You got your wish, sisters... and it has killed off compassion

August 31 2007 05:09 AM

A woman's right to choose! How well I remember the profundity of the debate all those years ago, when the Catholic Church maintained that all abortion was always wrong, at all times and in all circumstances, yes, even for raped girls.

Meanwhile, some "women's rights activists" insisted that a woman had a right to terminate a pregnancy no matter how far gone it was. And when I, a tie-dyed, doe-eyed, wishy-washy, indeterminate, unprincipled, well-meaning, liberal placater of the feminist agenda stood up and suggested that, hold on, you can't terminate a pregnancy that is eight months gone, I was told that, as a man, I did not even have a right to an opinion on the matter.

Well, in the intervening years, we have seen the female sex split neatly down the middle. On the one side there is the newly confident WAG-force, who proudly go shopping and like spending their HAB's money, and on the other, there are the ideological feminists who remain in power, still bitterly determining the agenda for a society which has long grown beyond the simplicities of the old gender debate.

Calamitous damage is being done to teenage boys. And we know, we absolutely know, that if teenage girls were committing suicide at the rate that it is occurring amongst young men, and if girls were falling on the educational Somme that is happening to boys, every single feminist quango, from the Council for the Status of Women, through to the Department of Wimmin's Studies in UCD, would be foaming through their well-honed teeth.

But the dead and the educationally doomed of this gender war have testicles, not ovaries, and their sufferings are therefore ignored.

And nor are they alone. Those who have been writing about the institutional injustices done to men in court, school and tribunal over the past 10 years have been routinely dismissed or mocked. John Waters, a pioneer in this field, is, as a matter of course, called a "misogynist", not least by sisterly men, no doubt because such cheap name-calling makes them popular with the girls.

Yet those right-on males are no better than those witless Fianna Fail county councillors during the GUBU days, bawling their approval for Charlie Haughey. They both belong to a similar culture of obeisance before the prevailing ethos.

Have we not learnt that there are no easy solutions? That those arguments which are won by the sneer, the put-down, the easy, crowd-pleasing generalisation, will come back to haunt those who have made and won by them, or at least their children? In abortion-loving, contraceptive-addicted Britain, people of indigenous stock are ceasing to reproduce in numbers sufficient for replacement. Asians, Muslims in particular, have twice the birth rate. Do the sums.

But it is not Asians in Europe that I want to speak about when considering the issue of unconsidered consequences of what are now considered to be 'inalienable rights'. It is Asians in Asia. If a woman's right to choose is inalienable, and is also universal, then surely Indian women have an inalienable right to choose whether or not to go to term. Yes? Or no?

An article from Christina Toomey in 'The Sunday Times' last weekend on the issue of abortion of female-only foetuses begs that very question.

In the course of a -- naturally -- widely condemnatory piece, the culture of dowries is blamed; the West (of course) is blamed, unscrupulous doctors are blamed, and so too (naturally) are western medical companies. But the most-telling quote came from an activist against the "murder" (his words, which I also believe it to be) of female infants in the womb, who spoke of the reluctance to speak out on the issue, "for fear of being labelled anti-abortionist."

Here, by God, is the ultimate equal-opportunities principle at its most depraved. Provided you kill male foetuses in the same proportion as female foetuses, all is well with the world's abortion laws. But if you kill female foetuses more often than male foetuses, then this is a crime. And lurking somewhere within this murderous conundrum is our old friend, "a woman's right to choose".

And for all Christina Toomey's attempts to suggest that the engine for slaughtering females before they are born is solely male-driven, societies are never so simple. The catastrophic Indian dowry-traditions, which are illegal, and which can spell financial ruin for a bride's family, are guarded as ruthlessly by women on the groom's side as by the men.

In other words, today's submission to feminist demands does not necessarily increase the sum of female happiness tomorrow. "A woman's right to chose" in free, democratic India has led to mothers there aborting perhaps a million she-Indians in a year. And unlike the sisters who probably would regard the slaughter of (the admittedly hypothetical) uterine males with utter equanimity, I see the butchery of such tiny girls, whose bodies are mature enough to identify their genitals, only as murder.

The Chinese, living where they do, between the brutal Gobi desert, the unforgiving flood plains of the Yangtze, and the abominable Himalayas, have many bitter curses, but one of the worst of them is, "May you live to see your wishes come true." Well, girls, you got your demand: almost universal abortion on demand. Pleased with the outcome?