In Britain, we love talking about… Britain. The tabloids veer cheerfully between an Alan Titchmarsh-style reveration of a green and pleasant land full of ruddy-faced milk maids pottering through rural chocolate box idylls; and an embittered bullied people stifled by the “Political Correctness Brigade TM” under a draconian, indifferent Orwellian government desperate to throw you in prison for putting your bins out on the wrong day, or de-icing your neighbour’s driveway, all the while cowering from the horde of swarthy ethnic characters pouring over the Channel. There are indeed some terrible things about Britain (although I wouldn‘t agree with the vast majority of what the tabloids highlight), but also some wonderful things – things that we often take for granted.
As a woman born and living in the UK, it’s difficult to imagine what it must be like to be unable to get access to legal abortion. In fact it’s hard to imagine how and why the issue of abortion is still up for debate. Of course there are small pro-life campaign groups that raise their ugly heads every so often, but public opinion has by and large remained firmly, if passively, in support of the right to abortion.
So what of countries that don’t give women that right? This leads us to Poland, and the tabloid fury over “abortion tourism” that has sprung up over the last couple of days.
To whit – Polish feminist organisation SROM has started an advertising campaign to raise awareness among women that travelling to the UK for an abortion is safer and better for women than procuring an illegal, often dangerous back-street procedure in their native land.
From the Sky News report (with their original translation from Polish):
The group mimicks the Mastercard advertising campaign to illustrate the costs involved in having an abortion in Britain.
“Plane ticket to England – 300 zloty (£70),” it says.
“Accommodation – 240 zloty (£56). Abortion in a public clinic – 0 zloty.
“Relief after a procedure carried out in decent conditions – priceless.”
The slogan at the bottom of the poster reads: “For everything, you pay less than an underground abortion in Poland.”
The advert – while deliberately humorous – is a startling realisation of how potentially dangerous the “abortion underground” in Poland can be. Often, these abortions are performed discreetly by qualified doctors and gynaecologists in medical surroundings, for humanitarian reasons. To quote an anonymous doctor speaking to the Gazeta Wyborcza, “I have been performing abortions for a year. In our cooperative there are only two doctors who do it, the rest are scared. But you cannot send away a despairing woman, This is how I understand the Hippocratic Oath. Underground abortions? They flourish – and not due to old women, who use crochet hook and herbal brew. Polish underground abortions are performed in sterile conditions and by people wearing white uniforms.” (More information on the effects of the Anti-Abortion law can be found in the English language section of the federa.org.pl website.) However it goes without saying that an unregulated, underground medical procedure is rife with the potential for difficulties, whatever the genuine efforts of the medical professionals who work to provide women with access to safe abortions. The Federation on Women and Family Planning reports:
There are cases of the poorest, uneducated women who do not want to have a child and they decide on desperate acts. Information concerning such cases is difficult to obtain. For different reasons the health service informs only about the most severe cases. Doctors and other health service employees inform only anonymously that there are frequent cases of women who get to hospital to “finish off” an abortion which was started by artificial widening of the cervix, which led to infection and miscarriage.
And such health and safety concerns don’t even begin to address the potential financial cost of abortion in Poland. Is it any wonder then that women’s health advocates may look outside their country for the possibility of a safe legal abortion?
It comes as no surprise that the tabloids are furious at this suggestion. The Express plastered its front page with the headline Now Poles get free abortions on the NHS. The Daily Mail whines Get a free abortion on the NHS: Polish women advised to travel to Britain for treatment. Both contain copies of the poster, with an attractive twenty-something woman in her underwear posing against a wall with “MY CHOICE” written on her belly. The Mail/Express never let a little moral outrage get in their way of the chance to publish a picture of a scantily clad pretty girl.
Now call me a bleeding heart liberal (or alternatively a human being with a vague sense of empathy for other people in difficult, distressing circumstances) but my anger and despair is directed fully at Polish anti-abortions laws here, not at desperate women. But of course, this combines two right-wing tabloid loves: complaining about nasty foreigners getting stuff for free from our creaking, overwhelmed public services, with a little bit of anti-abortion rhetoric thrown in for good measure.
The Express complains that the posters are “tasteless” (rather than providing useful information or satirical comment in a tongue-in-cheek format, but then I often forget that feminists are not supposed to show humour in any situation least they besmirch the right-wing straw-feminist bogey woman of angry, ball-crushing, very very serious she-monsters), that it would encourage abortion tourism and pile “pressure on the hard-pressed NHS”. Quick question, slight derail, but is this the same NHS that is vastly staffed and held up by the hard work of horrible, swarthy immigrants to our country?
Still, the Express wheels out some faithful frothing at the mouth acolytes to bemoan the prospect of scary baby-murdering Poles arriving on our shores.
