Possibly one manifestation of a wider mindset
For reasons I have been thinking about legal/illegal abortion over the last few days.
And the fact that making abortion illegal doesn't make it vanish.
It either makes it go elsewhere (O HAI, Ireland/Northern Ireland)* or it makes it go underground and dangerous and exploitative*.
But presumably people who want to do that do so so that they can feel pure and righteous?
And this made me think about people who privilege some imagined ideal pure state (in the past or the future) (or, indeed, non-existent, yet, persons) over the here and now and dealing with what you've got and actual people and their problems and suffering.
*At a level that's not about actual illegality but does seem to me to be about enduring stigma issues, encountered the fact that most abortions in England (not Scotland) are carried out not within NHS hospitals but via commissioning services by NGOs, mostly bpas (British Pregnancy Advisory Services) and Marie Stopes International, and this is a problem because it means lack of opportunities for training and getting experience within NHS.
**Heard somebody banging on about 'the abortion industry', as if this was some vast profit-grubbing enterprise: well, the time when there was a vast profit-grubbing enterprise around abortion was when it was illegal, when certain gynaecologists and psychiatrists in Harley Street and environs were making a nice little packet cash in hand and off the books doing more-or-less, sort-of-legal under existing case-law abortions, but very discreetly so as not to be investigated (and indeed, even before the judgement in the Aleck Bourne case in 1938 opened up that leeway, evidence suggests.). See Paul Ferris, The Nameless, (1966). And while I daresay a lot of backstreet abortionists were pretty much Vera Drake, not all of them were. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2677989.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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