Pro-Choice McCarthyism

In France, it’s now a criminal offence to oppose abortion. Oh, they deny that it goes that far: ‘"Being hostile to abortion is an opinion protected by the civil liberties in France,” Laurence Rossignol, minister of families, children, and women’s rights, told Rue89. “But creating websites that have all official appearances to actually give biased information designed to deter, guilt, traumatize is not acceptable.”’

In fact, ever since 1993 ‘“the offense of obstruction to abortion”’ has been subject to criminal penalties, including imprisonment, in that country. (https://world.wng.org/2016/10/france_plans_ban_on_pro_life_websites)

This is reminiscent of the US government’s stopping short of actually outlawing the Communist Party during the Cold War. Wrapping itself in the tattered remnants of the Constitution, it merely arrested and convicted party leaders in 1949 for violating the Alien Registration Act of 1940, which made it illegal ‘to advocate, abet, or teach the desirability of overthrowing the government’ (see, among other sources, http://academic.mu.edu/meissnerd/mccarthyism).

So we’re told that, in France, civil liberties are preserved, since ‘being hostile’ to abortion – having an opinion – is theoretically allowed; it’s only persuasion – expressing that opinion – that is not, on the ground that it is based on ‘biased information’.

But what political cause, including the pro-choice movement, does not seek to persuade; is not accused of ‘bias’ by the opposition; and indeed doesn’t actually represent ‘bias’? That’s what political controversy is about. When anti-abortionist Marie Phillippe insists that ‘her organization’s information does not force women to choose one way or another but simply allows them to make a “truly free” and informed decision’, she is fighting on her enemy’s ground. She is biased, on behalf of something she believes. And so are pro-abortionists. And so they both should be. But only one side can use the law to enforce its viewpoint and suppress the other side’s.

Clear lies about facts are one thing, and can be addressed by laws against slander and libel; opinion and persuasion are another. Minister Rossignol is not dealing with the former, but with the latter, when he claims that anti-abortionists ‘“take advantage of the complexity of situations and emotions to get [women] to renounce abortion”’.

The law in France is an extreme culmination of decades of informal suppression of democratic debate on abortion by the centre-left in the western world. Pro-abortionists have used censorship, ostracism, no-platforming, expulsions, and name-calling to make it clear that, unless you’re prepared to find a political home with the religious right – for example by condemning homosexuality, sex education in schools, single mothers, or the decline of ‘paternal authority’ – you’d better shut up about any doubts you might have about any aspect of abortion. The issue has been described by various people as a ‘litmus test’ for the left (if you’re for it) and for the right (if you’re against it).

But, you may ask, if I believe in free speech, why should I object to these informal methods of suppression? Sticks and stones, after all. But a hard neck is no use against a bookshop that refuses to carry one issue of a magazine it usually carries because it includes an anti-abortion article; or a radical newspaper that brags that it will not print anti-abortion letters; or the closing down, in France, of anti-abortion websites; or criminalization. These methods go beyond name-calling.

In arguing against them, my purpose isn’t to explain my exact policy on abortion, although I will say that I don’t like the practice. (And no, I don’t like Northern Ireland’s jailing of women, or any punishment of women, for having abortions either.) There are two reasons why that isn’t my purpose.

Firstly, it’s no use arguing with pro-choice people. Their response to any argument does not take the form: ‘Your argument is flawed for this, that or the other reason’, but simply: ‘It’s wrong to oppose abortion; only misogynists, fascists, and fundamentalist bigots do so’. Or they’ll repeat their two main slogans, about control-over-one’s-body and woman’s-right-to-choose, and if you then present a deconstruction of either, again the response is ‘It’s wrong to oppose abortion’. For a movement that loathes religion, it’s surprising how aptly religious language can be applied to it. Abortion is a sacred article of faith, apostasy from which, or blasphemy against which, warrants excommunication.

Secondly and more importantly, my main concern is not with abortion itself, but with free speech and the free thought that depends on it, due to the inner censorship that inevitably follows the external kind. In France, the fine line between ‘being hostile to’ and trying to ‘deter’ abortion means that people are likely to refrain from expressing any anti-abortion view even when it might not actually incur prosecution. While there’s apparently no law against a man trying to persuade his pregnant partner, or a mother her pregnant daughter, to have an abortion, if either should try to persuade her not to, that person would have to worry about going to prison.

Without free speech no social ills can be cured or goods achieved. The struggle for it transcends its political context. While McCarthyism and its even more severe counterpart, Stalinism, were strategies in an international power struggle, obligatory pro-abortionism operates on the cultural level, and up to now, here in Britain at least, it has just been an overwhelmingly popular cause on the centre-left. But now that it has the criminal law on its side in one important western country, it draws closer to McCarthyism.

I daresay that some people here would like to follow France’s example. Over 3000 people have signed a petition to ban anti-abortion demonstrations outside Glasgow’s new hospital. (http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/14213529.Call_for_block_on_anti_abortion_demos_at_Glasgow_s_new_hospital/) Although ‘Campaign director Rose Docherty, from Bishopbriggs, said … "We will be there every day quietly praying, we won’t approach people, there won’t be graphic images. If someone wants to come and talk to us that’s fine”’, opponents say that ‘the group's presence could cause distress to women "at a time of emotional distress and vulnerability" and staff accessing the hospital’.

This is a question of public order and limits of protest which has been considered not in terms of its actual nature and effects, but of the opinions that the protest in question represents. Whatever merits the case might have in legal terms, the protests have been attacked on ideological grounds: the protesters are anti-abortionists and must be neutralized and silenced wherever they appear.

This ideological motive is not recognized as such, because the pro-choice movement has on its side the government which legalized abortion, and the prestigious BPAS. There the ideology is invisible, for what is powerful is never recognized as ideological. Yet it’s just as biased as the weaker protest movement, and while bias, as I’ve argued above, is fine, unacknowledged bias enforced by the power of theoretically fair and objective law is not.  

  

When the ideology of the powerful is taken for granted and equated with social virtue, while all who disagree are shunned, we have a version of McCarthyism. The most frightening thing about that phenomenon was the way it stopped people from thinking, turning them into Daleks who were programmed to react with horror and aggression towards anyone deemed ‘subversive’, ‘pink’, or a ‘fellow-traveller’, or even anyone who attacked McCarthyism itself. Obligatory pro-abortionism is less sweeping in its effects than McCarthyism. But in its suppression of dissent and debate, replacing social observation and analysis with sloganizing and demonization, it’s the HUAC writ small.

And in its rejection of a woman’s right to choose her opinions on this vital issue, it’s a blight on any supposedly liberal society. In its place, can we not start to have a real discussion?