Whose Choice Anyway

abortion. This is not so. In fact abortion, whether free-market or back-street, has become the easy 'solution' to many forms of discrimination against women.

If a woman is poor and pregnant the state does not seek to provide her with economic emancipation - instead, its agents encourage abortion.29 If a prematurely born child is disabled the mother is judged anti-social if she refuses to destroy her child.

When we are violated by male violence the state does not impose suitable penalties on the aggressor; it has not amended sexual offences legislation to make marital rape a crime; there is no curfew of men. The state prefers to say that the only destructive consequence of rape or incest is pregnancy. It is not.

Abortion cannot solve the problems of violence against women because it is part of the problem of violence against women.

Abortion legislation has not taken our bodies outside state control; it has simply placed our bodies, and our children's lives, at the disposal of a eugenic medical profession. We contend that abortion is a violent, destructive procedure which is about the quality control of reproduction and the evaluation of women as genetic packages.

Abortionism has transformed women and children into objects. This is nowhere better illustrated than in Linda Byrd-Francke's book, The Ambivalence of Abortion.

She writes about an American abortion team whose working slogan is: 'You rape them, we scrape them, no fetus can beat us.'30 Feminism is about attaining justice and consequently has nothing to do with killing. Women have not, and we cannot, kill our way to liberation. The very notion is anathema to justice.

The most recent opportunity to fight the subversiveness of abortion was offered by the Alton Bill. Feminists Opposed to Eugenic practices supported this Bill to restrict legal abortion to eighteen weeks gestation because we think it would have been an effective challenge to the status quo. This Bill - if it had been enacted would have saved the lives of thousands of children and helped women avoid the traumas the state pretends do not exist.

We supported the Alton Bill - and will support any other similar measure - because we wish to see the practice of abortion undermined. We believe this Bill was the first to challenge the eugenicists - those people who think that disabled people have no right to live - the same people who use the eugenic clause of the Abortion Act to justify late abortions. This clause is supposed to be a benevolent rationale for destroying people because they are different from the Western model of 'perfect'