All the rightwing attacks on reproductive rights have been thwarted in the House Of Commons this week. I’ve been watching the abortion time limit voting live (and by gar isn’t our Parliament quaintly anachronistic?) and all the amendments tabled to curtail it - to 22, 20, 26 or 12 weeks - have been rejected. 24 weeks it is. The BBC notes that:

Data from the Office for National Statistics shows that just 1.5% of the 200,000 abortions in England and Wales occur after 20 weeks.

This is a figure which has remained faily stable in recent years with abortion providers saying many of these are women who do not realise they are pregnant because they were young teenagers or breastfeeding mothers who were not having regular periods.

… or because they are have been in denial, perhaps after being raped, because they have just escaped from an abusive relationship (or from Northern Ireland), or because their circumstances have just changed to the point where they are unable to raise a child. Late abortions are a source of relief to a very small number of women in particularly desperate circumstances and not - in the offensive words of Mark Pritchard, a Tory MP voting for a 16 week limit - “the latest manifestation of Britain’s throwaway society.“

The proposed reductions of the time limit were justified by the dazzling science of one Professor Campbell, who has used “4-D imaging” to make mashup videos of happy smiley baby foetuses. These pull on the heartstrings and confuse the columnists, but

The British Medical Association, British Association of Perinatal Medicine, Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare, Royal College of Nursing and Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists have produced a joint statement pointing out there is no medical evidence suggesting the limit should be reduced.

A few of the Labour MPs who routinely vote for war and privatisation if their career paths demand it threatened to throw their toys out of the pram if not allowed to “vote with their consciences” on this one, so it could have gone either way. The vote on the use of embryos in science was less nailbiting; whatever one’s position on whether or not a woman can be trusted with her own womb, we can all agree on the important role of scientific research of boosting Britain’s competitivity within the global economy.

Today’s votes also removed the requirements for women seeking IVF treatment to guarantee that they could provide their child with a “father figure”. The Tories moved to block this change, instead proposing that the wording be changed to “male role model”, presumably under the impression that this sounded modern enough to beguile their opponents. Again, the number of women affected would be small - IVF being unavailable to a great many for far more prosaic reasons - but they represent the section of the population who, through unwanted pregnancy or infertility, are vulnerable to Tory interference.

You couldn’t, in this day in age, get away with casting a pox on single mothers and lesbians, any more than you could get away with banning abortions wholesale. But you could push for steps in that direction. Undermine those women whose pregnancies you are in a position to veto; tell them that you don’t think they can raise a child without male supervision and, when it becomes clear that no-one’s listening to you, tell them that you won’t let them raise a child without male supervision. The others will get the message… or they would, except even the House of Commons aren’t so craven as to let you get away with it. How do you like that my Tory friend? Hahaha ha ha ha ha ha. etc. I’m going to bed.