Abortion: Their Morals and OursUKWatch.net - 13 Mar 2008The right is seriously mobilising around the issue of abortion. Tory leader David Cameron has stated that he wants to bring the limit down to 20 or 21 weeks and Tory ex-minister Anne Widdecombe has been taking her “pro-life” road show around the country in an effort to rally the troops. This is not something a Tory has been confident enough to do on any issue for many years – though, thanks to local activists, these meetings did not happen without noisy protests outside. It is clear that the right have been waiting for the opportunity to challenge the abortion law for some years. They have partly succeeded in focusing the debate about the time limit, currently set at 24 weeks, around the issue of viability and away from a women’s right to choose. There have been regular stories in the press claiming that new scientific developments prove the need to bring the time limit down. The medical establishment has rejected this view. Last year’s inquiry into the abortion time limit by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee reported: “We have seen no good evidence to suggest that foetal viability has improved significantly since the abortion time limit was last set, and seen good evidence that it has not.” The arguments about why a small minority of women might need to access an abortion at this stage in a pregnancy get little coverage and need to be constantly restated. It is a fact that some young women simply don’t realise they are pregnant, some go into denial until they can’t hide it, and, in the case of older women, some mistake missed periods for the menopause and don’t realise for some months that they are pregnant. One other major reason that women need access to abortion at a later stage is the discovery of severe foetal abnormality. For example, one important test for impairments such as Down’s syndrome is amniocentesis. This cannot be carried out until 16 weeks, the results may take two to three weeks, and then the woman may need counselling and advice. If she decides to have an abortion it may be yet another week or two before this can be arranged. The truth is the anti-abortionists are not concerned with any of this. They want to stop all abortions happening but they are faced with the fact that an overwhelming majority, 83 percent of the British population, support legal abortion. So they are left with trying to chip away at the time limit where they think they can make gains. If they win this time they will come back for more. The anti-abortionists will have gained confidence from the defensiveness voiced by some pro-choice campaigners in recent months. Even David Steel, the man responsible for bringing the 1967 Abortion Act onto the statute book, has been quoted as saying that “everyone can agree there are too many abortions” and “there is a mood now which is that if things go wrong you can get an abortion, and it is irresponsible”. The implication is that women are frivolous about having abortions, and it repeats the myth that women use them as a form of contraception. For socialists the key argument is that women are more than incubators: they have the right to control their own bodies. No woman should be forced to continue a pregnancy if she feels she cannot cope. So there is no optimum or “normal” number of abortions to aim for. Every woman who needs one should be able to access one speedily and safely. When abortion was illegal no one knew how many took place. Many women never told anyone for fear of the law (see below) and so the pre-1967 numbers were based on speculation and the number of women who ended up in hospital with sometimes life threatening complications. Neither will it ever be known how many women went through with pregnancies simply because they didn’t want to take the physical or legal risk of a backstreet abortion. Sex education Today, far from being too easy to get an abortion, there is massive unevenness in access across the country, which is why any new amendments to extend and improve provision are to be welcomed. The 1967 act was never about giving women full choice. As David Steel himself said at the time, “We want to stamp out the backstreet abortions, but it is not the intention of the promoters of the bill to leave a wide-open door for abortion on request.” Politicians claimed that opening up abortion provision too much would encourage sexual activity. Today the right still argue that access to sex education, contraception and abortion is too open, claiming it has led to Britain having the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Europe. Every year almost 50,000 young women under 18 fall pregnant in Britain – six times that of Holland, four times that of Italy and three times higher than in France. In the 1970s rates of teenage pregnancy were similar across Western Europe. The idea that this is because of too much sex education and the availability of contraception and abortion would be laughable if it didn’t have such tragic consequences. The example of the US is telling. Over $1 billion has been spent on abstinence programmes in schools yet the rates of teenage pregnancies are the highest in Western industrialised countries. Britain comes second. One way Holland has achieved the lowest rate of teenage pregnancies across Western Europe is by having compulsory sex education in schools from the age of five and continued explicit and supportive sex education from then on. In contrast, comprehensive sex education is still not a required part of the curriculum in Britain, making provision uneven. What is needed is more openness about sex, and systematic and sympathetic sex education in schools from a young age. Of course, some teenagers choose to become parents and they should not be demonised. But society needs to make it as easy as possible to avoid unwanted pregnancy, and attempting to repress natural sexual behaviour will not do that. We are a long way from the crushing morality of the 1950s, when any women who got pregnant outside of marriage faced stark choices: illegal and dangerous abortion, have the baby and then feel there was no alternative but to give it up for adoption, or keep the child and face society’s opprobrium. It is hard to convey the stigma that went with being an “unmarried mother” – a pejorative description which used to be commonplace. The term “unmarried father” was never used. Happily, today millions of us have relationships and babies without feeling the same pressure to marry or conform, and no serious section of the ruling class can argue that women should be pushed back into the home. Women are now a permanent part of the workforce and women’s paid work is vital to the economy. Yet despite all the advances and changes in women’s lives, ideas about the family, and a woman’s role, still persist. We are told that the family is a vital cornerstone of society, and women’s role within it as child bearer is central. Such ideology still plays an important part in shaping expectations and consciousness. It helps ensure that people continue to see it as natural that the family carries the bulk of the economic burden of bringing up the next generation. This lies behind the moral panic about single mothers and working class families that politicians still regularly whip up. If you have a baby on your own it will be financially difficult, unless you have a very highly paid job and good maternity leave. But the state makes you go through hoops to get assistance. You are seen as feckless and undeserving, and in some way hardship is still judged as an appropriate state for you. Women can’t win. If they have children young they will struggle to be financially secure but will get little support. If they wait to have a baby until financially stable later in life they will receive little sympathy if they then face problems with fertility as they have tried to “buck their biology”. When women do have children they can only stay at home without criticism if they are not a “burden” on the state. Any single parent on benefits will, from October, be forced to look for work when the youngest child is 12 rather than 16 as in the past. New Labour wants to bring this threshold down to seven years by 2010. This completely ignores the reality of the lack of affordable and flexible childcare that means some low paid workers can’t afford to leave the house to work. In contrast, middle or upper class women can make other choices. They can leave their children with nannies or send them to boarding school at a tender age and not be accused of neglect. Imagine if Madeleine McCann’s parents had been manual workers rather than doctors and had been staying on a package deal in Benidorm, leaving their children locked in a flat while they went to a pub. I believe the media would then have taken a very different stance. Instead of sympathy and global support we would have witnessed at best a wave of vitriol about selfishness and irresponsibility, and possibly even the prospect of legal charges. But the other side of this is that women today have more economic independence and are more sexually liberated than 40 years ago. Whatever the state or politicians say about our lives we are not going to go back to a time when our lives were totally restricted and repressed. Women are not going back in the box. The enthusiasm for the pickets against Anne Widdecombe’s rallies and the success of the 300-strong Abortion Rights meeting in London in January show that. Veteran activists are being reinvigorated, but most importantly a new layer of young women are getting involved in the campaign to defend and extend abortion rights. Many are hearing these arguments for the first time. There is no time to lose. Every trade unionist and activist needs to raise the issue of abortion rights at work, in the trade unions and at college. During the last serious battle to defend abortion rights the bigots were pushed back by the collective strength of the trade union movement. We need to be prepared to make such a mobilisation again. But by taking on the wider arguments about women’s oppression, morality and class we can do more than stop the current attacks. Already there are thousands of women, and men, who are angry about women’s position in society, about the rise of raunch culture, unequal pay and the lack of childcare. Right now we have a real opportunity to win this new generation to socialist politics and the fight for women’s liberation. Judith Orr is the author of Sexism and the System published by Bookmarks, 3. To join Abortion Rights go to www.abortionrights.org.uk. Before abortion was legal For the first 30 years of my life abortion was illegal in this country. Almost as soon as I got involved in politics in the late 1950s, a friend came round to my flat and asked to stay with me for a few days. She had just had an abortion; the foetus had come away in the toilet. She had to borrow lots of money and was frightened she would be found out and imprisoned. We sometimes had telephone calls from teenage girls giving false names and asking if they could come and stay. They were afraid they would be chucked out of their home or arrested after having abortions. In the late 1970s I interviewed an old lady who had had an abortion as a young woman. She insisted I did not give her name or anything that could reveal her identity. Even though abortion was by then legal she was still worried that she might get into trouble. I have friends who have told me horror stories after they realise I am in favour of a woman’s right to choose, but they always say I am the only person they have ever told and I must not tell anyone else. It is terrible that people are still frightened of the law, even though it no longer applies. Mary Phillips
The British Government Runs Scared of IsraelUKWatch.net - 13 Mar 2008On 18 February 2008, the British Government was forced to release a draft dossier on Iraq?s so-called ?weapons of mass destruction? under the Freedom of Information Act. But it succeeded in persuading a Freedom of Information Tribunal to allow a handwritten reference to Israel in the margin of the document to be suppressed. The Foreign Office sought this redaction because the person who wrote ?Israel? in the margin of the document was implying that Israel was on a par with Iraq in its pursuit of ?weapons of mass destruction?. Since the author must have been a high ranking official in the Foreign Office in order to have access to the draft dossier, the Foreign Office argued that UK relations with Israel would be damaged if the document was published intact and, as a consequence, the Israeli government became aware of the existence of such an outlandish opinion in the senior ranks of the Foreign Office.
