philosopher Peter Singer argues in Practical Ethics, that because “Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time,” therefore “they are not persons”. If you’d told me, when I was grieving a pregnancy loss, that I was mourning “little more than cells and electrical activity“ I’d have punched you. And yet we nod along to this idea in other contexts, where doing so supports women’s bodily autonomy.

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The atomised vision of personhood is nigh-on unchallenged today. So, many decades into the victory of autonomy over dependence, in the name of feminism, it’s easier to see why even Right-wing young women were unwilling to hear Bachiochi’s arguments. The Right may speak more warmly than the Left about family life, but while we grant personhood and citizenship on the basis of bodily autonomy, what sane woman would seek to deny those goods to her own sex?

Yet abortion rights cut to the heart of yet more contentious issues on the feminist Left. Here, bitter debates rage between those who denounce the marketisation of women’s bodies, for example in surrogacy or the sex industry, and those who defend such practices as potentially empowering and limited only by the need for individual consent. But most feminists on either side of even these fierce disagreements are unanimous on the need to protect a woman’s right to choose whether to continue a pregnancy.

Bachiochi, though, makes an uncomfortable argument that cuts across both these positions. Nothing, she suggests, could more viscerally epitomise the conflict between the individualistic logic of the market, and a more communitarian one that values and centres dependency and care, than the question of abortion. A women’s movement that “regards abortion rights as equal citizenship rights”, Bachiochi suggests, has already conceded nearly the entire battle on valuing dependency: it has “surrendered, once and for all, to the logic of that market”.

And this means, in effect, that the central political demand of feminism is for women’s rights to enter a “marketplace” of notionally free, unencumbered individuals on the same terms as men. To compete in the workplace without asymmetrical reproductive handicaps; to live without strings. In other words, to be functionally indistinguishable from the most Hobbesian vision of men at their most radically rootless.

And from this vantage-point, even those feminists who resist the claim that “a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman” find their proposition fatally undermined if they support abortion. For if Bachiochi is right, then they are defending the distinction between the sexes while fiercely committed to the medical intervention most critical to collapsing the distinction between the sexes. Can we really protest the degradation of feminism into a campaign to free us from our biology, while digging our heels in to defend a vision of personhood that rests on exactly that? For 21st-century feminism, the question of choice poses some difficult choices.

Today, we simply accept that leaders lie; not just occasionally but habitually. Trump did. Johnson does. Putin got there way before either of them. And yet, strangely, part of Johnson’s appeal has always been said to be his “authenticity”. He is a real person. His history of lying did not bother many people, nor his history of betraying everyone he has worked for or every woman he has been involved with. The electorate could not be expected to know the truth about Borisconi’s career.

I started calling him that because he always was — pre-Trump — the only politician with a similarly acute understanding of the incestuous relationship between politicians and the media. Surely he could be king of both? Or so he thought. He could control what he understood to be the most important thing about power, which was not “truth” but “the narrative”. His narrative was “fun”. For Bunga Bunga parties just substitute batshit-crazy Jennifer Arcuri and a Christmas quiz.

But things fall apart. Some lies matter more than others. This must have been a shock to Borisconi because the visual evidence of his lies — the video, the photo — cuts through. No amount of wordplay or random classical references can make people unsee what they have seen. Mirabile dictu!

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Why I had to leave The Guardian

By Suzanne Moore

Just as the CCTV footage of Matt Hancock snogging his bit on the side did for him, so these photos did for Downing Street. Those who worked for Borisconi were sent out to lie for him, and then he lied about them too. This we know for certain. It is not an idea, an opinion, or an interpretation. It is a fact.

But it’s not necessarily the end for him. He may stagger on until the next wave of the virus has passed. Who, quite frankly, would want to take over right now? He may chuck it in, not because he suddenly acquires a sense of morality or even shame, but because he is skint and there is money to be made in them there hills of after-dinner buffoonery.

I’m so tired of writing about the mendacity and entitlement of the man, though. I would far rather talk about another man who has also made me think about the nature of reality this week (and whom I unashamedly adore): Keanu Reeves.

Normally, press junkets for a new film are nothing more than dull promotion. But in their interviews for The Matrix Resurrections, Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss answered questions about the nature of reality in interesting ways. The Matrix, after all, is an entire world of distraction — and an influential one at that. Who could have known in 1999 how it would infiltrate our culture?

Take “redpilling”, a term which has come to be used by many men’s rights activists, largely thanks to a Reddit thread in which men discuss waking up to the reality that women oppress men. Not all these guys are incels, but redpilling is nearly always talked about online by those on the anti-feminist Right.

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For some, the notion of questioning reality that The Matrix so cleverly explored has morphed into a denial of reality. Sure, men are oppressed — but more so than women? Is that the radical breakthrough that the red pill offers? Apparently so.

Will facts and statistics change their minds? I know now that we are living in a profoundly anti-science moment. Anti-vaxxers do not believe in science. Many trans-activists do not accept basic biology. Grace Lavery talks of a liberated future in which transwomen like herself will be able to have abortions — and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I have fought my entire life for women’s right to abortion. But since transwomen cannot get pregnant, I wonder how this is progressive, how this fantasy of womanhood is in any way radical, and not in some way deeply insulting to women’s actual experience of abortion? Can we really say physical reality has had its day?

Reeves talked in an interview about having dinner with a director who had his three teenage children with him. They had not seen The Matrix, so he explained that it was about a guy in a virtual world who was trying to get back to reality. The young girl asked: “Why? Who cares if it’s real?” Keanu said: “You don’t care if it’s real?” She said: “No”. When the interviewer asked Keanu how it made him feel, he paused and said: “Awesome.”

