The MP Nadine Dorries at her home in mid-Bedfordshire Photo: JOHN ROBERTSON
8:11PM BST 02 Sep 2011
185 Comments Nadine Dorries and Frank Field, the Tory MP for mid-Bedfordshire and the Labour MP for Birkenhead, plan to move an amendment to the Government’s health reform Bill. This would ensure that pregnant women who seek a termination can have access to counselling and advice that is “independent” of the providers of the procedure itself. Predictably, all hell has broken loose. I put “independent” in quotation marks, deliberately, because it is that word that is contentious, and that word – and not abortion – I want to talk about.
Termination is a topic I normally avoid. Mainly, I refrain from stating an opinion because I’m a very happily civilly-partnered gay man, meaning that there are no circumstances in which I could be directly involved in a decision concerning a pregnancy. Wittgenstein’s quote seems apt: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (Would that some people with strong views on my own life obeyed the same dictum.) It is not that I don’t have a strong opinion, or cannot make up my mind. But any theoretical argument I could advance to support my view would be just that – theoretical. Not that of a real person facing the real decision. And so I hold back.
Strangely enough, this reticent disinterest (not indifference) is exactly what is desired by both Ms Dorries and her political opponents. Ms Dorries makes the point that there is a potential conflict of interest in having the same organisation provide counselling and receive payment for carrying out the post-counselling procedure.
Her opponents fear that these independent counsellors whom Ms Dorries foresees in these independent clinics will bring their own dogmatic prejudice, and dissuade more women from either proceeding, or seeking help in the first place. Both sides make valid points.
Which raises the question: who is a disinterested observer? Liberals think they know the answer to that question: disinterested policy-making arises solely from inspection of “evidence”, by which they mean surveys of opinion and experience. Desperate to avoid reference to any religious or even man-made ethical framework for the resolution of political dilemmas (because to admit to such a framework, even implicitly, would turn them into Tories), they have fetishised “evidence” as the ultimate arbiter. As I’ve mentioned before, the belief that an action, or political decision, can be assessed by data alone, free from contaminating personal opinion, is not only seductive, it’s wrong... read more
