I have written before about the tedious obsession of SW1 and Fleet Street with America’s abortion debate. In a country where abortion has been legal and widely available since 1967, and where more than 200,000 abortions are performed a year, a political class raised on The West Wing and The Handmaid’s Tale have treated the US Supreme Court’s overturning of the Roe V Wade ruling as if it is the end of days.
Needless to say, in my habitually unenthusiastic fashion, I do not agree. Neither did the ever-excellent Dominic Sandbrook in a fantastic article for UnHerd yesterday – which essentially says what I aimed to say two months ago in a much more eloquent fashion – and nor did the erstwhile son of Prue Leith, fan of Edmund Burke, and MP for Devizes, Danny Kruger.
In a Commons debate yesterday on the ruling that was tedious, pointless, and unedifying even by today’s turgid standards of Parliamentary discourse, Kruger attracted attention to himself by stating that he doesn’t agree women have ‘an absolute right to bodily autonomy’. This did not go down well amongst those MPs who had arrived expecting an afternoon of uninterrupted liberal virtue-signalling.
As MPs tried to speak over him, Kruger added that he couldn’t ‘understand why we are lecturing the United States’ over the Court’s decision to hand the ‘political question’ of abortion rights back to democratic decision-makers. This drew a clear contrast with Labour MPs such as Dame Diana Johnson, who claimed ‘American far-right groups’ were ‘organising’ to roll back the 1967 Abortion Act this side of the pond.
A fantasy, of course. I have called for us to imitate our Yankee cousins in having a debate over abortion in this country, since I believe a case should be made for reducing the number of weeks when a woman (oh, sorry – ‘person with a womb’) can access one. That we do not have a conversation about the ever-growing number of terminated pregnancies in this country strikes me as faintly grotesque.
So I am naturally in concord with Kruger in my support for the Court reversing the 1973 decision to treat abortion as a constitutional right – as if it was on the mind of Washington, Madison, Jefferson et al in 1787 – and return it to the states. Voters and legislators should decide controversial moral matters, not judges.
But Kruger perhaps went further than many would dare to in actually enunciating his views on abortion to the House and shocking many MPs in the process. The very fact that many found it a surprise to even hear one of their number suggest that a woman’s right to abortion may be curbed by the involvement of an unborn child shows just how timid public debate on this subject has become.
You may agree with Kruger’s views. You may think him a misogynistic reactionary. Or you might think he did not go far enough. Either way, it is surely a good thing for debate, for legislation, and for government that MPs like Kruger are occasionally able to pop the pretensions of the liberal bubble that holds sway over so much of our public life.
Kruger has long been a defender of unpopular causes. Any man who was willing to go out and bat for Dominic Cummings over the Barnard Castle affair will not be afraid of a few uppity female MPs. That is especially so if they are angry at him for committing a sin one does not see our politicians do enough: to have contentious opinions, and to express them.