Having four children without incurring so much as a blip in your lifestyle is the ultimate proof of success. The pile of washing is irrelevant: someone else is doing it; there is any number of highly-trained nannies to do the early shift on a Saturday morning. Tony Blair may have been up to his ears in foreign policy when baby Leo came along, but it was a point of principle that he still found time to do the odd night feed. That’s the kind of tough stuff a world leader is made of.

What might defeat ordinary mortals is just so much grist to the alpha daddy’s (or alpha mummy’s) mill. For men, the message is quick and effective: there’s plenty of lead in my pencil. For working women it reinforces just how super they really are: four children, a size ten and still got balls in the boardroom. For nonworking mothers it’s a similar thing: such is their allure that they’ve married an alpha capable of supporting not just her in suitable style, but a nest of embryonic alphas too.

Having four children means that you need a house the size of Texas; it means a convoy on the school run; an army of highly trained staff; multiple school fees. It’s the Darwinian expression of a person’s physical, mental and social superiority.

Real Life

It’s an interesting question: at what point do we draw the line between the human and the non-human? Most of us would put it some time before birth (although historically some societies, especially on small islands, have considered infanticide to be a viable method of birth control) and some time after conception (unless, of course, you’re a religious leader in a country ravaged by HIV, in which case condoms are of course an affront to life itself), and shrug off the detail as a philosophical curiosity that’s hardly worth getting worked up about. And, while we shrug, reproductive rights are under the most intense attack in a generation.

Proposed amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill 2007-08 would cut the time limit for abortions from 24 weeks to 22, 20 or even 13 weeks. Those lobbying for these restrictions tend to do so after showing hi-tech 4D scans of the little ones in utero, giving the impression of a scientific breakthrough shedding new light on the old babies’ rights dilemma. In the real world, 4D scans are a fantastic tool but to read prenatal ensoulment into them is pure fantasy (and not even such an innocent fantasy, when presentations are given using looped and edited footage to simulate waving and smiling).

And, in the real world, very few women are having abortions at 20 weeks, let alone 24. Anyone having waited this long faces a much more difficult time of it, emotionally as well as physically, and will have had a good reason to wait. This is especially true of the few post-24 abortions, allowed on grounds of severe foetal impairment. The women who would be most affected by the imposition of Anne Widdecombe’s morality upon their wombs are also those facing the toughest of circumstances, those most worthy of our compassion.

Other points of debate tell us more still about what this is really about. One pro-choice amendment aims to overturn the requirement for a women to get two doctors’ signatures assenting to an abortion. Such a requirement is not pro-life, it’s anti-choice; it’s taking control of a woman’s body, and putting it in the hands of a professional authority figure. The number of doctors refusing abortions is apparently at “crisis” level, following a sharp rise in the number of conscientious objectors perhaps seeking to assuage their PFI-era workload more than their tortured consciences. It’s a good job they can’t conscientiously object to flu jabs and heart surgery! Ah, but if only it were that simple; some GPs are known to fail even in their duty to recommend less sqeamish doctors, and access to abortion services is a postcode lottery at best (a lottery that Northern Irish postcodes are bound to always lose, this being the one thing upon which the Catholic and Protestant establishments are agreed).

From the other side comes an amendment seeking to impose a “cooling off period” before going through with the procedure, perhaps the only attempt to increase waiting times in the history of British medicine. Again, this has nothing to do with babies’ souls - forcing a woman to wait doesn’t only make the whole thing more painful for her, it makes it all the more likely that the mystical deadline will be exceeded - and everything to do with undermining a woman’s authority to control her own body.

There are those who disapprove of abortion on religious grounds, but by and large it’s not working class Irish Catholics who are working to put a stop to it. It’s not the Africans and Polish plumbers whose recruitment to the dwindling ranks of Jesus’ soldiers brings great joy to our racist bishops’ hearts either. Most of the noise - along, I suspect, along with most of the judgemental doctors - is coming from those sections of society whose sisters, daughters and neices will always have the choice between a flight to a land of more liberal laws (or, at least, to the classy end of the black market, the end at which you’re least likely to bleed to death in some godforsaken backstreet) and a baby with an easily-bullied au pair in the spare bedroom.

Pro-life? Ask Bill Hicks (if you dare).

Real Choices

If there’s ever a word that should get you on guard these days (other than “flexibility“, I suppose, or “humanitarian” or, God help us, “democracy“. Or, for that matter, “women’s rights“), it’s “choice”. Gordon Brown, remember, says he wants to put choice at the heart of the NHS, and David Cameron never shuts up about doing so. John Howard, the man who got away with Kyoto rejectionism and Deputy-Sherriffhood for so long, was finally removed from office on the strength of his punitive WorkChoices programme. But sometimes it’s worth reclaiming a word from its abusers, because choice should be so much more than a shopping-list buzzword. To be pro-choice is to be pro-liberation.

