It must, surely, be close to the last battle. In this moment of newly-sensitised concern about male violence towards women, tackling a crucial area of female experience takes considerable arrogance. Plus, if you are a political representative, conviction which you can voice with sincerity. Or considerable political agility.
How about instead leaving the morality of abortion to those who decide they need one, to those who would otherwise be forced to bear a child? It’s against your beliefs? You do not have to have an abortion. This is a question of legalising a service that you will never be forced to have. Those who avail of it pay their taxes as you do, as churches and clerics do. But removing choice from women and girls goes deep into attitudes that some don’t even know they have. It goes beyond political identity, Irishness/Britishness.
You prefer to ban choice and force through that pregnancy, or push someone to make that traditional miserable journey to England to protect your conscience? You cannot see that as double standards?
Treating women’s decisions about their bodies as a matter of reproductive health, not someone else’s idea of ‘morality’, is something the DUP cannot do. Nor the entire squad of Sinn Féin MLAs, the nine SDLP MLAs who voted with the DUP, the seven Ulster Unionists, the two Alliance MLAs who voted one with the DUP and one to abstain, the two independents.
A dozen MLAs respected women’s right to choose and voted against Paul Givan’s Severe Fatal Impairment Bill. There should be interesting conversations now inside all the parties.
Easier though, if you’re a politician, not to factor in the possibility that the British government in the shape of Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Brandon Lewis might very soon order enactment of a law Westminster passed because Stormont won’t. Frequently (or at least occasionally) independent commentators have had little or nothing to say on the latest episode. Easier to talk about interference with a devolved legislature than to recognise reproductive rights; too delicate, that, too controversial.
It’s very stale now, unionist protest at British betrayal, refusal to listen to them, insufficient respect for their sensitivities.
And running alongside this particular ‘outrage’ is a continuing ‘fury’ at Brexit’s predictable yet to some apparently incomprehensible inconveniences about trading back and forth across the Irish Sea.
Could some of the wrath be fake? If Lewis goes through with what ‘Westminster sources’ fed out last week about his intentions, the Stormont Executive won’t have to stand by Robin Swann as his department ‘commissions services.’ Conflicted souls in the assembly who voted as Michelle O’Neill and Arlene Foster directed can tell constituency meetings, their distressed spouses and parents, the clerics who phone for serious conversations that draw on biblical quotations, priests who denounce them, that Westminster did it. Over their blameless heads.
Brandon Lewis can say he’s merely doing at last what the UK has been told it must, to comply with international human rights laws and its own supreme court. For Lewis and the Boris Johnson government to so offend already ‘furious’ unionists at the moment is slightly odd, no doubt about it, but also some indication of how Britain truly regards them.
By the time of the next assembly elections will most voters remember all this? And that this last ditch attempt to turn back progress is, almost certainly, play-acting by some of those involved?
Until it emerged at the weekend, thanks to a Freedom of Information request by Daniel Holder of the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), as reported by Amanda Ferguson, nobody outside the executive knew that last June the DUP, with Ulster Unionist support, vetoed discussion on providing services. The other parties in the executive didn’t tell.
What mattered was to keep ‘power-sharing’ in existence. Even if power-sharing has been fake from first to last.
