You can’t stop abortions – taking away a woman’s choice is just barbaric

If women are to take full responsibility for the fact of a pregnancy, then women must also be allowed to take full charge of what happens next, writes Katy Brand

Protesters in the city of Edinburg, Texas (AP)

You can’t stop abortions. You can only stop safe abortions. And for as long as people continue to have sex with each other, there will continue to be unwanted pregnancies.

For as long as men continue to rape women, there will continue to be unwanted pregnancies. For as long as men commit incest against their female relatives, there will continue to be unwanted pregnancies. To believe otherwise is to deny any sense of the reality we humans live in every day.

For centuries, women have been dealing with pregnancies that are either dangerous, unplanned, unwanted or unaffordable by having some form of termination. How safe, dignified, affordable and available that termination is is down to us as a society. If you want to stop all abortions, you will have to stop all sex except that which occurs in a mutually supportive loving environment where all babies are wanted and a blessing. Raising a baby on your own is hard, especially without a lot of money. Perhaps if the state demands that women go it alone regardless of circumstance, there should be some fairly hefty funding available. I’ll wait.

If you want to ban all safe abortions, and apply legal consequences to seeking one, there must also be the equivalent punitive action against any man who fathers a baby and doesn’t stick around to see it through. In fact it would be best to ban all casual sex, now I come to think of it, because accidents can and do happen, even when all parties are being "responsible". I am married with children. I have a good job. I have a stable life. If I got pregnant now, I would seek a termination because it would mean that my contraception had failed me.

I couldn’t possibly afford another baby now. It would be too much to handle for both myself and those around me. I would terminate the pregnancy out of love for my family, to protect the living – those already here. Unplanned pregnancy and termination within marriage happens to a lot of couples, more than you might think. I thank my lucky stars that I live in a country where this would be allowed.

If I lived in Texas right now, where the state legislature has shocked many people by bringing in an anti-choice law so stringent they may as well have banned termination of a pregnancy outright, such a course of action would be impossible. The new law states that once a doctor can detect cardiac activity in a foetus, which occurs around six weeks, an abortion is completely illegal, under any circumstance – with no exception included for rape and incest.

As most women become pregnant in the 14 days following intercourse, but often will not realise they are pregnant until their next period a month later, by which time it would be too late under this law, it is effectively a ban. They have added insult to injury by asking members of the public to report anyone they suspect of seeking an abortion, and criminalising anyone who helps someone seeking an abortion, including healthcare workers.

A last-minute appeal by abortion care providers in Texas to the US Supreme Court was rejected. President Joe Biden has reacted by saying that he will use every federal power at his command to oppose it, citing the historic Roe v Wade case which has defined American abortion law for nearly five decades. He called this new ban "unconstitutional".

This is reassuring, but it remains to be seen how much he can really do, and in any case, it is already too late for some. I read only yesterday of a 13-year-old girl who became pregnant after being raped by her grandfather. She travelled alone across Texas to seek an abortion, as she was unable to tell anyone at home for fear of further abuse. That grim journey is bad enough as it is. She would now also be a criminal – and anyone who helped would be too.

Nobody gets an abortion casually or lightly – that is a myth put about by people who should know better. If we are not going to bring the full force of the law down on men who get women pregnant and then vanish, then we cannot call ourselves civilised for not providing safe and clean services to those women left to deal with it themselves as best they can.

If women are to take full responsibility for the fact of a pregnancy, then women must also be allowed to take full charge of what happens next, and this sometimes includes not having the baby at all. Anything less is barbaric.