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You can’t have missed it, the posters littered campus, people were on the Vanbrugh stalls urging us to come and support one side or the other and the members of pro-life and pro-choice found that their pigeon holes were full to bursting with information on the forth coming debate. The evening promised to be both entertaining and informative, though as I entered V/045 I was most definitely worried that the atmosphere might be more one of acrimony than intellectual debate. The room filled with some one hundred people and it was obvious from the start that the audience was fairly evenly split on the issue. At 7.30pm the chair called the house to order and the debate began.
The exact issue before us was that “This House believes that there should be the right to abortion” and the speakers who had been invited certainly knew their stuff. For the proposition were two speakers from NUS, Sarah Proffit the NUSs’ women with children rep and Sally Copley the women’s officer from Oxford University, and for the opposition two speakers from SPUC (Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child), Steve and Steph Marshall. Summed up the arguments for both sides went something like this …
The argument on the Pro-Choice side seemed to hinge around a number of key points, the main one being, obviously enough, the right of a woman to control her own body and decide what happens to it. Both the speakers linked equality for women with the abortion issue, saying that you could not believe in women’s rights and the rights of the foetus. Better sex education was called for as well as better child care and a change in societies attitudes which they saw as all to often condemning single mothers, rape victims and the victims of abuse, SPUC were heavily criticised for not campaigning on any of these issues. The example of Denmark was raised because it has one of the most liberal abortion laws in Europe and yet one of the lowest rates of abortion, a fact that was put down to the countries excellent sex education programme and wide spread availability of contraception. The issue of backstreet abortions was also raised with the speakers suggesting that if abortion were to be made illegal in this country then there would be a return to this and all the inherent dangers to the woman’s health that this would involve.
The second speaker concentrated on some of the issues raised by the first SPUC speaker (whose speech she described as a “moral tirade”) and the dispute arose as to whether the foetus can feel pain during an abortion. She mentioned the fact that between 35 and 40 percent of women will have had an abortion by the time that they are 40 and that 92 percent of these pregnancies will occur out of wedlock. One of the most powerful arguments, I felt, that they came out with was their very last one, made in the summing up speech, where the speaker read out a list of things, such as better sex education, which would be available in an ideal world. Her very last words were that in an ideal world every child would be loved, raising the question of whether bringing an unloved and uncared for child into the world is not a greater evil still.
The speakers from Choose-Life naturally concentrated on the sanctity of human life and called abortion the “silent holocaust” (a link that was taken still further by the second speaker). In the first speech an actual abortion was described for us (something which I personally found quite shocking) and a model of a foetus at twenty weeks was produced. At eighteen days (we were told) the heart beats, at seven weeks it begins to move, at ten weeks there is brain cell consciousness and at twenty four weeks the child is viable outside the womb, all these facts were undoubtedly designed to make us think of the foetus as a separate entity from its mother with all the rights of any other human being. Abortion was still further described as an attack by the powerful on the weakest and most vulnerable members of society, it was “uncivilised, barbaric and a denial of natural justice”.
The second Choose-Life speaker was probably the most controversial of the night and picked up the link previously made by the first speaker with the Nazis. She said that when you start to abort foetus’s because they are handicapped then you start to make dangerous judgements and set worrying precedents. She warned the audience not to make the assumption that the handicapped are any less human or viable and reminded us of the Nazis forced euthanasia policy against the handicapped. She produced further pieces of evidence (though these were hotly disputed by both the proposition and several speakers from the floor) which suggested that an abortion can increase the chances of having breast cancer and that promiscuity can lead to an increase chance of cervical cancer.
The floor debate was passionate and the points were fairly evenly balanced between the two sides. Speakers on the pro-abortion side disputed some of the facts mentioned by the last speaker with one person saying that she found the pro-life speakers offensive. We were told that one woman every three minutes dies from having an illegal abortion and a visual coat hanger prop was produced. Women, we were also told, should not be treated as the sum of their reproductive systems. On the pro-life side speakers mentioned the fact that life is a pre-requisite to choice and that of the 180,000 abortions carried out every year in this country only two were carried out in order to save the life of the mother. At the end of the floor debate either side summed up their arguments and a vote was taken, the motion was defeated by 60 votes to 43.
Personally I thought that it was not the best debate that I have ever heard with, in my opinion, both sides going too far. I thought that the proposition speaker who had her hair dyed red with little devils horns at the front was being deliberately provocative and at least one person I know found it offensive. The charge leveled against the pro-life speakers of producing a “moral tirade” was probably justified, the second pro-life speaker verged more on preaching than debating and the link made with the Nazis was fine to a point but was on the whole pushed too far. Positions were far too intrenched and passions far to high to make this a mind changing debate (from my quick glances around the room at voting time I think there were very few people who swapped sides) but at least tempers did not boil over to the extent that I had feared.
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Last modified: 25th November 2005