PRAVO NA IZBOR: Mediji i odnos prema pobačaju daleko od stvarnog života

Here we go again, the never-ending story of the rightwing newspapers’ campaign to roll back the right to abortion. The front page of the Sunday Times is at it once again today: “Record number of babies survive birth at 23 weeks”, which will, it says, “revive the debate over the legal limit for abortion”. Right on cue, up pops Tory MP Fiona Bruce of the all-party pro-life group to say, “I don’t understand why there is not more outcry about the fact that we allow viable babies to be aborted.”
The date at which a foetus might be viable has nothing to do with a woman’s right to choose. Some day an embryo might be reared in a test tube to full term, but that changes nothing for a woman’s right not to be a mother. For now, very premature babies born before the 24-week abortion limit fare badly. Latest national figures show only 19% survive, though the Sunday Times has found that in highly specialised centres many more can. But survive to what? You have to read on to find there are “high levels of disability” among them, no figures offered.
The Epicure 2012 study shows that only 11% survive at 23 weeks without a disability. Heroic neonatologists may keep more alive, but they are not the ones who will see, let alone treat, the children with often extreme impairments. Many of the “saved” babies end up in care because their multiple disabilities are beyond what parents can manage. Directors of children’s services find they take in many now reaching their teens, needing 24-hour two-person care, crippling budgets for child protection and care of all the others. If money shouldn’t enter the equation, I’d like to see the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail calling for higher tax and more money for children’s services to cope. However, it’s always a mother’s right to choose to save a child if possible, and every woman’s right to abort a child she doesn’t wish to carry.
What is remarkable about this non-stop stream of anti-abortion stories is how far out of line the rightwing press is with the real world of their readers. That should be a good political reminder on many other issues too. One in three women will have an abortion by the age of 45. Accidental pregnancy or change in circumstance once pregnant crosses all classes. Abortion is very, very ordinary and a mark of civilisation – liberty for women and every child wanted. YouGov finds only 7% want abortion banned: these calls for pushing back the date are just a way for pro-lifers to inch towards abolition week by week. In the process, they would deny abortion to the most desperate cases who leave it the latest – the very young or the middle aged who thought they had gone through the menopause.
The film Obvious Child, a romcom out this week, is one of the remarkably few that deals with abortion as a normal event in a woman’s life – no trauma, no tragedy, just routine. A study from the University of California has been looking at TV and movie treatment of abortion: needless to say, they shy away from it. Unwanted pregnancies miraculously end in miscarriage before the heroine has to make the decision or, as in Juno, she changes her mind at the last minute and has the baby. In 9% of stories the mother dies – negligible in real life, less common than death in childbirth; in 9% they have the baby and have it adopted – nine times more often than in life. There are usually serious consequences, moral suffering, guilt and, in one, a changed mind on the doctor’s operating table. The remake of Alfie left it out altogether, a key story line in the original. In Coronation Street a convenient miscarriage saved the day; in Downton Abbey she had a change of heart. Only in Skins was it treated as normal. All this shows the grip the anti-abortion lobby has on nervous TV and film-makers. No heroine can have an angst-free abortion.
Look at the flow of anti-abortion stories just in the Mail in the past months, and these are only a selection: “The baby who survived an abortion and the mother racked by guilt that she might have harmed the tiny child she now adores” (May); a singer “reveals her ‘shame’ at abortion and fears her youngest son’s autism was a ‘punishment’ for her actions” (May); “Rise of the ‘career girl’ abortion” (June); “Police use draconian riot law to break up pro-life vigil outside abortion clinic” (June); “Schoolgirl had four abortions before her 16th birthday” (July); and “Middle-aged mothers who are fuelling a rise in abortions” (July).
The real campaign is to normalise the law in line with attitudes and behaviour. No need for two doctors to sign, no need for an early cut-off date. For the third of women who do have an abortion it remains a stigma few dare discuss openly. Time for the soaps and the movies to catch up with the Obvious Child approach to an everyday medical fact.
Guardian