http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/13/abortion-choice-counselling

Excuse me while I scream for a moment. For one thing, the horrible woman doesn’t even know what “anti-choice” means in this context. If someone wants counselling when they choose to have an abortion, then they should have free and easy access to it, but only if they want it. Nobody should be required to have it. Not every abortion is a tragedy. Not every abortion is a traumatic decision. Some are, let’s be honest about this, but painting us as poor fragile individuals that can’t make a decision without help (from people whose only agenda is to talk you out of it, if Dorries has her way), and who are always terribly traumatised by the decision to abort, and who are all terribly vulnerable and sad is misogynistic and a fine example of what Dorries thinks of women. Because whilst I understand that some men have wombs too, you know damned well that Dorries doesn’t accept that at all, and as far as she’s concerned it’s just women involved here.

And she hates women. She has no faith in us, no trust, she paints us in subtle ways as the problem in society. See “abstinence sex-ed for girls (not boys)” and “if girls were taught abstinence, there would be less sex abuse” for reference. And this all ties back to the way women have been viewed in society, and the way many of us have been taught to think of ourselves, and how important it is for us to bring up the next generation to understand that this view is outdated and wrong, in the hope that they won’t have to keep having these arguments as often as we still have to. But for that to happen, we are going to need to have these arguments a lot.

I have gone off on a tangent.
Dorries thinks that it is bad that someone needing counselling regarding abortion is most likely to be referred to organisations that provide abortion services. I don’t know, I always think it’s best to get counselling from people that actually know what they’re talking about, and any pro-life organisation is only going to talk to you about how you shouldn’t abort because it’s wrong. And possibly the great lie about how abortion gives you cancer, do these people all write for the Mail or something? Surely people who actually know about any real possible health risks and who deal with people seeking abortion on a daily basis are the best people to talk to if you have questions? If you needed counselling for depression, say, would you go to someone who doesn’t believe it exists, and thinks you should just bootstrap?

And then there’s her great adoption argument. Without going into all the possible problems with adoption, let’s just take a look at the figures as presented by Dorries. In her speech to Parliament on this, she said that only 400 children were put up for adoption last year, and that this was terrible because think of all the people wanting to adopt. I questioned the veracity of this statement, as I do everything that she says, so I looked it up.
If I assume that by “children” she meant “babies under 1”, then yes, there were around 400 put up for adoption in the last year that there were full statistics for (2009-2010, as the figures are not calculated Jan-Dec, but April-March, and her statement was made before the end of the 2010-2011 reporting period).
So, 400 babies available for adoption.
70 were actually adopted. That means 330 children under the age of 1 left in care.
In total, 3,200 children were adopted in 2010. So clearly there were more than 400 put up for adoption, because otherwise where have all these extra children come from, but Dorries doesn’t care about facts, she just wants us to feel sorry for these thousands of families that can’t have children and there are no babies to adopt because of evil abortions. The thousands of families that didn’t adopt the 330 babies left in care.

It’s very simple, really. If you don’t agree with abortion, don’t have one. Nobody is making you have one. We’re not going to harass you in the street for not having an abortion, we’re not going to chase you down the road yelling “baby keeper!”, we’re not going to protest outside the maternity ward, we’re not going to demand that you live your life solely according to our morals and beliefs.
How about you try returning the favour?

Caitlin Moran has written a book. It’s called How to be a Woman, and is about feminism, as you’d probably expect. It even looks like there might be some valid points in her book, but I’m loath to give her any of my money because of her complete failure to understand the root cause of a lot of the issues, as displayed by this quote.

“I don’t think that women being seen as inferior is a prejudice based on male hatred of women. When you look at history” – achievements in arts, science, exploration, for instance – “it’s a prejudice based on simple fact.”

Is anyone else seeing the glaring problem with this? Why is it that women didn’t match the achievements of men historically? Could it possibly have anything to do with the fact that most women weren’t educated because to do so was seen as pointless? Our poor female brains would overheat, after all. Learning how to manage a household was about as much as we could cope with. 

Thomas More, who was by no means a paragon of virtue but is a good example in this case, held that the education of his daughters was as important as the education of his son. His contemporaries thought he was wasting his time, because women just weren’t intelligent and educating them was pointless, but Margaret Roper (his eldest daughter) was celebrated during her lifetime for her letters and her translation of Erasmus. For a woman in the 1500’s, this was a pretty big thing. And why did she achieve this? Because her father did not believe that women were incapable of being scholars, or that they were inferior in intelligence and as a result she had opportunities that other women didn’t.

So men think women are inferior because they haven’t, historically, achieved as much as men, but women didn’t achieve as much as men because they were considered to be inferior and therefore not given the same opportunities to achieve things and oh god, where does it stop?

In short, Ms Moran. Go away and do some reading.