Abortion and the press
Mary Kenny
The abortion issue will not go away. In America, where abortion was legalised in 1973, the conflict has tended to intensify as time goes by, partly because the advance in medical knowledge and practice keeps introducing new controversies into the Whole question. Test-tube babies, artificial insemination by donor, the drive to improve the rate of infant survival, the constant advances in the technology of sustaining life in seriously premature babies — all these Shifts in social and medical frontiers impinge upon the ethical questions surrounding abortion. As in America, the fight over abortion will continue to be passionately enjoined in Britain. The British are broadly split on a 56 Per cent-44 per cent basis*: just over half the population are in favour of ,abortion being legally available 'for all who want it'; just under half entertain reservations and misgivings about abortion. 29 per cent of the population is completely against the termination of pregnancy. More recent studies done by Gallup indicate that a substantial majority of people are against late abortion, as is the House of Commons.
However, although nearly half the British People are against abortion, it is an interesting phenomenon that in the national press, this section of the population is dramatically unrepresented. Almost all the national newspapers are broadly pro-abortion; an influential section of it is rigidly proabortion, holding attitudes of unrelenting orthodoxy in the matter. The Guardian, the Observer, the Sunday Times and the Mirror papers are all unequivocally pro-abortion. The Observer, for instance, ran three stories on the abortion question in one issue recentlY (6 May 1979): all three were quite plainly committed to the pro-abortion side °f the argument. There was no attempt Made at all to provide balance. The same is true of the Sunday Times which has never, under.its present administration, published an article written by a staff member which I Would consider fair to the anti-abortion Sid e. `:When I see that the Sunday Times is s,till silent,' says one 'pro-life' activist, 'Iit that the Holy Spirit is at work in Fleet She treet. ' In the absence of the Sunday Times, _ Guardian has become 'the abortion enewsPa. per'; both sides read it avidly for its .xtensive coverage of the abortion question, It is, of course, pro-abortion, as one would expect, though in my judgment it givi_ves balanced space to readers' letters of often provide the most vivid witness at the distress, pain., loss and sense of sepration that follows abortion.
* New Society 22 March 1979. When 'Ten years of the Abortion Act' were being celebrated in 1977, not a single national media voice was raised to express misgivings, and Conservative papers like the Daily Express and the Daily Mail ran strong pieces on the women's pages saying that a splendid right had been established in the working of this legislation. The Times, despite its Roman Catholic editor, is rather detached on the question; as is the Daily Telegraph.
The Telegraph will run a leader saying how tragic abortion is and how it can only ever be accepted as a last resort; but it will not run features about the reality of what is happening. That, one feels, would be somehow bad taste, The Financial Times being almost wholly read by men is completely impartial, though abortion is as much about money as anything else in the economy. The down-market tabloids apd the popular Sundays will run sensational stories about abortion whenever they can get them; shock-horror-baby-in-the-incinerator always makes a good story, but somehow that should never interfere with A Woman's Right to Choose. The Sunday People was the first paper to get on to the Wanstead baby case — the case, one among many, in which an aborted baby lived to cry in the hospital ward — yet when John Corrie's reform Bill came up on 13 July last, the People backed down from supporting a change in the law.
The Sunday Express is on the other hand firmly anti-abortion, as is the Sunday Telegraph. But again, the tradition is that it is not something which looms as a major issue for them; it does not seem to be as important a story for the Sunday Telegraph and the Sunday Express as it obviously is for the Observer, the Sunday Times and the Guardian. From the point of view of the 'pro-life' campaigner, it seems like the old Yeatsiaii maxim that the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
But why is the press so pro-abortion? Some of the reasons are obvious. It is London-based, it is run by a class of people — journalists — who are inclined to morally liberal views anyhow. People are still partly reacting against the bad old days of the 'back-street abortionist' and the rusty knitting needle. And of course, abortion is the kind of issue which provokes such painfully deep emotions that once you take a stand on it, you tend to try and shut your mind to any misgivings.
Moreover, the anti-abortion lobby is given to fanaticism. They do get terribly worked up — 'exercised' as Dr Wendy Savage, the pro-abortionist doctor said on Radio Four on 13 July. 'They are very exercised about these late abortions,' she commented, 'and it's only a matter of about 200 babies a year.' That is exactly why the anti-abortion lobby are 'exercised'. They imagine people coming on the radio and saying 'I don't know what all this fuss about capital punishment is about, it's only a matter of about 200 mistakes a year'. If you regard unborn babies as people, you get upset to think of them being left to die. And of course the fact that the press is almost completely closed to the anti-abortion voice makes the 'pro-life' activists even more paranoid.
And their feelings of paranoia are certainly justified. From my own experience as a fairly seasoned journalist in Fleet Street, I know it to be true that the pro-abortion stance is the prevailing orthodoxy; and God help anyone who goes against a prevailing orthodoxy. I once asked a man who specialised in the works of G.K. Chesterton why Chesterton and Belloc had been so antiSemitic in the Thirties. 'Because most people were vaguely anti-Semitic then. People made jokes in their drawing-rooms about Jews and everyone laughed. It was the way people were.' That is a prevailing orthodoxy; people just take it for granted.
The question, perhaps, that one should be asking is how healthy a society is in which a prevailing orthodoxy dominates the means of communication. Because even if one does accept the thesis that abortion is about A Woman's Right To Choose, you cannot possibly make a choice in any real. sense of the word unless you are equipped with the full facts. And the facts about abortion are not fairly given. Abortion is not half as medically simple as it is made out; there are long-term questions about subsequent fertility, depressions and hormonal dislocation. Hundreds of thousands of young women are having abortions without any proper counselling, without knowing the facts, and perhaps coming to regret it all later. A Woman's Right to Choose, if it means anything, should mean a woman's right to full freedom of information.
Will it change? Well, the anti-abortionist who thinks that the Holy Spirit is keeping the Sunday Times shut believes that gradually the Lord is working a change of heart in the very psyches of men and women. I am more cynical. I believe that some smart media guy is going to come along and see that there is simply a big hole in the market. Someone, somewhere is going to realise that there is an enormous question-mark, still, over this whole matter, and that people's feelings are deeply engaged and painfully conflicted about it. But you don't get to find out about feelings by being rigidly doctrinaire about anything. For that, you have to open your mind, question old assumptions. And then there is a new generation coming up, less concerned about rights for which they have not had to fight, and more concerned with ethical ideals, of which they feel deprived. For the most consoling thing of all about fashion is that it is subject to change.
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