One of the axioms of Marxism is the idea of alienation, a state in which workers cannot control their own productive capacity, the idea, in other words, that we have very little opportunity to control what we do. Whether it be through the sale of our labour on the jobs market or through more brutal and less subtle institutions like slavery, a large proportion of what we do is decided by someone else, and we end up working to make rich people that bit richer, or to destroy that bit more of the planet. Interacting through the mechanisms of the market, competitive and paranoid, we are even more powerless to act together, to organise ourselves and coordinate our actions.

To be liberated, in the Marxist sense, is to take control of one’s own productive capacity, and to work not for our bosses, but for ourselves and our fellows. The pro-choice position is not an optional add-on to this philosophy, but an inevitable and crucial consequence of it. However long the hours and however poor the conditions, there are precious few jobs whose implications compare to those of being pregnant. An expectant mother doesn’t just have something inside her; her appetites, her rhythms, her whole body is transformed for the better part of a year. If spending our days in a call centre makes us unfree, how much more unfree are our sister-comrades if they do not control their own reproductive capacity, if they go through this process on anyone’s say-so except their own?

Of course, one does not have to be a Marxist to be pro-choice and, indeed, there are many women and men who, despite being resigned to or even contented with their wage-slavery (despite, in some cases, being a minister in a centre-right Labour government), will stand up to defend the solidarity of the womb. There is, in fact, a secure pro-choice consensus in this country, although the well-organised anti-abortion lobby are often more visible in the press than the silent majority. But, even though this kind of rhetoric is often less than evident among the broader pro-choice left, the realities are there.

Those who are pro-choice are usually also pro-sex education and pro-contraception. We are also, generally, more than supportive of giving help to working and working-class mothers: child benefits, and decent, subsidised childcare. In contrast, the hard right “pro-lifers” would prefer to see young girls uninformed and unprotected, with the only sexual choice being that between strict extra-marital abstinence or the constant risk of unwanted pregnancy. And, with their mythical meritocracy and their visceral hatred of “scroungers”, they would make the lives of unemployed and lower-income parents so hard (New Labour soundbite of the week: work or lose your home) as to make even unsanitory and dangerous backstreet abortions an attractive alternative.

Of course, this doesn’t all come out every time one of the broadsheet runs a story next to a picture of an eerily-humanoid foetus. But, if you’re skeptical, think of your own views, and those of your friends who take a stand for or against abortion rights, and tell me if it doesn’t all fall into place. Those of us whose position isn’t dictated to us by our personal theocrats tend to fall in one camp or the other: we either want to people to control their own destinies, or to be kept powerless, pion-like, and preferably poor. We want to liberate, or to alienate; and that, no matter how much effort one puts into painting a human face onto a poxy little cluster of cells, is that.

PS: Real Conflict

If you want to make a stand for this most intimate of socialist causes, Anne Widdecomb has embarked on a speaking tour promoting her anti-choice agenda, and Abortion Rights UK (whose website, incidentally, is full of useful info) and affiliated organisations have been picketing her. I hope to be there in Liverpool this Tuesday. This isn’t just Tory-baiting, fun as that always is, but a way of bringing the pro-choice agenda back into the public eye; remember, most of the population support abortion rights, but few are aware of the attack they are currently under.

Only one of the amendments has so far gone before the Lords, an anti-choice amendment which would have eliminated abortion on grounds of severe foetal impairment. A woman cannot get an abortion, under current law, merely on the strength of preferring not to be pregnant, but must request it on one of three grounds. In practice, these are broad enough to cover most cases, but only one of them allows abortions after 24 weeks: the grounds that the foetus is so unlikely to survive beyond birth that the woman can’t bear to go through the rest of the pregnancy.

We should be very glad that this amendment was defeated, as the few women affected by it would be among those worst-off anyway, but it was only the opening salvo. There are more serious and more contentious amendments to come, and so far it is the anti-choice lobby that has been better organised. We need to be ready to mobilise at short notice as the other amendments come up for debate throughout the next six months; as well as spreading the word generally it is probably worth sigining up to Abortion Rights UK’s Action Alerts in order to keep on top of developments.

Oh, and ask your aunties if they remember the old slogans from last time around, and maybe post a few of them here as comments. The wittiest and most incendiary entries will win, well, not prizes as such, but some imaginary equivalent.