First up, it’s wanktank favourite Sir Andrew Green, of MigrationWatch, who can always be relied on for a boringly predictable quote, spluttering, “we should insist the Polish government take action to have these posters removed.” Anton Vowl makes a good point when he notes:
“(T)hat quote from Sir Andrew is a good reminder of the kind of people you’re dealing with. Here’s someone who wants state intervention to prevent free speech from a group of feminists in Poland. I’m sure if a Polish ’thinktank’ demanded that Sir Andrew be prevented from communicating his anti-immigration rubbish in Britain, he’d be equally delighted. No, you say…?”
Next up, it’s the utterly impartial Michaela Aston of anti-abortion group LIFE saying:
“Abortion can have serious effects on a woman’s physical and mental health. This blinkered advice will result in many Polish women making this decision without any counselling, only to return home to cope with the consequences.”
The statement that abortion causes serious effects on physical and mental health is spurious to say the least, and there is little to no evidence that health problems of any sort arise from abortion in all but a small minority of cases. Of course, we could also turn Ms Aston’s statement on its head, and comment on the probabilities of the serious effects on a woman’s physical and mental health of carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term. We could, but we won’t, because they may require us to engage in something called “telling the truth” even if it doesn’t fit in with our self-constructed personal narratives.
The Mail also gives us the ever blustering Ann Widdecombe, who comments:
“When the Abortion Act was liberalised I said it would turn Britain into the abortion capital of Europe and that sees to be exactly what’s happened. The laws here are far, far too lax.”
That’s interesting, because according to data here the number of known pregnancies ending in legal abortion in the UK in 2008 was 21.8%, with Greenland, Romania, Hungary, Estonia, Belarus, Latvia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Moldova, Czech Republic, Serbia, Slovakia, Sweden, Lithuania, Slovenia, Armenia and Albania all totalling larger percentages. And let’s be fair here, not a few percentage points behind us is Macedonia (21.4%), France (21%), Croatia (19.7%), Italy (19.6%), Norway (19.5%), Denmark (18.8%) and so on. Hardly the abortion capital of Europe.
It’s also probably worth noting that thousands of Irish women have been coming to the UK for abortions every year for quite a long time now. Abortion statistics by the DoH for 2008 state that for legal abortions carried out by country of residence, 4,600 women came from the Republic of Ireland, accounting for 67% of abortions performed on non residents, compared to 30 abortions performed on Polish women, a paltry 0.4%. If we are to single out people coming from other countries, why pick on the Polish in particular (or any woman at all)?
But let’s leave aside the abortion hand-wringing for a moment, and focus on the aspect of free NHS healthcare for Polish “health tourists”. According to the Citizens Advice Bureau family planning services in hospitals are free of charge treatments for all, but this doesn’t state whether this refers to abortion procedures per se, or to the distribution of contraceptives and so on. However the claims by both SROM and the tabloids that abortion will be free on the NHS are disputed by the Department of Health itself. From Sky News again:
The Department of Health says it would be very difficult to get a non-emergency procedure such as an abortion on the NHS if the patient was not a British citizen.
And women from Poland would be liable to pay unless they had been formally referred by a doctor, which rarely happens, the Department of Health said.
Buried at the bottom of the Express’s article is another quote from the DoH, putting things into further context:
A the (sic) Department of Health spokesman said: “The NHS is provided primarily for the benefit of people lawfully resident in the UK.
“We do, however, choose to exempt from charge the residents of some countries for some treatment needs when they visit the UK.”
He said the arrangement was reciprocal, meaning British citizens can receive similar benefits. He said where treatment is given the NHS is obliged to attempt to recover the full cost of chargeable treatment.
While he doesn’t state whether abortion is covered under NHS for visitors, it would seem from the preceding statement that unless abortion was a medical emergency, Polish visitors would be unlikely to receive NHS help. However migrant women working legally in the UK have full access to NHS treatment free of charge, as is to be expected when the said individuals pay tax to their temporary host nation. However for visitors, there is still the possibility of private health care that would invariably cost the woman money, but it would enable her access to a safe legal abortion like her British sisters.
Despite the DoH disputing the lurid headlines, I imagine this toxic combination of women’s rights and immigration will continue to make a large degree of heat and light in both Britain and Poland. And this can be seen as SROM’s end goal – to draw attention to the plight of family planning in Poland, and to challenge the laws surrounding abortion. Ultimately, it’s an appalling situation if women have to fly to another country to receive safe, legal medical care, and these posters highlight not just the ridiculousness of attempting to legislate against a procedure that Polish women can get abroad, but the remarkable lengths desperate women can and will take to get it. It also points out the massive discrepancies in women’s health options between the rich and the poor, meaning that while wealthier women will be able to travel outside of Poland for abortions, poorer women are left to chance Poland’s illegal underground. This implication will no doubt get lost in the hustle and bustle of the tabloid fury, but will remain the take home message for many women in both Poland and the UK.
Hat tips to Unity at Liberal Conspiracy, Anton Vowl at Enemies of Reason and MacGuffin at Tabloid Watch.
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