Are we the 17-year-old girl at dinner with Keanu Reeves who no longer cares what is real? I’m not convinced. Reality TV, itself scripted and managed, may be coming to the end of its cruel reign. Yet it was Ant and Dec on I’m A Celebrity, gunning for our Prime Minister, who alerted the Westminster bubble to the idea that the non-stop pizza, quiz, cheese and wine gatherings during lockdown was ‘cutting through’. A basic unfairness was exposed; a truth about rules not applying to those who govern us.

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It was almost as if reality mattered, that endless lying was no longer acceptable. There is always something that punctures the Matrix. It’s there in The Communist Manifesto: “Man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Sure, it’s more comfortable to be fooled. But in the end, we have to do the work. We can argue forever about subjective and objective truth but hold the hand of a new baby or the hand of a person who is about to die and tell me that everything is virtual and nothing matters.

You can’t can you? The glitch in the Matrix is where we find ourselves. It’s the only place to be.

Pro-life culture was particularly hostile at the time, and many of us felt under siege in our Texas location. We ran drills so we all knew what to do if someone released anthrax in our building. Being hated is often clarifying, and we all believed we were doing good, even if in a sometimes shabby way.

It took a while to notice that the executive director was making six figures; that the administrative offices, unlike the clinic, never had broken chairs; that the clinic in the posh neighbourhood was nice and the clinic on the side of town where white people were a minority was not. Planned Parenthood was forever making headlines for testifying in front of Congress, or getting into a war of words with some hideous Christian fundamentalist who claimed abortion causes breast cancer (it doesn’t!). But it didn’t seem to be lobbying for healthcare expansion, or campaigning for compulsory training in abortion services for medical students. It wasn’t challenging politicians who claim to be pro-choice but only mention it when there’s an opening on the Supreme Court, instead of consistently supporting policies that would help the women who came to us in need.

But as hard as it was working in the hostile environment of Texas, back before people started to have hopes of flipping the red state blue, it also felt historically important. This is where American abortion rights were born, and this is where the greatest threat to those rights now lies. On September 1, the state blocked access to all abortion services for women beyond six weeks of pregnancy. Because most pregnancies are impossible to detect or confirm before the four-week mark, and because many women won’t realise they are pregnant until considerably later than this, the state has effectively blocked abortion access full-stop. The law was immediately challenged, and the Supreme Court has heard arguments, but so far it has not released any ruling. Still, with the way the court is packed at the moment, with a heavily conservative slant, it’s not looking good for supporters of reproductive justice.

It’s poetic, almost, that Texas is erasing a right that originated within it. Sarah Weddington was only 25 when she filed a lawsuit, in 1970, against the Dallas district attorney. She was acting on behalf of a pregnant client who was seeking to obtain an abortion, pseudonymously known as Jane Roe. Before long, Weddington found herself in front of the Supreme Court, making the argument that finally gave American women the legal right to terminate a pregnancy. But the focus of this landmark case, and the way it was handled by the professional feminist community, showed that it was only a matter of time before the pro-choice project came crashing down. Because from the very beginning there existed a gulf — one that I noticed on the frontline of Planned Parenthood — between the empowering rhetoric of the professional activists and the realities of those who found themselves pregnant and vulnerable, caught in the middle of a political battlefield.

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The Planned Parenthood promotional materials always exhibited the bright smiles and shiny hair of healthy young women, confidently making the healthcare choices that were right for them. They aren’t the ones who needed our help. I remember a week of repeated calls from a young man describing his girlfriend’s symptoms over the phone, all of them suggesting pregnancy. “But she’s not pregnant right?” All I could do was say it’s impossible to diagnose pregnancy over the phone and urge him to tell her to come into the clinic. I could hear him telling her, “They say you’re fine,” and I wondered how long he pressured her not to get help — and if, by the time she was “allowed” to take a pregnancy test, it was too late to choose whether or not to end it.

The people who most needed assistance, then, were not the independent and beautiful poster children of a Planned Parenthood ad campaign. They were much more like the woman at the centre of Roe v Wade, whose name was actually Norma McCorvey. She already had two children. Her first became the centre of a custody battle between McCorvey and her own mother; her second was adopted outside the family. When McCorvey realised she was pregnant for a third time, she tried to get an illegal abortion, but she found the clinic had recently been raided by authorities.

Her young, idealistic attorneys immediately recognised the potential McCorvey’s story held. It was the kind of case that could make it all the way to the Supreme Court, due to her already troubled maternal history. But they also knew that this wouldn’t help her individually: if she stayed in the spotlight, McCorvey would have to continue the pregnancy. She made the sacrifice, in the name of women’s rights. But she found that the feminists who championed Jane Roe, a legal persona, had very little time for Norma McCorvey.

In the 2020 documentary AKA Jane Roe, McCorvey talked about how she was sidelined. She wanted to speak at a pro-choice rally, but the organisers were more interested in Gloria Steinem and other more professional, or photogenic, activists. McCorvey was poor, identified as a lesbian, and lacked formal education. Her story wasn’t one of triumph and empowerment; it was one of abuse by men, familial dysfunction, and addiction. She was in desperate need, but she wasn’t a particularly inspirational standard-bearer.

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This same problem plagues the pro-choice movement today. In an attempt to “normalise” abortion, and thereby gain widespread support for reproductive rights, the movement focuses on an appealing minority: attractive, professional, financially stable women “shouting their abortion” on social media. It’s as if once we hear that the cute blonde girl got pregnant through no fault of her own and she really just isn’t ready for motherhood — she can barely take care of herself right now! — then we’ll finally understand that it should be fully legal and accessible. Lindy West, in a viral essay, compared getting an abortion to having a tooth removed, giving the sense that these decisions are easy to make, these services are convenient to access, and the procedure is comfortable to endure.

