A View From Across The Pond On The Rights of a Woman To Always Be Able To Choose!

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

As I sit in my Kailyard I wonder often about the future.

I have five daughters. Each one of them has the right to decide what they put in their bodies and what comes out of them. It is a topic we have never discussed. It may be a topic we never do discuss. I would hope that should they need help they turn to the person best able to give them that help. If it is not me, then so be it.

I did not raise clones after all.

I hope that the life they lead does not have to face the same challenges that others before them have faced. In short, I hope we have moved on from 1965 when I was born. In that year, in the UK it was illegal to have an abortion. It was illegal to terminate a life in a woman’s body. It was also illegal to be gay.

Ironically it was not illegal to be a lesbian. The story goes that when Queen Victoria was asked to outlaw gay sex and lesbian sex, she refused to outlaw women having same sex relationships because she felt it was an absurd idea that did not exist…

Over here the news that Texas now outlaws abortion with the so called Heartbeat Bill was depressing. I accept that in the UK we have little to criticize as Northern Ireland are just getting to the 21st Century with the imposition of a bill on abortion as they too had a similar condemnation of the practice.

But there is something which concerns me greatly.

It really does worry me.

The right are very good at exploiting weakness and here’s the thing.

As we are all becoming increasingly hostile to each other over the issues of gender are we letting the hard-won freedoms for women slip away? Are we obsessing over important detail – but details nonetheless – whilst the fundamentals are finding themselves shifted into an arena from which we swept them decades ago?

I only ask because I am worried.

With the arguments between who is the more T focused and aware than any others raging on Twitter and other platforms the right have found that diving underneath and getting to our hearts is how to do things. It could be argued that the real heartbeat debate is the one where we had made our case for the right to live and the right to understand holistically the body and not fixate on a part of that body. The right have won and won well.

I would love to commend them on their victory as you would any opponent who fair and square has managed to beat you hands down and in a real contest but I cannot.

As the debate has been lost so too shall be countless lives of young women forced to contemplate giving birth to an abuser’s baby, to a rapist’s child to an unwanted child that shall be unable to achieve true love. Why? Because there is a righteous man sitting somewhere enabled by righteous followers – men and women – who believe that this is the God given right thing to do. Many of them shall not be in the field of caring for people or having to deal with the unbelievably difficult decision facing young women in giving up their pregnancies. They shall not face the medics who have told them time and again that the heartbeat is a misleading indication upon which to base law. They shall not face the public until an election.

And then?

Trump lost – will they? Or will party lines come back in to play?

And until then shall we hear the cries of anguish from Texas whilst women suffer. Shall we hear them over our infighting or at last do we all have a cause that ought to unite us as something for which we should all be fighting?

And hey, I am a democrat, conservative Texas has the right to make their own decisions. Perhaps, we need to engage to convince, to debate to change and to love to make right a massive wrong?

A view from the new Kailyard or, how you look over there, from over here…

(kailyard n. a genre of sentimental Scottish literature turned into effective invective comment from one Donald worth reading…)

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