A photocopy of the document is now available on the Foreign Office website [1]. At the time of its publication, it was known that a ?minor redaction? had been made to the document, but the nature of the redaction was not known until it was revealed by The Guardian on 21 February 2008 [2]. At the same time, The Guardian published in full the Foreign Office statement to the Tribunal making the case for the redaction [3]. Freedom of Information request The draft was written in early September 2002 by John Williams, a former Daily Mirror journalist, who was Director of Communications at the Foreign Office from 2000 to 2006. A Freedom of Information request for its publication, which was made by Chris Ames on 9 February 2005, was turned down by the Foreign Office under Section 36 of the Freedom of Information Act on the grounds that its publication would ?inhibit the free and frank provision of advice and the free and frank exchange of views for the purposes of deliberation? (see Chris Ames? website here [4]). However, the Information Commissioner ordered its publication on 3 May 2007. The Foreign Office appealed against this decision to an Information Tribunal seeking, in the first instance, to prevent publication altogether and in the second instance, if the Tribunal ruled in favour of publication (which it did), to have the handwritten reference to Israel suppressed under Section 27 of the Act. This Section allows an exemption from publishing material that would do damage to the UK?s international relations. On 22 January 2008, almost three years after the initial request, the Tribunal ordered publication but accepted the Foreign Office case that the reference to Israel be redacted. The Tribunal?s published decision stated that ?a minor redaction [is] to be made to the information to be disclosed? [5], but didn?t reveal the nature of the redaction nor the Foreign Office argument for requesting the redaction. However, all this was revealed by The Guardian a few days after its publication. The Foreign Office case for redaction
The case for the redaction of the reference to Israel was set out in a witness statement to the Tribunal by Neil Wigan. At the time, he was the head of the Arab, Israel and North Africa Group in the Foreign Office and therefore responsible for UK relations with Israel. Wigan wrote: ?On page 3 of the document, I refer to the marginal references in the first paragraph to Israel. The reference to Israel is linked (by a hyphen) to a sentence which reads: ?No other country has flouted the United Nations? authority so brazenly in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction?. I interpret this note to indicate that the person who wrote it believes that Israel has flouted the United Nations authority in a manner similar to that of the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein.? (paragraph 3) He went on to point out the difficulties that this would pose for the UK?s relations with Israel: ?I believe that if these comments were released into the public domain, this would seriously damage our bilateral relations with Israel. In my view, Israel will, in seeing these comments believe that the FCO has firstly, compared the Israeli regime to that of Saddam Hussein?s Iraq, and secondly, suggested that Israel has flouted the authority of the United Nations in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Although the author of the marginal notes is unknown, I believe that the Israeli government would consider it likely that they would have been written by a senior figure. The assumption could, and I believe would, easily be made that these marginal notes represent the views of the FCO in relation to Israel.? (paragraph 5) ?Both the comparison with Saddam Hussein?s Iraq and an implied accusation of a breach of the UN?s authority by Israel are potentially very serious. In my view it is inevitable that the relations between the UK and Israel would suffer if the reference in page 3 of the Williams draft were allowed to enter the public domain.? (paragraph 6) Having worked the British Embassy in Tel Aviv prior to his present job, he had seen Israel get upset at a lot less: ?I have seen that far more minor matters than this have been of great concern to the Israeli authorities. Unfortunately there is a perception already in Israel that parts of the FCO are prejudiced against the country. These notes would therefore confirm this pre-existing suspicion and would increase the damage. During the last five years there were approximately 10 substantial incidents and 20 more minor ones relating to Israeli concerns over perceived attitudes about their regime within the British government.? (paragraph 7) There?s nothing of consequence in the Williams document itself (and later drafts of the dossier were brought into the public domain by the Hutton inquiry), so it is almost certain that the Government?s resistance to its publication was driven solely by worries about Israel?s reaction to the handwritten reference in the margin of the document. This whole incident demonstrates the extraordinarily craven attitude of the Government towards Israel. If it is running scared of Israel learning about an unconsidered comment written more than 5 years ago in the margin of an unimportant document, it would be unwise to expect a major UK policy change that would really upset Israel, such as a decision to talk to Hamas or