But pretending that the young, urban, middle-class woman who is choosing ambition over family is representative of those who need abortion services does nothing to help, well, anybody who isn’t that. And providing abortion access on the ground looks quite different from getting paid a couple of hundred dollars to write your personal pregnancy essay for an online magazine. It means dealing with death threats and harassment by protesters at clinics. It means putting your body on the line to escort clients from their cars to the clinic so they don’t have to face the screaming, praying, howling protesters on their own. It means listening to terrible stories sometimes, of people refusing to take responsibility for their own lives. It means seeing a woman coming in for an abortion six months after her last one and helping her anyway. It means letting strangers sleep on your couch because they drove for five hours to get to the clinic and didn’t have money left over for an AirBnB.

While I worked in the education department during the day, at night I often covered shifts for the abortion fund’s hotline, offering financial and logistical counselling for those who were pregnant and urgently needed to figure out how not to be. We talked about applying for credit cards, we compared prices at different clinics, we strategised places to stay if they had to go out of town. It was hard, draining work. Because often they felt compelled to explain how they got into their situation, and many ended up referring to our failings.

They went to Planned Parenthood to get an IUD but were offered no pain relief, and it hurt so badly that they vomited and passed out before the procedure could be completed. Or the clinic required a Pap smear before it would renew their Pill prescription, but when they came for their appointment, they could only wait for an hour before they had to give up and go to work, otherwise they’d be fired. And I listened to all this knowing that Planned Parenthood weren’t model employers. In fact, they have been the focus of multiple labour disputes for underpaying and exploiting their clinicians. The consequences for our institutional failings never affected our CEO, but it left me flat on the floor night after night.

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Texas has betrayed women

By Jill Filipovic

In a recent essay for Harper’s Bazaar, Sarah Schulman wrote about her experience working with an underground abortion network in Seventies Fascist Spain. As an American, she could enter and leave the country without much notice, making it easier for her to smuggle in illegal contraceptives and other materials needed by the group. The activists were risking imprisonment in order to help one another end pregnancies, creating a kind of solidarity and sense of purpose that’s lacking in the American pro-choice community. Our professional feminists are heavy on the rhetoric and weak on hands-on action. They are focused on institutions, like the Supreme Court or Planned Parenthood, instead of the women who need them most. They have managed to squander support from the majority of the population and allowed our rights and access to fall in disarray. This time, we can’t only point our fingers at the religious Right and the patriarchal stereotype of Texas.

When I had to have an abortion in Germany, I was extremely nervous about the general anaesthesia. I had never gone under before. What would it be like? What if something happened while I was there all alone, in a country where no one knew me? I didn’t speak any German, but as the nurses and doctor moved around me in the room, I managed to squeak out, “I’m scared.” And immediately everyone stopped what they were doing and just put their hands on my arms and legs. They applied just a brief pressure before they returned to their tasks, but it was the most comforting and caring gesture I had ever experienced. I think of it often. Pregnancy is a crisis, and the only moral and compassionate response should be: all hands on.

The police officer gives her a hard, cold answer: “That’s rape.”

This is a scene in the Emmy-winning I May Destroy You, which last year served to briefly focus the conversation about sexual violence on the underreported crime of “stealthing”. In the UK, where it is set, removing a condom without the consent of your partner is illegal. The same is true in Germany, and one jurisdiction in Australia. Recently, California became the first US state to ban stealthing — or removing, damaging, or otherwise interfering with the integrity of birth control during sexual intercourse. And a few weeks ago, Chile became the latest nation to follow suit.

But the fact that stealthing is a crime doesn’t necessarily help Arabella. She does not press charges, as she no longer has any physical evidence. She is not compensated for her purchase of emergency contraceptive. And the law doesn’t act as an arbiter between herself and the man who harmed her. It does help her in one way — by telling her definitively that her intuition is right: this act was wrong and hurtful and should not have happened. But is that enough?

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When we look to address wrongs — and to expand our understanding of what causes harm — we so often look to the creation of rules, laws and institutional responses, and stop there. The act of criminalising stealthing is meant to announce to perpetrators and victims alike — who, like Arabella, and possibly her own rapist, might not know — that it is classified as rape, and comes with potential consequences. When Chilean deputies put forth the bill, lawyer and politician Gael Yeomans followed up the announcement with, “Yes, gentlemen, that is a sexual assault even if you do not like to hear it.”

All this allows politicians to say: “we are taking this seriously.” But the promise of justice is a difficult one to keep, in practice. The United Kingdom has only had one successful conviction of stealthing. In that particular case, a man removed the condom in the midst of an engagement with a sex worker, continued to have sex with her despite her protests, assaulted her, and left without paying. His overt aggression and violence — he reportedly threatened to murder the judge presiding over the trial — made it easy to find him guilty.

But the overwhelming majority will not find justice within these systems — partly because it’s a crime that can happen without the victim noticing. In Alexandra Brodsky’s survey of people who were victims of stealthing, many of them didn’t realise the condom had been removed or tampered with until after the completion of the sexual act, sometimes not even until the partner had left. This makes it almost impossible to prove it happened.

People have long struggled to prove they have been raped for the very same reason: lack of corroborative evidence or witnesses. But with stealthing, it’s even harder to prove the intention to do harm. Condoms come off and they break. Making a case that the removal or damage wasn’t accidental or inadvertent is harder even than making a case that you said no when your rapist is insisting you said yes.

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The consequences of stealthing are very real, though. Those who spoke with Brodsky report scrambling for health resources after discovering what their partner had done: making appointments for STI tests, procuring PrEP to protect against possible HIV exposure, buying the morning-after pill. Some of these medical interventions have debilitating side effects, like cramps and headaches. Some might not work, meaning more medical interventions.

And all of these services can be difficult, expensive and occasionally impossible to access, depending on the victim’s location and financial situation. Even in cases of forceful rape, hospitals in America are not legally obligated to give victims PrEP or emergency contraception — Catholic hospitals in particular make it difficult to procure any medication that might interfere with a potential pregnancy.

