Those of you who were at National Conference 2005 will be aware that we had a fierce debate about abortion. Ignoring the fact that it was supposed to be a sexual health debate, there was a lot of confusion about the phrase “defend and extend a woman’s right to choose”.

Although we won the debate on the conference floor, I thought I would do a brief reminder about what ‘defend and extend’ actually means.

Defend a woman’s right to choose

Put simply, this means opposing any cuts to the legal time limits on abortion, campaigning to ensure that the health service doesn’t take any budget cuts to its services on sexual health, fertility and abortion. Although women aren’t the sole decision makers over their own bodies at the moment, we have to defend what rights we’ve already won against the anti-choice movements who want to repeal the 1967 Abortion Act altogether.

Extend a woman’s right to choose

This phrase could be interpreted many ways, but those of you who read the policy put to National Conference will be aware that it didn’t say what its opponents said it did. The policy didn’t call for the current legal time limit to be lifted. What it did do was talk about extending women’s reproductive rights so that women, not doctors, can make the decisions about their own bodies.

This means doing simple, obvious things such as getting rid of the law that says that a woman has to get permission from two doctors before she can have an abortion. It means changing the law so that women can have an abortion not because (if you’ll forgive me for quoting the law at you) “(i) it is necessary to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman; or (ii) the continuance of the pregnancy would carry risk to the life of the pregnant woman greater than having an abortion; or (iii) there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped” but because she (for whatever reason) doesn’t wish to continue the pregnancy.

Extending a woman’s right to choose means just that - allowing and empowering women to be the sole decision makers over their own bodies, from decent and compulsory sex and relationships education in our schools, to well-funded, confidential sexual health services, to a law that works for women facing an unwanted or unplanned pregnancy - regardless of her age.

Jo Salmon
Proud to be your pro-choice NUS National Women’s Officer
jo.salmon@nus.org.uk

The Blogs on this site represent the individual views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or practices of the National Union of Students.

All links in blogs will open in a new browser window.

The permanent URL for this specific blog entry is: http://www.officeronline.co.uk/blogs/josalmon/270895.aspx