Katy Clark

Pro-choice MP Katy Clark on gearing up for next week's vote on the existing abortion time limit of 24 weeks:

Remember this, says pro-choice MP Katy Clark: the abortion debate we're having should not be about the 24-week time limit for the legal right for abortion. The issue is purely and simply one of a woman's right to choose - whether the state should make it lawful for a woman to terminate a pregnancy. The End, in many ways.

Except that it's not the end, of course: there are only a few days left before MPs take their first vote on proposals to amend the Abortion Act via the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, and Clark is certainly one that feels that a woman's right to choose a legal abortion is 'under a very real threat.'

She is less concerned about the junk science being witlessly peddled by the likes of Queen Halfwit Nadine Dorries than she is about those MPs who sit in the middle, do not hold hardline views, and may still be persuaded to vote in unhelpful ways. That's where the danger probably lies, as attendees of this year's earlier Abortion Rights' lobbies are only too aware.

As Clark rightly pointed out at one of those lobbies, parliament is made up largely of men. Those men need to know that women won't tolerate negative equity on abortion rights. 'We must build such a campaign [that] the men who are going to vote on whether we have the right to make a choice have no choice but to accept that we need real rights…’ After all, as Clark says now: 'we [already] know which way pro-lifers will vote.'

She isn't especially minded to say how Labour MPs are likely to vote, though, which doesn't inspire confidence, altogether: 'It's a free vote... Labour MPs have traditionally been pro-choice,' is as far as Clark will go on that topic. I push her a bit further on it. She says that she has spoke to 'dozens of MPs' on the subject, but that she will not speculate on Labour's general mood or inclination on the topic of time limit. 'I won't go down that path,' she says firmly. This isn't the best thing I've heard, to be honest - is this just clever political reticence, or does it mean that Gordon Brown is still permitting his limping troops to dither?

This story is also posted at liberalconspiracy.org

Why the anti-abortion lobby must be stopped from amending abortion law and reducing the upper time limit for abortion via the government's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.

A little preamble: There is nothing in this world that winds yours truly up like political and/or religious opportunists banging on about restricting access to legal abortion, and foetus rights, and 40 years of legal abortion delivering Britain of two generations of conscience-free sluts, etc.

The truth is that pro-lifers drive me BANANAS. I have frothed about them all over the internet and most social events I've attended.

Alas, the pro-life contingent and their political backers witter on, undaunted by the fact that the great majority of the British public supports a woman's right to choose.

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About 300 women (and a small cluster of blokes) turned up at the Houses of Parliament last week for an Abortion Rights meeting about the threat posed to the 1967 Abortion Act by proposed - and opportunistic - anti-abortion amendments to the government's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. Pro-lifers are particularly keen to lower the present 24-week gestational limit for abortion.

The bill - as you doubtless have guessed - has absolutely nothing to do with abortion law (it's about reforming the regulation of human embryology as the sciences of fertilisation and embryology move on at pace). Sadly, complete irrelevance ain't putting the god-squad off.

One Baroness Masham has already attempted to perpetrate an amendment to reduce access to abortion for women who discover their babies have severe disabilities. Her notion was to force women in that situation to see their pregnancies to term - to give birth, as renowned pro-choice doctor Wendy Savage said at the abortion rights meeting - to children they know are doomed.

MPs might be crazy, but they're not all stupid, and the brighter ones know very well how women instinctively respond to the thought of being trapped by an unwanted pregnancy.