So often, then, when citizens find themselves in crisis, they discover there is a wide gap between what is available and what is accessible, and between what might be useful to them and what they are told they can have. This is reminiscent of the pro-choice politicians who give lip service to “protecting Roe v. Wade,” while doing nothing to make abortion affordable for people with low incomes, or to restore clinics that have been shut down by anti-abortion activists’ nuisance suits, or to decentralise services away from abortion clinics — which are often the targets of harassment and threats of violence.

Sure, abortion is available — if you are lucky enough to live in a city that has a clinic or wealthy enough to travel for it, and of course if you have the funds to pay for the procedure. But it’s not accessible — doctors should be able to offer medical abortifacients directly to patients, or mail them to those in rural environments or in abusive situations.

This state of affairs has become so acceptable to most of the politicians in power that it’s very rarely discussed — even by those who say they care about reproductive justice. The subject is left to Hollywood: trying to access abortion services is so commonly understood as an arduous and complicated process that it’s become the plot of multiple films — Happening, Four Months Three Weeks and Two Days, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Plan B. In most cases, the primary character is finally able to find the care they need, even if it drains them financially, emotionally and physically.

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The new law in California makes stealthing a civil matter, giving the victim the opportunity to sue for damages in civil court. If the crime led to the transmission of a disease or an unwanted pregnancy, there is at least the chance of compensation, even if that chance is slim. The burden of proof is less heavy in civil courts than in criminal ones, but it’s difficult to imagine scenarios in which the judgement didn’t come down to trusting one person’s word over another’s — which historically hasn’t gone well for victims of sexual assault.

And this might be especially true if there isn’t a tangible result to the stealthing — no infection or pregnancy: if the victim did not accrue costs in the pursuit of health services. Was harm still done? Clearly, yes: trust has been violated, emotional fall out is likely. But when we try to convert that experience into dollars and cents — when trying to define the precise dimensions of the damage done — we reach for clarity and find only more murk.

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By Tanya Gold

In her 1998 essay, “The Secret Sharer: Sex, Race, and Denial in an American Small Town” — recently collected in What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk about MeToo — JoAnn Wypijewski told the story of Nushawn Williams, a young black man who infected multiple women with HIV through unprotected sex, knowing he was positive. The small town of Jamestown, New York, wanted to show it was taking the harm done to these young women seriously — and prevent any more women from being infected. And so, it filed criminal charges against Williams for reckless endangerment and statutory rape (two of his partners were underage).

Many of the townspeople had opinions on the case — about how evil Williams must be, about what was “wrong” with the women and girls who had unprotected sex with him when HIV/AIDS was all over the media. Few paid much attention, however, to what those women and girls might need now that they found themselves infected — or even what could have helped them before their encounters with Williams. There were free condoms available through the health clinic, but they weren’t accessible, because there was so little outreach in the community.

Plenty of politicians contributed to turning this local case into a nationwide scandal — Rudy Giuliani said Williams should be charged with attempted murder — but few showed any interest in expanding medical access or offering childcare services to those low-income women who had had HIV+ babies from William. Everyone got what they wanted out of the situation: the politicians burnishing their reputations, the TV commentators using the AIDS panic to gain attention, and the media who made money by creating a scandal. Everyone except the women most affected.

I have sympathy with some critiques advanced by friends on the Right, of the excesses and uncounted costs of feminism. I have made a number of those critiques myself.

But I’m often frustrated by conservatives’ refusal to engage with feminist arguments or history much beyond the ‘pop’ versions you might find in the pages of Vox. The result is, regrettably, a Right-wing treatment of the women’s movement that is often as ignorant of what it decries as modern liberal feminists are of the conservative case against abortion.

We can do better. And we must, because today defending women’s interests is properly, and rightly, a defence of the family. Which is to say of all humans  including men – understood as relational beings.

This isn’t easy to see from a conservative vantage-point that blames feminism for many modern societal ills. Some of this critique is not without justice. But nor is the women’s movement without justice.

I don’t believe in progress, in the ‘arc of history’ sense. Nor do I believe that there exists an eternal conspiracy against women, called ‘patriarchy’. Worked free of these fairy tales, what we think of today as ‘feminism’ is a story of economic transitions.

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Specifically, it’s a story of how men and women re-negotiated life in common, in response first to the transition into the industrial era, then into twentieth-century market society. If everyone today seems to be arguing about men and women again, it’s because we’re in the throes of another economic transition.

To illustrate, I’ll take a short detour through that story. Of course this is complex, and varied by factors such as class, race and geography. But since what we think of as ‘feminism’ today is mainly driven by bourgeois white American women, and serves their class interests, I’ll focus on their story.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century America was mostly agrarian. The typical American matron was a disciplined, skilled, devout individual who worked alongside her husband in a productive household. She processed raw materials and foodstuffs produced by male family members into meals, clothing and so on, usually while caring for multiple children.The patriarchal legal system of ‘coverture’, which subsumed her legal personhood and property into that of her husband, rendered her technically a subordinate class of citizen. It also served to shield her from market pressures.

By the end of the nineteenth century, though, America was more industrial than agrarian. Families were smaller. Work took place outside the home, forcing a much sharper split between sex roles. In the new private household, the bourgeois woman was more economically dependent than her agrarian grandmother. Her main activities were the education of children, the management of servants and the consumption of goods produced elsewhere. She may have been more materially comfortable. But this woman had in many respects less agency than her foremothers.

This prompted a frenzy of debate about sex roles. Some women moralised the new feminine role. They framed the home as sanctuary from competitive life in America’s capitalist economy, and the non-working bourgeois housewife as its guardian. Her task was to tend this sanctuary, and to shape the children whose ability to flourish in industrial society depended on having the right moral and intellectual education. This was the so-called ‘cult of domesticity’.

But it takes a while for social norms to catch up with changing material conditions. The old legal system of ‘coverture’ still existed. Women had lost their agency in the agrarian productive household, and as yet acquired no other kind. The result was an economic and political helplessness that resulted in some deep injustices. It was this imbalance that drove the first feminist campaigns for property ownership and enfranchisement.

