No Politics on Facebook — why I’ve broken my self-imposed rule.
People who follow me on Facebook, twitter or any other social media will know that I’ve got some fairly strict self-imposed rules about what I will and won’t share. Photographs of every meal I’ve ever cooked and eaten are a bit of a no-no, along with a running commentary of the latest soap opera and anything too personal or sentimental.
There’s some flexibility of course — some chocolate cakes just have to be shared and I’m occasionally nice to my family online. But on the whole, for me, social media is just that — it’s light-hearted and social and intended to make people smile, or laugh, or leave a funny comment. During the past year I’ve extended that to business and now have an author page and a website purely dedicated to my career as a writer. But one thing which doesn’t tend to feature anywhere is politics.
Politics has always been a slightly odd one for me, along with religion. I was brought up in a council house in the East End of London in an unashamedly working class family who ought to have been dyed-in-the-wool socialists. And they probably were at heart, but they were also both intelligent and fairly well-read people who didn’t believe in a slavish adherence to anything at all, particularly to any one political party. In their view, not all parties get it right all of the time, so at elections, whether they were local or national, they read the news, watched the party political broadcasts and listened to the radio and then each of them would make their own decision based on what was going on at the time.
This meant that at different times, they would vote for different parties, and they didn’t always agree. My mother voted for Margaret Thatcher first time around, because she said that it was high time there was a woman in charge. My father voted Liberal and then Lib Dem sometimes, because he disagreed with Labour policies on education. They would discuss but not fight. And the rule was, in the house, never ever engage in a discussion about either politics or religion when guests were present; some people get offended just because people disagree with them.
Reading some of the vitriol on social media during and since Brexit, I’ve chosen to operate the same rules there. My close friends tend to know what I think about a particular issue but I don’t share it with the wider world. Partly this is because I prefer not to argue online but largely it’s because I have a number of friends with directly opposing political views and I’ve got no intention of anybody using my Facebook page as a boxing ring.
This year I’ve broken my rule and I’ve done it deliberately, knowing the risk. I joined a group called CALM which is campaigning for the reform of the current abortion laws on the Isle of Man, and I am using social media to spread the word and express my opinions, knowing that there’s a risk of some people that I like and respect taking offence. I will be sad if they do, but not sorry that I’ve done it.
The arguments for and against a woman’s right to choose in the matter of continuing with a pregnancy are very well known and the current debate going on in Ireland is hitting the headlines regularly. What is less well known is that the situation is very similar on the Isle of Man. The current law is highly restrictive and forces women to travel to the UK for treatment, which discriminates against women who find themselves unable to afford the cost of a private termination. CALM is looking to offer unbiased counselling and abortion if required all free on the NHS.
A friend recently asked me about my somewhat surprising stance on this given my usual reluctance to impose my political views on everybody who looks at my social media accounts and it made me think about why I’m doing what I’m doing. There has been some unpleasantness attached and I now check all my sites very regularly to remove any abusive comments. But it doesn’t put me off because this is something I believe in so strongly that I am prepared to take that chance.
I have realised that for me, this is not about politics at all, it’s about human rights. Nobody is trying to impose abortion onto anybody, we are simply asking that each woman be treated like the adult she is and allowed to make a choice. Given that, I don’t actually care what the arguments are on the other side since all of them add up to the same thing, which is a group of people trying to force a woman to have a child she doesn’t want.
During the course of this campaign I’ve done a lot of reading and research about this issue and I was interested to find out that the virulent attitude to abortion seems to be a lot more recent than I had realised.
There is an excellent article concerning this by Christina Forrester from the Christian Democrats of America which can be read in full here and which points out that both secular and religious authorities seemed to have little interest in whether women terminated their unwanted pregnancies until well into the nineteenth century.
St. Augustine, for example, is considered a Christian doctrinal authority in many respects, but he had little to say about abortion, other than quoting the traditional Jewish view.
“The law does not provide that the act (abortion) pertains to homicide, for there cannot yet be said to be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation.” He was simply reiterating the traditional Jewish view…that the destruction of a fetus could be considered homicide only at a relatively late stage of fetal development. (Christina Forrester, as above)
A similar silence about abortion echoes throughout the old and new testament as well as the Jewish religious laws. It is only within the last two hundred years that the idea has arisen that women should be forced to go through with unwanted pregnancies in order to satisfy a recently invented notion of religion or morality which she may not share at all.
That is the crux of the matter for me. Believe what you want but don’t force it on other people. Don’t have an abortion but stay out of another woman’s choices. Stop trying to impose your views on other people and stop trying to bully them.
So no, I don’t think it’s fair for our legislators on the Isle of Man to hear “both sides of the argument” because for me, there aren’t two sides of this argument. Stop arguing about it, change the law so that there is no law. There shouldn’t be, this isn’t a crime. Let women choose, give them a safe and easy way of ending a pregnancy they don’t want and give them unbiased and non-judgmental support and counselling to help them make the decision. And then leave them alone, just as church and state did for centuries.
One of the things I’ve heard said often during this campaign is that women should not be allowed to use abortion as “a form of contraception”.
Why? Why, if we can stop a pregnancy using the Pill, the Coil or a condom, should we not be able to take a safe and legal tablet if any of those fail, for whatever reason? If a woman can get the Pill free on the NHS because it is recognised that she has the right to have sex without being forced to bear a child she doesn’t want, why can’t she take an abortion tablet for the same reason? If a man can get Viagra free on the NHS so that he is able to have the sex life he wants then we need to give every woman the same choice to have sex without fear or repercussions. No discussion. No arguments. Just a basic human right.
Should a doctor or healthcare worker be allowed to “opt out” of giving abortions as a matter of conscience? No, not unless the same rule allows them to opt out of giving blood transfusions for religious reasons, which it doesn’t. If you can’t do every part of your job, go away and do something else.
Should people be allowed to protest outside abortion clinics and try to change women’s minds about having an abortion? No, what she does is none of their business, it’s an invasion of her privacy and she should be able to report them to the police. If a politician can get sacked for harassment for making inappropriate remarks to a woman, why would it not be inappropriate for a group of complete strangers to shout things about her sexual health at her in the street?
I am not tolerant of bullying and I don’t want to hear the other side of the argument. Listen to the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Midwives, people who know their jobs, and remove all criminal law from abortion and contraception, it has no place there.
At the beginning of this campaign I was a lot more cautious and a lot more willing to be nice to people but I realise that has changed. I’ve engaged in direct discussion with people about the economy and Brexit and the knotty problem of the NHS and I’ll recognise that there are many points of view about all of these; that’s politics and you won’t find me sounding off about it on social media. But on a woman’s right to control over her own body, all my well-known tolerance has officially gone out of the window. And if people are angry with me about that, then they’ll just have to be.
