On: Abortion, the best piece in Uniqlo - maybe the ENTIRE HIGH STREET - this week, and: does being thin make me right wing?

I don't call it "Broad" for no reason

It’s weird to feel pride about being British - a bit out-of-body, like, being a fan of a football team which never wins anything, except that, bizarrely, it just did - but today? I feel it! I do.

I’m writing the morning after MPs voted to decriminalise abortion in the UK. 379 voted in favour (137, against) of an amendment to the crime and policing bill. This vote takes abortion out of a legal framework, away from questions of criminality, which means women can no longer be arrested, investigated or prosecuted because they’ve had one.

While the rest of the world goes further and further to shite on the abortion rights front: Britain - a historically, and cheerfully, pro-abortion rights sort of a place - moves forward. Hence: my pride.

Not everyone shares this pride, mind; but maybe that’s because they’ve got the wrong end of the stick re, what this change in law actually means. IE contrary to SubStack colleague Dan Wootton’s Worst Nightmares™: this vote does not make abortion legal up until the point of birth. The Abortion Act of 1967 requires two doctors to approve the termination of a pregnancy, which can be performed until 24 weeks (although in truly exceptional circumstances, EG significant risk to the life of the mother, a pregnancy might be terminated later)… And this still applies. A medic who performs an abortion after 24 weeks, and not because of exceptional circumstances, can be prosecuted. A woman who ends her pregnancy after 24 weeks, and/ or without the approval of two doctors, however, cannot.

Six women have been charged with ending pregnancies outside of those legal specifications in recent years. These cases hinged on a mixture of honest mistake, absolute tragedy, wanton desperation and utter devastation, and were either thrown out because of the pity of all that, or, in the case of Carla Foster, sentenced in 2023 to 28 months in prison for ending a pregnancy between 32 and 34 weeks with illegally obtained abortion pills, a prison term reduced and suspended one month after she began it, on the grounds that it was: “a case that calls for compassion, not punishment”.

Quite.

All of which suggests that Dan Wootton’s Worst Nightmare™ re how women will be now gleefully and constantly terminating pregnancies on a whim and however late they feel like doing it, are completely unfounded. Oh, he must be so relieved!

Except he probably isn’t, because he probably doesn’t actually give a monkey’s. I mean, of course, I don’t know for sure. I don’t know Dan Wootton. And I have enormous respect for people who genuinely struggle with the morality of abortion. I know the arguments against it - the genuine ones, the heartfelt ones - and I absolutely understand them. None of us can say with any certainty when life begins; all we can ever do is work through - balance out - our own, entirely individual, red lines on it, our own religious beliefs, our own experiences, our own psychologies, and take it from there. Me? I think it just has to be up to the individual woman. Always always always. Because as much as I respect another person’s horror of the idea of ending a pregnancy - I would also ask that they do not try and enforce that feeling of horror onto the body, and life, of anyone else, someone who, for example, doesn’t share it.

What I do not respect is people - usually, let’s face it, of a male disposition - who don’t have any honestly held views on the subject AT ALL. They’d barely even think about it, actually, if it weren’t for the fact they know they can weaponise it for social media clout, or political power. These men have never, and will never, know what it means to finally, sickeningly, give in to the nagging suspicion which has lurked in the back of your mind for days/ weeks now; then: buy the kit, pee on the stick, shake and quiver and shake some more while you wait for it to develop, your heart in your mouth and everything crossed and prayers to a God in which you do not believe, begging and begging and BEGGING for your body not to have betrayed you, not to have hijacked you, not this time, not now…!

Here’s what I say to those bad-faith men:

“Darling. I want you to promise me you will NEVER have an abortion. I think it would be awful for you, given your strong views. Deeply traumatising and endlessly emotionally painful. But do fuck off thinking you can tell women whether they can have one, or not. You can’t.“

While I’m on the subject, here’s the best thing in Uniqlo - possibly the best thing on the whole of the high street - this week It’s