Hezbollah. Did Israel deserve comparison with Iraq? But did Israel deserve comparison with Iraq in its pursuit of ?weapons of mass destruction? in defiance of the UN? As far as nuclear weapons are concerned, Israel didn?t violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in developing nuclear weapons ? since it refused to sign up to the Treaty in the first place. Had Iraq followed Israel?s example, it too would have been free to develop nuclear weapons without breaching any international treaty obligations. However, Iraq did sign up to the NPT (in 1968) and clearly breached its obligations under the Treaty by attempting to develop nuclear weapons in the 1980s and early 1990s. Unlike Israel, it failed in its attempt ? and it abandoned its pursuit of nuclear weapons in 1991 after its defeat in the first Gulf War. In the 1980s, when the West supported Iraq in its aggression against Iran, the West turned a blind eye to Iraq?s development of non-conventional weapons and its widespread use of chemical weapons on the battlefield against Iran. The moral outrage from the West about Iraq?s alleged possession of these weapons that was prevalent in the 1990s, and was worked up to fever pitch before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, was completely absent in those days, when Iran was on the receiving end of Iraq?s ?weapons of mass destruction?. Security Council Resolution 487 Israel has flouted, and is flouting, one Security Council resolution about its nuclear programme. This resolution was passed in reaction to the Israeli bombing of Iraq?s Osirak nuclear reactor on 7 June 1981. In response, the Security Council unanimously passed resolution 487, which ?strongly condemns the military attack by Israel in clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct? and said that ?Iraq is entitled to appropriate redress for the destruction it has suffered, responsibility for which has been acknowledged by Israel? [6]. Crucially, in paragraph 5, the Security Council called ?upon Israel urgently to place its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards?. None of Israel?s nuclear facilities were then under IAEA supervision. Nothing has changed in the interim. So, for nearly 27 years, Israel has flouted the authority of the United Nations as expressed in resolution 487. Perhaps, the senior official in the Foreign Office had this in mind when he wrote ?Israel? in the margin of the Williams document. Of course, 487 was a Chapter VI resolution with no enforcement measures to attempt to compel Israel to do what it was told. And, when Israel ignored the demand to put its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards, no pressure was put on Israel to comply: unlike Iraq no economic sanctions were applied and there were no threats of military action to enforce compliance. Joining the NPT Resolution 487 didn?t specifically demand that Israel sign up to the NPT. To do so, Israel would have had to give up its nuclear weapons. The NPT allows states that ?manufactured and exploded a nuclear weapon or other nuclear explosive device prior to 1 January 1967? to sign up to the Treaty as ?nuclear-weapon? states and retain their nuclear weapons. This is built into Article IX(3) of the Treaty itself [7]. Only, five states ? the US, the UK, France, Russia and China ? qualify for this extraordinary privilege. All other states must join as ?non-nuclear-weapon? states and undertake not to develop nuclear weapons ? and place their nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards. So, any state that possesses nuclear weapons, other than the privileged five, must give them up and join as ?non-nuclear-weapon? states. Neither Israel (nor India nor Pakistan) is going to do that, particularly since the penalty for staying outside the NPT, and remaining nuclear armed, isn?t onerous. It is limited to being unable to trade in nuclear material and equipment, a restriction that the US is trying to have lifted in the case of India (see my article The US-India nuclear agreement: A triumph for India [8]). Williams? role played down The Government has been at pains to play down the role of John Williams, and his draft, in the production of its dossier on Iraq?s ?weapons of mass destruction? in September 2002. It has been at pains to do so because Williams was a Foreign Office spin doctor and the Government?s story was that the published dossier was the work of John Scarlett, the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), the (unwarranted) implication being that, whereas a Government spin doctor might be expected to sex up a document in order to serve the Government?s purpose, as an intelligence professional, John Scarlett, would never do such a thing. The existence of the Williams draft became public knowledge through the Hutton inquiry but, unlike later drafts which were said to be the work of John Scarlett, it wasn?t published by the Hutton inquiry. In view of this, it is difficult to believe that the Foreign Office would have resisted its publication so stubbornly for three years if it hadn?t been for the reference to Israel in the margin. A Government dossier A great deal of effort has been expended in trying to discover the dramatis personae involved in the drawing up of the dossier and the precise role played by each in the drafting process. To me, none of this matters much. The Government published the dossier ? its title is Iraq?s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government and it carried a foreword in the name of the Prime Minister. So, the Government is responsible for every word in it, no matter who wrote it, be it the Prime Minister himself, or Alistair Campbell, or John Scarlett, or the humblest civil servant. The dossier was the Government?s responsibility ? and crucially it didn?t accurately reflect the intelligence about Iraq?s ?weapons of mass destruction? at the time it was published. In other words, the Government deceived Parliament and the public. That became clear a year later when the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) published its report Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction ? Intelligence and Assessments [9] on 11 September 2003. Despite being a Committee appointed by the Prime Minister and reporting to the Prime Minister, the ISC was remarkably critical of Government?s dossier (see my article The Intelligence and Security Committee Report: Dossier not justified by intelligence [10]) It is very revealing about the gaps and uncertainties in the intelligence about Iraq?s proscribed weapons, and the degree to which these gaps and uncertainties were glossed over in the dossier to paint a much more coherent and threatening picture than was justified by intelligence. Specifically, the report was critical of the way the dossier presented: The 45-minute claim ? the dossier didn?t say it referred to (unknown) battlefield weapons and, in any case, it was of no significance; The claim that Iraq continued to produce chemical and biological weapons was based on very flimsy evidence ? the intelligence services hadn?t a clue as to what agents, if any, had been produced and in what quantities, and what quantities had been put into weapons: they just thought Iraq was producing something; The almost non-existent strategic threat from Iraq: the dossier failed to point out that the most likely use of chemical and biological agents was in battlefield weapons, rather than in strategic weapons that could hit Cyprus, or even London A dossier which out of care for the intelligence evidence contained these doubts would never have been published ? because it would have greatly diminished the case for military action. According to the Government, the dossier was compiled by the Chairman of the JIC, John Scarlett, and approved by the JIC, and they were free from political pressure in doing so. Scarlett concurred with this proposition in evidence to the Hutton inquiry. The only possible conclusion is that he, and the JIC he chaired, was grossly incompetent ? since between them they made a pig?s ear of a straightforward job of taking JIC assessments and turning them into a document that the public could understand. As a result, Parliament and the public were misinformed on very serious matters relating to peace and war. For this service, the Government promoted Scarlett to be head of MI6. On Saddam Hussein pretence On 18 February 2008, The Guardian published an article by John Williams [11], in which he wrote about his part in drawing up the dossier. He said that at the time he hadn?t questioned the Government?s case for invading Iraq. One factor that convinced him was apparently the following: ?I still find it hard to understand why a dictator who had possessed and used illegal weapons should have continued pretending he still had them, up to the point when his deception cost him his job and his life.? Did the man who was the Director of Communications at the Foreign Office from 2000 to 2006 not know that, far from pretending to have forbidden weaponry, for many years Iraq stated repeatedly (and truthfully) that it had none? It appears that this profound ignorance existed in the highest echelons of the Foreign Office at the time when in March 2003 the UK joined the US in invading Iraq in order, we were told, to rid Iraq of its forbidden weaponry. Listen to this: ?Even after reading all the evidence detailed by the Iraq Survey Group, it is still hard to believe that any regime could behave in so self-destructive a manner as to pretend that it had forbidden weaponry, when in fact it had not.? [12] Those are the words of Jack Straw in a statement to the House of Commons on 12 October 2004 after the Iraq Study Group had reported the absence of forbidden weaponry in Iraq. He was Foreign Secretary in March 2003. Does the Foreign Office also believe the earth is flat? References: [1] www.fco.gov.uk/Files/kfile/wmd_jul_2002.pdf
[2] www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/21/israelandthepalestinians.iraq
[3] www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/21/israelandthepalestinians.iraq1
[4] iraqdossier.com/foi/williams
[5] www.informationtribunal.gov.uk/Documents/decisions/fco_decision_website….
[6] www.david-morrison.org.uk/scrs/1981-0487.htm
[7] www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Infcircs/Others/infcirc140.pdf
[8] www.david-morrison.org.uk/india/indian-triumph.htm
[9] www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/upload/assets/
www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/publications/reports/isc/iwmdia.pdf
[10] www.david-morrison.org.uk/iraq/isc-report.htm
[11] www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/18/foreignpolicy.iraq
[12] www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmhansrd/vo041012/debtext/410…
