The (long-overdue) vote to decriminalise abortion

How rare it is these days to tune into the news and find that something good has happened, not by mistake or luck, but because a large group of people from different political stripes decided to work together to make some positive changes. How incredible to see that it didn’t pass with a razor-thin majority, but was instead an incredibly popular move. 

It’s also fair to say we shouldn’t take it for granted: as America has seen recently, and keeps discovering, there are many people in the west who still think of female bodily autonomy as something to frown upon. Give them an inch and they’ll remove all your rights; assume some things are settled and needn’t be relitigated constantly, and you’ll find yourself back at square one.

The world is, in short, not exactly a thrilling place to be at the moment, if you’re a liberal or a progressive. Many of our victories from the past few decades are being questioned, and much of what we assumed was now a given is being put back on the table. That the vote happened in the same week that Adriana Smith gave birth in Georgia, on the other side of the Atlantic, makes it feel that much more poignant.

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The 31-year-old has been braindead for several months, due to some blood clots in her brain, but draconian rules on abortion in her state meant that neither doctors nor her relatives were allowed to take her off life support. As her mother told the press, “I’m not saying we would have chosen to terminate her pregnancy. But I’m saying we should have had a choice”. What Smith’s family had to go through is a tragedy, and a much needed reminder that women are so often the first to suffer when reactionaries are in power.

Britain is currently enjoying a spell in which the right is in opposition instead, but that doesn’t mean that it can rest on its laurels. Already, conservative voices in Parliament and in the press are condemning Monday’s vote, and arguing both for it to be overturned, and for abortion rights to be curtailed. Nigel Farage, to quote but one villain on the scene, is arguing that 24 weeks is too clement a cut-off, and the time limit should be shorter.

The Telegraph, meanwhile, has published multiple articles about it, attacking it from every angle they could think of. In arguably the most imaginative of them all, it quoted prominent gender critical feminist Kathleen Stock, who apparently believes that the only people wanting to decriminalise abortion have “been slowly boiled in a vat of hyperliberal feminism and progressive technocracy like overheating frogs, until they can’t tell which way is up”. Catchy!

Of course, it is tempting to want to either make fun of those sore losers, or worry about what they may do next. Instead, it may be worth taking a moment to breathe, focus, and celebrate the fact that something good has happened. It may not have been the full reversal of Victorian laws originally proposed by fellow MP Stella Creasy, but Antoniazzi’s amendment will help countless vulnerable women. One can only hope that it will also force overstretched police forces to investigate the crimes that actually matter.

In short: the war hasn’t been won yet, and there will be more battles in the future, but this week is a good week. Well, in the grand scheme of things, it clearly isn’t: the whole world seems to be on fire. This merely was a sliver of light, among a vast universe of doom and gloom. Doesn’t that mean we should raise a glass while we can?