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Fast forward a century. Labour-saving devices and booming consumerism have shifted society once again. This set off another round of re-negotiation between the sexes as to the proper division of roles. Phyllis Schlafly observed that women were liberated more by the washing machine than feminism. And for bourgeois twentieth-century housewives, labour-saving devices combined with an increasingly atomised, individualistic social world to trigger a renewed search for agency, this time within the workplace.

I take this detour into women’s history to illustrate a core underlying argument. In each case, sex roles have been re-negotiated not by some abstract process of moral advancement but in response to changing material conditions. And in each case, this has been necessary because social and legal norms change more slowly.

So what about the central event in twentieth-century feminism: the sexual revolution? I come to this separately because in my view the sexual revolution was not the start but the end of feminism.

In its nineteenth and early twentieth-century incarnations, the women’s movement sought a positive negotiation of sex roles for prevailing material conditions, in the interests of life in common. But feminism in this sense ended in the 1960s. It was killed by the twin technology shocks of contraception and abortion.

Up to that point, the women’s movement encompassed both women who understood personhood in the context of family life – women as relational beings – and those who argued for women to be treated primarily as individuals, irrespective of the givens of sex or relational obligations. Medical control of fertility constituted a fundamental material change to this debate: it enabled the final victory of the individualist side.

As my friend Erika Bachiochi has argued, treating access to legal abortion as a necessary precondition for personhood implies a liberal male-centric understanding of what a person is: a radically separate individual. Within that framework there’s no conceptual language, for example, to describe the ‘more than one but less than two’ nature of pregnancy, or the radical sense of merged selfhood that comes with mothering a newborn baby.

For women to be human on this model, we must have total ownership over all these aspects of our bodies that differ from those of males. Even a conflict between total autonomy and an unborn human life must be resolved for autonomy.

There exist feminist thinkers who contest this, but they have been marginal since the 1960s. For the mainstream, the entrenchment of this radical bodily autonomy in law as a baseline for human personhood signalled a conclusive defeat of relational feminism.

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Instead of calling for both men and women to embrace a human duty to be dependent others, we embraced a supposedly empowering pursuit of universal, de-sexed radical individualism, and outsourced care to the welfare state.

Received opinion today frames this shift as a victory. Conservative critiques of feminism usually boil down to enumerations of its uncounted costs: the meltdown of family life, the tiny infants in daycare, the degradation of sexual intimacy, the collapsing fertility rate, and so on.

But we need to understand that what we’re fighting is not feminism, properly understood, but something I’ve characterised elsewhere as bio-libertarianism. A worldview that for fifty years now has claimed to act in women’s interests but is increasingly obviously at odds with those interests. It’s a worldview that believes human freedom necessitates radical unmooring from the givens of our bodies.

The transgender writer Jennifer Finney Boylan recently observed that the campaigns for medical abortion and transgender surgeries have a great deal in common. This is correct. Both causes champion the right of atomised individuals to exert absolute mastery over their bodies. They are not feminist but bio-libertarian.

I disagree with Boylan only on whether this is desirable. Because conditions have now changed again. And our norms and laws haven’t caught up yet.

Bio-libertarian causes may have appeared in women’s emancipatory interests, in a broadly democratic consumer society. That era retained some shared social and cultural norms, along with a sincere belief that things could go on getting better, richer, freer, more comfortable forever. As such, working loose those old-fashioned social norms and physiological givens seemed an unalloyed good.

That world is gone. There are no shared norms. We’re past peak oil. Living standards are falling. So is life expectancy. Variously in the name of economic progress, digital disintermediation, Covid, net zero or the Great Reset, the middle class is being methodically cannibalised to shore up the 1%. Pluralism has birthed a Hobbesian moral anarchy, held together only by the technologies that mediate our meme wars.

This is the new normal and it’s not going away. Against this backdrop, the interests of men and women no longer align with the bio-libertarian agenda of mastery over the body. And this brings me to the three main types of response I notice to the new tension between emerging conditions and our legacy social and cultural frameworks: trads, cads and radfems.

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Very reductively, these three positions break down as follows. The Trads say: all this could be fixed if only we could put second-wave feminism back in its box, and return to something more like the cult of domesticity. This has the appeal of both familiarity and nostalgia.

But we no longer live in the industrial society that produced those roles. The economic landscape has changed beyond all recognition. Arguing over the merits of those changes won’t reverse them. And today’s reality is that the ‘Trad’ argument is pure fantasy fiction, for the millions of twentysomethings who can barely make rent, let alone support an unwaged carer for little kids.

Nor is the sexual revolution going back in its box, a fact that today produces ‘Cads’ of both sexes. Men and women who have internalised the radically individualist, bio-libertarian belief that sex is merely a fun leisure activity that can be managed via contract theory.

Among high-status men, this looks like Tinder hookups summoned as casually as a Deliveroo pizza. For the less fortunate it looks like the embittered life of a porn-sick ‘incel’. Among women, the same dynamic looks like classes for college freshmen on how to launch yourself on OnlyFans; like consenting reluctantly to violent or degrading sexual practices in the hope that it will make a boy like you enough to hold your hand in public.

For both sexes, it means an interpersonal landscape marinaded in pornography, actively hostile to intimacy, and governed by a false belief that male and female sexuality are the same. Under its rubric the pursuit of pleasure becomes a degraded search for thrills: one which leaves both sexes numb and jaded, scarred by having traded in love for violence.

The cads have accepted this situation and resigned themselves to just scavenging whatever kicks they can get. Others revolt against this nihilistic nightmare by calling for the re-imposition of power, in the interests of a final victory for one sex over the other. In this sense, ‘radfems’ in fact encompass both feminists and anti-feminists. They have a surprising amount in common.

