Abortion is a crime? (and four other stories)

Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism to end your week.

This week in London has been hot, hot, hot. I love the heat. I love the sun. I know that it’s partly end-of-the-world-run-and-hide-climate-related weather, but I love the feel of hot sun on my skin. I love the bright mornings. I love the particular colour of the evening sun in our living room at this time of year. I love not having to wear a coat.

But enough of this (it’s so hot I think my brain has melted?)

To the reads…

1) British mother-of-three sentenced to prison over abortion

In the UK, a 44-year-old mother of three has been sentenced to 28 months in prison for using abortion pills to end her pregnancy. She was more than 30 weeks pregnant at the time, and got the pills through the pills-by-post scheme introduced during the pandemic. The legal limit in this country is 24 weeks. The case provoked shock at the reminder that abortion is criminalised in this country. There was outrage, too, as various organisations had urged the judge not to give her a custodial sentence.

The woman was prosecuted under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act. Here is an explanation from the Guardian on how the law works:

In England, Wales and Scotland, abortion is outlawed under the Offences against the Person Act 1861, and this is the legislation under which the woman was prosecuted. Crucially, while the 1967 Abortion Act outlines circumstances in which it can be allowed – and gives what BPAS calls “broad discretion” on how it is interpreted – it does not overturn the earlier legislation, so any abortion outside its terms carries a potential life sentence.

The 1967 law allows an abortion before 24 weeks if the pregnancy would risk harming the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman, and potentially later if it risks her life, could cause her “grave permanent injury” or if there is a “substantial risk” the foetus would be “seriously handicapped”.

While the woman in this week’s case terminated her pregnancy later than the legal limit, says [Katherine] O’Brien (associated director of the Birth, Pregnancy and Advisory Service, BPAS, through which she got the pills), “she could have been prosecuted at any gestation” if she had acted outside the terms of the 1967 act. Prior to the pandemic-related introduction of pills by post (last year made permanent in England after a vote by MPs), “we were aware that every week, every month, women were trying to buy pills online. Any woman who bought the pills online could be sentenced to up to life imprisonment under the law as well.”

And here is a statement from the charity, Birthrights:

Birthrights stand with the British Pregnancy and Advisory Service (BPAS) and more than 30 other organisations including the Royal College of Midwives to call for the reform of the Abortion Act 1967 to prevent any more women and birthing people from facing prosecution for seeking to end their own pregnancies. We are united in our belief that no one should be forced to continue their pregnancy against their will and that there should be no chance of imprisonment if they choose to do so. 

In another reminder of the fact that any woman in the UK could be prosecuted over an abortion, a Freedom of Information request has reportedly revealed that British Transport Police recorded an abortion-related offence after the death by suicide of a pregnant woman with bipolar disorder in 2018. “Charges could not be brought because the suspect was ‘too ill’,” National World reports.

2) A rare interview with Annie Ernaux

My day job colleague Ellen Peirson-Hagger met the 82-year-old Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux, and the write-up is really worth your time. Ernaux is such a fascinating character. On Ellen’s recommendation, I am reading Happening, Ernaux’s astounding book on her procurement of an illegal abortion when she was in her twenties. Here is a snippet from the interview:

The remarkable power of Happening – which comes to just 80 pages in the 2019 Fitzcarraldo edition – was made all the more imperative upon the June 2022 overturning of Roe vs Wade, the ruling establishing a constitutional right to an abortion in the US. Ernaux’s first reaction to the news was “anger”, she said, “that these rights had been taken away from women, and so suddenly. Another reaction I had was more ethnological. It made me reflect on the historical subjugation of women by men. I asked myself why, and I’ve come to the conclusion that men are uncomfortable with women’s power to create life. Yes, men provide the sperm, but women choose whether to carry life or not. Men have a problem with that.”

Happening has made me think a lot about the experience of reading writing where women are central, not excluded, subjects, not objects.

3) New study shows paternity leave shifts gender norms

In 2007, Spain introduced two weeks of paid paternity leave, up from two days. The uptake has reportedly been as high as 60 per cent. On her Substack,

Alice Evans

highlights a fascinating new study that looked at kids in Spain born in 2007 and 2006, the year before paternity leave was extended. The authors of this study found that:

The introduction of paternity leave led to children displaying significantly more gender-egalitarian views….Paternal eligibility leads to an 18 percentage-point (a 28%) increase in the share of children stating that it is “socially appropriate” for a woman with young children to work, and a 16 percentage-point (a 36%) increase in the share stating that it is “socially appropriate” for a father to work less than full time to take care of a child. We thus find that the introduction of paternity leave affected children’s norms regarding both mothers and fathers to a similar extent.

There’s more in the full paper here.

4) To be young, conservative, and female

The Washington Post’s Kara Voght reports from a modern Maga-woman conference in Grapevine, Texas:

What does it mean to be young, female and conservative in America, 2023?

At the leadership summit, there were answers. It means posing for selfies in a mirror made to look like a magazine cover with a headline that reads, “Birth control is so last year.” It means having it all — but having kids and a husband before trying to get the rest. It means buying tampons and beauty products and other items from companies that market themselves as pro-Christian or anti-“woke.” It means embracing a particular kind of American nostalgia, one where women’s liberation means being free from the complexities of modern gender politics.

5) “A pervasive problem worldwide”

The United Nations Development Programme has released its second Gender Social Norms Index — and it ain’t pretty. It finds that “gender bias is a pervasive problem worldwide”, and describes the past decade as one of “stagnation” on gender biases. As per their press release:

Half of people worldwide still believe men make better political leaders than women, and more than 40 percent believe men make better business executives than women. A staggering 25 percent of people believe it is justified for a man to beat his wife, according to the new GSNI report.

But there is a bit of good news:

An increase in the share of people with no bias in any indicator was evident in 27 of the 38 countries surveyed.

Thank you for reading, see you next week.