Can we be complacent over our liberal abortion laws?

We might be susceptible in this country to American influences, more than somewhat, and even suffer from cultural cringe, particularly where light entertainment or language is concerned. But when it comes to the serious stuff, say, gun laws, national health services, or abortion rights, we are instantly reminded of how far removed we are in mindset from the United States.

The ongoing conflict over birth control has divided Americans, as do the other issues above, but it is a debate we would simply not be having here.

In fact, when the news was leaked earlier this week of the US Supreme Court’s draft decision to overturn Roe vs Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalised women’s right to abortion, the initial reaction among Britons was most likely shock.

That we have come this far in the fight for equality to still be confronted with antediluvian attitudes that would remove women’s dominion over their own bodies is dismaying, even if it’s happening more than 5,000 miles away.

It is true that the feminist battles of yesterday are being fought again in the field of gender politics in the UK too, and women often find themselves going backwards rather than forwards — especially when leading politicians in almost all parties are suddenly uncomfortable defending their rights.

But the abortion row engulfing the States is the product of something else, a grassroots “pro-life” lobby that is fundamentally against female liberation and seeks to punish women for their choices.

If conservative justices in the Supreme Court — a majority of whom now represent the religious right thanks to Donald Trump’s manipulation of the appointments process — do carry out their threat to undo nearly 50 years of federal freedom for women, it will be open season on female autonomy.

Decisions will be up to individual states, some 13 of which already have “trigger laws” to ban abortion immediately. As many as 26 states are expected to enact partial or total bans, and several do not make exceptions for pregnancies that are the result of rape or incest.

Polls show a majority of Americans support abortion rights, but there remains a sizeable Christian and conservative core that will never surrender its campaign to push women back into the Dark Ages. 

Worryingly, this minority seems to be growing. Gallup found that 49 per cent of Americans now identify as pro-choice and 47 per cent as pro-life, compared with 56 per cent and 33 per cent in 1995, respectively, as reported by Forbes last week.

Unlike in the UK, this group has electoral heft in a country where politicians are openly God-fearing and where religious faith can make or break a candidate’s prospects, whether they are on the Left or Right.

In Britain, politicians don’t do God, as Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair’s communications chief, famously said when his more-religious-than-most boss tried to discuss his Christian beliefs in public.

MPs with a holy bent, such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, a practising Catholic who has stated his opposition to abortion (as well as same-sex marriage), are seen as anomalies, even within the right-wing of the Tory Party. Their views are not necessarily regarded as threatening because they are unlikely to gain wider currency in the Parliament.

The last time abortion raised temperatures in the Commons was more than 40 years ago, in 1980, when John Corrie, a Scottish Conservative MP, attempted to amend David Steel’s 1967 law legalising abortion.

Veteran lobby correspondents recall the scenes of mayhem, with pro-abortion protesters clashing with police and the Commons galleries packed with Catholic nuns backing the bill.

Corrie was defeated, but the memory of those hostilities is believed to have influenced Donald Dewar, the “father of devolution”, when abortion rights were reserved to Westminster in the 1998 Scotland Act, thus keeping potential skirmishes away from Holyrood (though the issue was subsequently devolved through the Scotland Act 2016).

As with devolution, abortion legislation became the settled will of the British people — though Northern Ireland was only brought into the fold in 2019 — and there has been no appetite to turn back the clock.

Britons, religious extremists aside, largely respect women’s access to safe abortion services, a premise enshrined as a human right. We are suspicious of any meddling, on dubious moral grounds, in what we rightly treat as a personal matter.

And we look at America, on this subject, with pity, as a throwback to an era we have left behind. But can we afford to be complacent?

The erosion of women’s rights to single-sex spaces — in hospitals, refuges, prisons, changing rooms — and even in our own sports competitions, defines the sexual politics of today. We didn’t let this happen, but it goes on anyway, driven by transgender activists, a lobby much more niche than American religious evangelicals.

We might like to think ours is a more progressive society than the States’, in which certain liberties are sacrosanct. But perhaps the current culture wars are a wake-up call, a reminder that no rights, however treasured, can be taken for granted.