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Radical feminism is a rich and fractious tradition that I clearly can’t do justice to here. But its contemporary inheritors take for granted the individualistic liberal anthropology I have described. The anti-feminism that opposes this view is just as individualist. It simply prefers not to extend selfhood to women.

Both believe in the same patriarchy. They differ only on its merits. Both are similarly hostile to interdependence. Both these groups, in different ways, argue for the use of power to settle the war between the sexes, in either for or against the “patriarchy”.

These groups are both wrong. Because patriarchy doesn’t exist, either as a good thing or a bad. What does exist, has always existed, is the ongoing negotiation between men and women, over how we can best live together in the world as it is.

And we are in the throes of renegotiating now. For the age of abundance is over. Neo-feudalism is already here. It’s underwritten by an emerging bio-security state that disciplines and surveils our bodies even as it proposes to terraform our souls. It would de-regulate human nature itself. Open up our bodies as markets for biotech. Applaud males for embracing a surgically feminised ‘gender identity’, while re-branding females as ‘gestators’, chestfeeders’, ‘birthing bodies’ or just ‘uterus-havers’.

Men and women face this disunited; no longer sure how to live together. Family formation is collapsing. Anti-natalism is hip. Millions of young people are trapped in a hell of transactional sexuality ordered not to love, or meaning, or the future, but to bare, squalid, hyper-mediated commerce.

The pursuit of freedom is not just delivering diminishing returns. It has long since turned against women. It is now turning against life itself. What we need to face this challenge is not more freedom. It’s more and better obligations. That means, for feminists, a reckoning with some of the unpaid debts of the age of emancipation. It also means that we’ve run out of road for the kind of movement that seeks to pry women free of our fathers, brothers, husbands and sons.

To respond, first and foremost we must stop treating the question of family as a women’s issue. It’s a human one. And we need to accept that men and women are equal in dignity and personhood but different in physiology. The core question is how we reconcile our interests.

At the centre of this is how we understand marriage. The twentieth-century consumer society trivialised and individualised marriage, as a vehicle for personal fulfilment. That no longer works. But marriage does, if we pry it free of the ‘patriarchy’ baggage and treat it as the first and most crucial step in a fightback against radical atomisation, and for life in common.

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Texas has betrayed women

By Jill Filipovic

At the bigger scale we must fight for policies that support this. That defend the human body against enclosure by biotech, human interiority against enclosure by digital transparency, human desire against enclosure by the sex industry. That defend children against enclosure by ‘reproductive healthcare’ or identity medicine. That support family formation, incentivise solidarity in marriage, and proactively seek to shield the domain of human intimacy from the market.

To those of my feminist friends about to denounce me as a reactionary, I say: under current conditions, defending women means defending the human. And if you do that, people are going to call you reactionary. A feminism fighting back against the bio-libertarian nightmare must centre embodied care and dependency. Marriage has the power to convene radical loyalty, in the interests of life in common. For a feminism that centres care, this is self-evidently a good thing. So here the interests of twenty-first century feminism converge with those of conservatives.

Such a feminism also defends human nature and the body, against technologies that would remodel us in the name of utopia. Commercial surrogacy, transgender ‘medicine’ and experimental human-animal chimeras are just the start. Resistance requires a willingness to re-open the question of those embodied ways in which men and women are different. Here too the interests of feminism converge with those of conservatives.

To those well-meaning progressives who argue “you can’t be a feminist and not be for freedom”, I say: wake up. The agenda you ushered in is now the stuff of nightmares. To those on the Right who say “feminism got us here; you’ve made your bed ladies, now lie in it” I say: I get where you’re coming from, but don’t be stupid. You might enjoy watching trans activism abolish sex dimorphism, to own the feminists, but the ideology is coming for your kids too.

At its best, conservatism has always been pragmatic. It seeks the eternal Good, not from nostalgia for bygone days but from where we are. We can’t go back, but the future doesn’t have to look like a nihilistic hell, or like the final victory of one sex over the other.

In terms of how men and women live together, there may be nothing left to conserve. But that means there is everything to build. What we have is the rubble. Our bodies. Each other. And our willingness to try. It’s time to begin.

This is a version of a speech delivered at NatCon 2. 

But this was a visit in which neither the White House nor the Vatican seem to be paying the slightest attention to the optics. That was a mistake, because although the Left-wing pope and the liberal president obviously like each other, there were just so many things that could go wrong. And by Saturday night, when bizarre rumours of the encounter started circulating on Twitter, it was pretty clear that most of them had.

The world’s media weren’t interested in what these two old men had to say about the environment. Their combined age is 163. Francis makes a point of reading as few newspapers as possible; Biden’s cognitive decline means he struggles to hold them the right way up. The only thing anyone wanted to know was what the Pope, who recently described abortion as “murder”, would say to a supposedly devout Catholic president whose militantly pro-choice stance extends to support for late-term abortions.

The first sign that the Vatican was nervous about the meeting came when it cancelled the planned live broadcast of Biden meeting Francis. The media had been told they could film the two men shaking hands in the Throne Room of the Apostolic Palace, followed by a few seconds of them sitting down to talk. On Thursday, the Holy See press office suddenly pulled the plug on this — the cameramen would be thrown out as soon as Biden emerged from his limo. The hacks scratched their heads for an explanation. The most likely one was that the Vatican was worried that the doddery president would forget the Pope’s name or walk into a broom cupboard. Or both.

A photograph released afterwards showed the two men chatting happily across the table, an impressive feat since they don’t share a language. But, with the aid of an interpreter, they did spend 75 minutes in each other’s company. That’s more than twice as long as Trump was granted in 2017 — no surprise, since Francis couldn’t stand him — and also more than 20 minutes longer than the Pope’s meeting with Obama in 2014.

Did they talk about abortion, and specifically Biden’s insistence on receiving communion every week — something conservative bishops say he’s not entitled to do, since his lobbying for abortion puts him in a state of grave mortal sin? The Vatican wouldn’t comment: it never discusses these private conversations. But Biden did, in response to a shouted question from a reporter. Asked if the subject of abortion came up, he said: “No, it didn’t. It came up, we just talked about the fact that he was happy I was a good Catholic and I should keep receiving communion.”

