The law of unintended consequences

When I awoke the other morning and switched on my radio, the airwaves were alive with the sound of furious, transgressed women. Nobody else got a look in. What have we done to get their goat this time, I wondered, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. Nothing, it transpired. It was all in the USA, where a Supreme Court decision removed the constitutional right for women to have abortions and left it to the 50 states to decide instead.

This last part was largely overlooked, incidentally: in essence the women were howling about decentralised democracy and what an awful thing it is. Democracy is sexist. Democracy is especially sexist in those southern states which might impose (or have already imposed) restrictions on terminations. These states – Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, Texas, Georgia and Arkansas – all have a majority of women voters, so if this really was a crime against women (or, as the dimbo BBC correspondent referred to them, ‘pregnant people’), then women could very easily gain redress at the ballot box.

The debate, such as it was, focused entirely upon the civil rights of women being taken away by redneck God-bothering male fascists. On not a single occasion did I hear – or read – anything about the other ethics of this decision. Not once was the rectitude of abortion questioned. It was taken as a given. It was seen entirely through the prism of women’s rights: nothing else mattered. You might have expected a religious leader to throw in his or her two pennorth, given that all of the major denominations are opposed to abortion in both principle and practice – but they stayed the hell out of the way, keeping their powder dry for the next time someone tries to solve our migrant crisis, I suppose.