The War Against Women Continues

The Polemicist

by Michael House

KING’S SUTTON England—(Weekly Hubris)—9/12/11—Demented Christians, whose interpretation of “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” is “thou shalt force thy female neighbor to be an incubator against her will,” never give up trying to subvert Roe v. Wade. In a previous column, I listed some of the wheezes dreamed up by the anti-choice bigots which they have managed to push thought state legislatures to make abortion more difficult in the US.

They rationalize their behavior by peddling the myth that a fetus is a human life rather than part of a woman’s body. Men who will never go though the agonies of childbirth, and women who have given birth and see no reason why others should be let off what they have gone through, conspire to control women through their biological functions.

Keeping women in their place has always been a major religious imperative.

In the UK, we have a relatively civilized abortion law. But the anti-choice brigade has recently dreamed up a new trick to put obstacles in the way of women wanting terminations. The protagonists are Nadine Dorries, a Conservative MP, a sort of Sarah Palin with brains, and Frank Field, a renegade Labour MP who has got religion.

They are trying to insert into a parliamentary bill a clause that forces women to seek counseling from an organization other than that which will carry out the operation. They are the public face of the cleverly-named “Right To Know” campaign. (Sadly, the Right To Know does not extend to the right to know how much funding for the campaign comes from extremist evangelical groups in the US.)

The idea is that abortion clinics (which are charities) profit from every abortion they carry out, and that there is a “conflict of interest” when the clinics counsel women seeking an abortion.

So, under the guise of providing women with impartial information, the clause seeks to slow down the process and put obstacles in the way of a termination. It is easy to guess the kind of organizations that would be delighted to offer their services as “impartial” counselors.

Perhaps this principle should be applied to all surgical procedures.

You are in agony with toothache. Your dentist advises you to have a rotten tooth extracted. But he/she will benefit financially from the extraction. So, the law forces you to go to another dentist, who will charge you to advise you as to whether the extraction is really necessary or whether there is a viable alternative. The same would apply to any other operation, thus bringing the health services to a standstill.

But why not?

If the doctors who work in abortion clinics cannot be trusted to give impartial advice because of some notional financial conflict of interest, why trust surgeons and dentists if they, or the organizations for which they work, will profit from a procedure?

The government, alive to the risk of alienating women voters, is opposing the clause, which is unlikely to be passed here.

But the bigots never give up.

Dominic Strauss-Khan is an individual for whom the term “dirty old man” could have been coined personally. The ex-head of the International Monetary Fund and one-time future President of France, has an appalling reputation for hitting on women. The world did not know this until recently, because the French press applies the rule of omerta to the sexual, extra-curricular activities of politicians.

He was accused of raping a chamber-maid in his hotel suite. He agrees that sexual activity took place, but that it was consensual.

Apparently, when Strauss-Khan emerged naked from the bathroom, the 32 year-old maid was so turned on by his 62-year old pot-bellied physique that she could not resist having sex with him.

Her injuries and his conduct afterwards notwithstanding, the New York prosecutors concluded that the case should not go to trial because the maid’s credibility was compromised. She had lied to the police and had dubious associates in her background.

The message to would-be rapists is clear: Find a woman with a credibility problem, with a skeleton in her closet, and you can rape her without fear of prosecution.

Why not let a jury decide?