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The exact words are important, because several US media outlets — unswervingly pro-Biden and keen to protect him from embarrassment — missed out the words “It came up”, thus concealing the fact that Biden had said abortion didn’t and did come up in space of a few seconds. Liberals generally, and especially liberal Catholics, would much rather go with the narrative that Francis diplomatically avoided the subject of abortion and simply reassured the president that he was a good Catholic who could receive communion.

Conservative US Catholics, meanwhile, reacted with a mixture of anger and confusion to Biden’s comments. They were outraged at the thought that a pope could spend over an hour with a pro-abortion Catholic and not remind him of the Church’s teaching — spelled out very clearly in the past — that his activism bars him from the Eucharist. Indeed, if Biden were to be believed, Francis had just demolished that teaching by beckoning the President towards the altar rail, thus making a nonsense of his earlier denunciation of abortion as murder.

But can Biden’s account be trusted? Strict truthfulness was never his long suit, even when he had his full complement of grey cells. Presumably he was advised that, given the Vatican’s policy of not commenting on private discussions, short of a furious papal denunciation he could get away with saying anything.

Also — and this is a difficult point for loyal Catholics to grasp — Pope Francis’s own judgement, even on questions of faith and discipline, is far from infallible. Like his one-time hero, the Argentine populist dictator Juan Perón, he is happy to bend or blur principles in order to wrong-foot his opponents. And there is no one he dislikes more than American Catholic conservatives. When they begged him to reprove Biden for his extreme pro-abortion stance, they were guaranteeing that he would do nothing of the sort. Francis knew that, by allowing Biden to escape censure — and to receive communion in Rome on Friday night — he would pull the rug out from under orthodox US bishops who want their conference to tighten the rules on reception of the Eucharist. Rug-pulling is one of this pope’s hobbies.

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So it might seem that Biden’s visit to the Vatican worked out well for him, despite the lack of official confirmation that he can receive communion. But on Saturday the poor man found himself confronted by an avalanche of tweets and retweets gloating about reports from well-connected sources that he’d had a bit of a “bathroom accident” while visiting the Pope. Hence, allegedly, the meeting over-running so much. And even if we discount this as puerile black propaganda, the edited video of Biden presenting gifts to Francis shows the most painfully frail American president in living memory. At 79 he is the oldest man ever to hold the office, but he could easily be a decade older. His visit to the Vatican will raise questions about how many more foreign trips he’s capable of making. It’s hard to believe he will still be in office for the midterms, let alone the 2024 elections.

There’s no doubt, however, that Biden derived an almost childlike pleasure from meeting the successor of Peter. But it’s less likely that Francis was personally moved by the encounter. You can imagine him rolling his eyes at the White House’s hilariously inappropriate decision to give him an antique vestment made for the celebration of the traditional Latin Mass he’s busy trying to suppress.

What we see on the video is the switched-on charm Francis provides for any foreign leader who passes his ideological smell test. The unofficial motto of this pontificate is “My enemy’s enemy is my friend”, and it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to imagine the satisfaction the Peronist pope is feeling at the sight of his conservative critics roused to a new pitch of indignation.

But what the video also shows is a man who, still recovering from major colon surgery at the age of 84, is finally showing his age. He is tired – he had to cancel his plans to attend the Glasgow climate summit – and, significantly, many members of the college of cardinals, including his own appointees, are tired of him. We can’t predict whether the next pope will be a conservative or a liberal. What we do know is the conclave will be anxious to put an end to the Machiavellian antics on display last weekend.

Much as new lives were not automatically worth preserving, taking your own life in the ancient world wasn’t automatically bad either. Socrates’ decision to drink hemlock rather than face exile, was deemed honourable by many ancient philosophers.

Christian doctrine, though, taught that human life is sacred, because it holds a spark of the divine. Thus only God should be permitted to give or take life. The 325AD Council of Nicaea decreed that every Christian village should have a hostelry for the sick, a principle which extended to abandoned children. For the same reason, a long-standing Christian tradition forbids suicide. But as the Christian era has faded, so old debates about the beginning and end of life have re-surfaced – most recently, in the accelerating campaign to legalise assisted dying.

The latest such effort, Baroness Meacher’s Assisted Dying Bill, has been debated today in the Lords. It’s a campaign that kicked off initially as Christianity began fading in earnest, in the early 20th century, and has accelerated sharply in the last two decades.

But it’s not enough just to see this as further evidence of Christianity’s terminal illness. For even when Christendom dominated the West, the edges of life have always been vulnerable to a nudge this way or that. And this in turn shows why even non-believers should think twice about legalising such nudges — even when they’re justified in the name of choice, agency or compassion.

The “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of Christianity, picked up speed after World War I. When church leaders on all sides cheered on that bloodbath as a “crusade”, perhaps it’s no wonder “the Church says so” lost its shine afterwards, and “progress” began to look like ‘whatever the Church forbids’.

Unsurprisingly, campaigns challenging Church teaching on the sanctity of the beginning and end of life gathered pace in the Thirties. The Abortion Law Reform Society was founded in 1936, while the first Voluntary Euthanasia Bill was proposed even earlier, in 1931.

The Abortion Law Reform Society got its way in 1968; closely tracking this victory for individual choice, another effort was made to legalise voluntary euthanasia in 1969. Though this attempt was unsuccessful, more recent efforts have sounded an insistent drumbeat, in tandem with decline of Christian faith.

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The 2001 census reported that 71.7% of Britons described themselves as Christian; by 2011 that was 59.3%, and it’s predicted to be below 50% when this year’s census data are released. And since the 1997 attempt by Labour MP Joe Ashton to introduce a Doctor Assisted Dying Bill, there have been nine further attempts, of which Meacher’s is the most recent.

