Tide of history is turning against abortion

There must have been more than one weary sigh when people heard that the Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) was launching a campaign to have abortion made "safe and legal in Ireland." Will abortion never go away? Well, no. Abortion as a hotly debated issue has not gone away in Britain, or the United States, so why should it go away here?

There are some places where abortion is not greatly debated, but they tend to be such as the countries of the former eastern bloc, where abortion is a method of contraception.

I remember speaking to one Irish woman politician, a person who could not be characterised as conservative, who had spent a lot of time working with women in these countries as they emerged into democracy.

She told me, in tones of horror, of women with "uteruses scraped thin as paper from 30 or 40 abortions." Perhaps we should be thankful that we have not reached the stage where we no longer debate abortion. It is, after all, a matter of life and death.

However, I think pro-choice advocates are going to have to do better than "safe and legal in Ireland" if they want to rouse support for abortion in Ireland.

It is perilously close to Bill Clinton's favourite abortion slogan "safe, legal and rare". Some American pro-choice advocates feel that, once he admitted that abortion should be rare, he undermined abortion as a choice.

Actually, Clinton's slogan was not what undermined the pro-choice movement. It was the fact that he was so patently insincere about reducing abortion rates, including twice refusing to ban partial-birth abortion.

This late-term abortion procedure involves deliberately manoeuvring a baby into the breech position and delivering him or her, still alive, as far as the shoulders. What follows is too gruesome to describe in a family newspaper.

Bush eventually banned the procedure.

However, it is typical of American pro-choice people that they feel that a slogan was so important. As the Democrats reel from their election defeats, there has been a lot of anxious huddling going on as to how debates should be "framed" .

Abortion is one of the key issues that alienated the middle-ground voter. George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics and currently the Democrats' favourite guru, has been drafted in to help them "re-frame" abortion.

He started off by speaking sturdy common sense. No wonder "choice" as a concept is a turn-off, he said, when "choice" comes from the language of consumerism, while "life" comes from the language of morality.

Good man, George. "Choice" is the language of shopping. This was confirmed for me when recently one of the catchphrases in a clothing catalogue was "a woman's right to shoes."

However, Lakoff then drove right off the road into the ditch. He advised the activists to reclaim the "life" issue by blaming Republicans for high US infant-mortality rates and mercury pollution that can cause birth defects. "Basically what I'm saying is that conservatives are killing babies," he said.

Er, George, if your response to losing voters on the abortion issue is to blame conservatives for killing babies, is that not a little giveaway that the issue of abortion might be about killing babies, too?

Of course, a foetus is not a baby, just as a teenager is not a middle-aged woman.

However, trying to argue that there is no continuity between middle-aged women and teenagers, and that teenagers do not automatically have the right to life because they are not middle-aged women, would get you locked away rather rapidly.

Yet pro-choice people have to skate over the essential continuity between foetus, baby, toddler, teenager and OAP if they are to sell the idea that abortion is not really about deciding whether someone should have just weeks of life or decades. Of course, women are not fooled.

Time and time again, research has shown that the rhetoric of choice leaves women unmoved. Many of them say that they chose abortion, not because of ideology, but because they felt they had no other choice.

A truly pro-choice movement would be working to ensure that a woman never had to feel that she had no better choice than to terminate the life of her own child.

As well as listening to Lakoff, the Democrats have also consulted religious leaders, among them Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine, a left-wing Christian who is anti-abortion, anti-war and pro-social justice. His advice was blunt. Forget about framing, he said. Change your message.

For starters, introduce concrete proposals aimed at reducing the number of abortions by half. Ensure adequate income support for poor and working women. Combat teen pregnancy and sexual abuse.

Forget about slogans, he said, and embrace a radically different message. Not much chance of that.

At the moment, pro-choice advocates in the US are working flat out to prevent Bush nominee, John Roberts, from becoming a member of the Supreme Court.

Rather annoyingly for them, this has generated enormous publicity for an organisation which advocates an approach very similar to Wallis's. Jane Sullivan Roberts, wife of the nominee, is a prominent member of Feminists For Life (FFL), which opposes abortion from a feminist perspective.

Practically every major news outlet in the country has featured material on FFL, the vast majority of it approving, because it offers something new, a way beyond the impasse of pro-choice/pro-life.

Instead of slogans like "safe and legal", it offers "women deserve better".

That is a message coming from many quarters, some of them unlikely. For example, the UN Committee for Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) regularly raps the Irish Government over the knuckles for not legalising abortion. In an astonishing twist, at CEDAW's last Irish hearing, the Hungarian representative Krisztina Morvai declared that one thing that is always lost in the abortion debate is that it is bad for women and "is a terribly damaging thing psychologically, spiritually and physically".

Ultimately, the pro-choice message fails to convince, not just because it embraces consumerist rhetoric, but because it does not want to face the desperation and sadness involved in most decisions to abort.

The tide of history is turning against abortion, because it damages women and ends the lives of the next generation. Safe and legal? "Shattering and lousy choice" is closer to reality.