UK: Knowledge is power, so it’s time to talk honestly about abortion

Shona Craven: Knowledge is power, so it's time to talk honestly about abortion

28th September, 2017

YOU’VE only read the headline, but your hackles might already be up. What knowledge, exactly? What power? And how many paragraphs before the big reveal? For or against, “foetus” or “baby”, right or wrong. I don’t blame you. When people start talking about the reality of abortion, I get suspicious too.

It took a show at last month’s Edinburgh Fringe to make me realise how little I actually knew about this subject. Sure, like any good feminist I knew the basics of the Abortion Act 1967, passed 50 years ago next month. I knew about the pickets, the posters, the religious extremists lobbying to retain laws branded cruel and degrading by the UN. But I remained largely ignorant when it came to the messy, bloody, psychological and emotional reality of this procedure.

Continued at source: http://www.thenational.scot/comment/15565150.Shona_Craven__Access_to_safe_abortion_must_be_accepted_as_a_human_right__no_ifs_or_buts/