The principal defence of assisted dying is that an individual of sound mind should be free to choose whether he or she continues to suffer. Many today find this convincing. But when we weight the merits of this argument, it’s worth considering some of the less-counted costs of the successful parallel campaign for ‘choice’ at life’s beginning.

Today, legal abortion in the UK is widely viewed as a core feminist victory. But while this change eased the predicament of countless women facing unwanted pregnancy, it also had wider knock-on effects. For while legalisation gave more women the option to end a pregnancy, not all of them wanted to take it.

Meanwhile, though, the fact that carrying the baby to term was now optional eased social pressure on those men who caused accidental pregnancies. One US study shows that the availability of oral contraceptives so increased demand for extra-marital sex that — because the method wasn’t 100% reliable — it also increased the rate of extra-marital pregnancies by around 15%. At the same time, another US study shows that legal abortion drove a parallel decline in shotgun marriages that far outstripped the number of accidental pregnancies forestalled by abortion.

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Thus, while advocates of legal abortion believed that it would reduce instances of single motherhood, its paradoxical effect was the opposite. By relieving social pressure on men to step up after impregnating a woman, legalising abortion accelerated the prevalence of single motherhood — a phenomenon now widely recognised as a central to the feminisation of poverty.

Most women in the UK support the availability of at least some legal abortion. My aim here isn’t to re-litigate this acutely sensitive debate, but to draw out a more general implication: that when a previously unavoidable life experience becomes avoidable, wider attitudes to that experience will change. And for some, it’ll stop being a matter for sympathy.

This is the shift which justified the Right-wing depiction of single mothers pervasive during my youth in the Major years, and still widely associated with individualist Thatcherite Toryism: lazy, parasitic “welfare scroungers”. Implicitly, those who took this position assumed that because such women could have terminated a pregnancy, the duties following on having not done so should be wholly on their shoulders. In other words: if suffering is avoidable, the choice to suffer comes to be seen as wholly private.

And it’s on these grounds that we should be wary of assisted dying, regardless of our views on the immortal soul. For in practice, over the increasingly liberal 20th century, it’s been consistently the case that what looks like ‘choice’ for the well-off gets underwritten for the less wealthy by the welfare state. In the case of accidental pregnancy, for example, as single mothers grew in number others rightly sought to relieve the resulting poverty and suffering.

Again, I mention this not to re-litigate these debates and certainly not to stigmatise those who rely on these resources. Rather, I want to sound a note of pessimism about how sustainable this dynamic will be in the 21st century. For the expansion of the welfare state as underwriter of last resort for personal choice is predicated on economic growth. And this in turn relies heavily on population growth. And while that well seemed bottomless in the Peak Boomer years of the 20th century, the 21st so far has seen economic shocks, concentration of wealth in a super-elite, and a globally collapsing birth rate. In other words: the enabling conditions for a 20th-century welfare state are crumbling in front of our eyes.

We’re already seeing intensifying competition for a dwindling pot of taxpayer support, between different interest groups. Thanks to the demographics of the UK’s voting public, which skews toward the old, victory in this struggle has thus far gone to the elderly. But this may yet change, as demographics shift and belts are tightened. And history teaches us that even during the Christian era, when life was explicitly defended as sacred, scarcity has at times driven people put a thumb on the scales.

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Folk songs tell of women who give birth out of wedlock and murder the newborns. And at the other end of life, even Christian European cultures sometimes practised “mercy killings” of the elderly.

In Sardinia, the femina accabadòra, the “lady of the good death” would be summoned to the bedside of someone very old or terminally ill, and after reciting a final ritual blessing would kill the sufferer with a blow to the temple, using a special hammer. The Galluras Ethnographic Museum in Luras includes an example of this implement, resting with a gothic flourish on the pillow of an empty bed. Similarly, early 20th-century ethnographic reports describe Lapot, a practice in the Carpathian mountains in which an elderly person unable to care for themselves would be ritually killed by a relative.

The common factor in such killings was a shortage of resources. That is, societies making grim choices about what to do with those so old, young or ill they’re wholly dependent on care – and to whom a community is unable or unwilling to devote the necessary resources.

And notwithstanding cruel conservative stereotypes, it’s overwhelmingly scarcity that drives the “choice” to end a pregnancy. In the US, the poorest 12% of women account for almost 50% of abortions. And a glance through women’s stories swiftly illustrates just how far the individual “choice” to end a pregnancy is often far from free, but rather a reluctant decision driven overwhelmingly by poverty.

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In a world where dwindling welfare resources are ever more grudgingly funded by a shrinking working-age population, it’s easy to imagine the arguments from scarcity that will follow, ever more explicitly, upon the transformation of terminal illness into a “choice”. Indeed, they’re already foreshadowed by an assessment of assisted suicide by the Canadian government, which noted that legalisation “could reduce annual health care spending across Canada by between $34.7 million and $138.8 million”.

Those individualists now pushing to extend “choice” to the end of life are still wedded to a hyper-individualist twentieth-century mindset that relies on an ever-expanding welfare state to underwrite its freedoms. But they’re not paying attention: the age of abundance that shaped that dream of endless choice is already over.

And yet they push on. If they succeed, many people now healthy will face terminal illness in a “care” landscape created by individualists, for a society that’s enshrined “choice” over any public duty of compassion — and that can no longer afford a publicly-funded care infrastructure to pick up the pieces. I don’t want to live in a world where ‘tough-minded’ right-liberals write op-eds implying that those with terminal illnesses who refuse the Socratic way out are selfish parasites.

A cynic might argue that given all this, adjusting the statute book to allow for a 21st-century “lapot” is merely sensible. But if this is so, we should drop the rhetoric about freedom and compassion. We should be under no illusions about what this Bill is for, or about the callously neo-Roman attitude to human life that will follow in its wake.