Polly Toynbee | abortion-news.info

Doctors say a return to pre-Covid rules, where women had to get a clinic appointment, will leave thousands waiting too long

Polly Toynbee
Thu 10 Feb 2022

How long ago the Abortion Act of 1967 seems now, and yet the struggle for a woman’s right to control her own body never ends. Time and again this basic principle comes under attack from rightwing and religious lobbies forever seeking to limit and reverse it.

Now they are at it yet again. As the prime minister dashes to roll back all coronavirus legislation a month early to mollify his rebels, the health secretary, Sajid Javid, and his junior minister, Maggie Throup, will decide whether to maintain the abortion laws that were introduced as part of emergency Covid laws, allowing women to request earlier and easier terminations at home. If Javid and Throup instead return to the old abortion laws that were in place before Covid, where women had to have an in-person clinic visit in order to get an abortion, thousands of women will have to chase scarce clinical appointments, forcing many to wait beyond the time limit for medical abortions.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/10/abortions-tories-culture-war-doctors-covid-women

Northern Ireland’s abortion laws are an abomination. Westminster must step in
The government must heed a select committee report – and end the brutal, primitivist treatment of women in the region

Polly Toynbee
Thu 25 Apr 2019

They were all there: Northern Ireland’s DUP and Sinn Féin leaders, side by side with the Good Friday agreement’s guarantors, the British and Irish prime ministers. All were gathered at the funeral of the journalist Lyra McKee. “Why in God’s name,” asked Fr Martin Magill, had it taken her death to bring them together? But his exasperated tone implied he didn’t expect a political miracle.

Visit this deadlocked region, the UK’s poorest, and it feels transformed from the dark days of the troubles. But its political paralysis is partly a product of Westminster’s longstanding neglect of the region, at least until the DUP unexpectedly came to play a pivotal role in the Brexit psychodrama. The red hand of Ulster holds in its palm the fate of May’s Brexit deal, though the DUP doesn’t represent the far more progressive and forward-looking remain-voting country. The party may yet become Boris Johnson’s kingmakers through its refusal to back Theresa May’s deal.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/25/northern-ireland-abortion-laws-westminster-dup-women