How instructive to meet Danny Kruger, the Conservative MP for Devizes, who is probably better known for being Prue Leith’s son. Of wholesome appearance, his least appealing characteristics appeared, until last week, to be his previous dedication to David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings, whose rule-breaking he defended.
It emerges, however, that this particular Etonian believes that his own sex should be free, collectively, to coerce women into unwanted pregnancies. Speaking after a number of female MPs, who wanted the UK to signal its disapproval of the reversal of Roe v Wade, Kruger said he didn’t understand why they were “lecturing the United States” on this judgment. “They think that women have an absolute right to bodily autonomy in this matter. However, I think that, in the case of abortion, that right is qualified by the fact that another body is involved.” Though by far the most celebrated, this isn’t the first sermon Kruger has delivered on the subject. He opposed decriminalisation in Northern Ireland, is against buffer zones and last year informed MPs: “It says a very, very terrible thing about the value that we place on an unborn life if we simply say that it should be determined by whether or not the mother would like to keep it.” Were female constituents aware, when Kruger was parachuted into Devizes (replacing Claire Perry), that he considers mothers consultants to their own pregnancies?
They could surely have expected, given Kruger’s fondness for Johnson, a man not universally popular with foetuses, that his approach would be, for the avoidance of hypocrisy, non-judgmental. There’s still nothing in the “About Danny” bit of his website to warn constituents that this affable individual is evidently at ease with the female misery and deaths that follow, especially for the impoverished, from the prohibition of abortion. Nor is there any indication that female biology is incompatible with personal autonomy. He tells Devizes: “I want to be the MP for everyone in our part of Wiltshire.” Which is tricky if you also represent the womb police. Yesterday he sought to qualify his recent remarks, though his statement wasn’t as clear as his anti-abortion record.
Probably, there are some women in Wiltshire, as in Afghanistan, who are happy to be represented by a virtuously repressive male at the UK version of the loya jirga. But others demonstrated yesterday against the MP. So long as he can’t stop them, one in three women in Devizes are likely, given the approval of two doctors, to have an abortion by the time they are 45. How they must have enjoyed Kruger telling them they are, or were, incompetent to make the decision.
Still, all credit to this minor celebrity for advertising the need, reversing any previous complacency, for women to interrogate parliamentary candidates about abortion. Not on their personal choices, which are nobody’s business, but on any possibility that, if elected, they will threaten women’s existing access to legal terminations. To judge by the resistance to buffer zones around fanatic-besieged abortion clinics, and by a very recent vote on keeping the pandemic innovation of abortions at home, scores of MPs would still, like Kruger, be unable to stop themselves.
If they can’t emulate the US, and overturn the 1967 Abortion Act(which permitted state-approved abortion), an alarming number of parliamentarians, whether they are motivated by faith, misogyny or some unholy mixture of both, evidently feel entitled to make abortion as difficult and as shaming for English women as possible. Lending their efforts respectability is the enduring convention that female reproductive autonomy is not an unequivocal right, but a parliamentary gift, subject to constant revision by the combined consciences of the jirga, the majority of whose members will know neither the consuming fear of an unwanted pregnancy nor the colossal relief of a wanted abortion.
Naturally, we find Kruger taking the opportunity, in March, to join Jacob Rees-Mogg, Jim Shannon and fellow stars of the Commons anti-abortion lobby in ignoring the “overwhelming” female and professional support for early abortions at home. So, looking down the list of 184 moral guardians, did the MP who has just resigned for drunken groping at the Carlton Club. Oh, and here are the equally principled Natalie Elphicke, Theresa Villiers and Roger Gale – the three suspended last year for intervening improperly on behalf of the sex offender Charlie Elphicke – all keen, in another matter of pressing female concern, to defy advice from every significant body in UK reproductive health. Mr Edward Morris, president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists: “We urge governments across the UK to listen to women and make the regulations that allow for telemedical abortion services to become permanent.”
Likeminded MPs won the vote (212 to 184) but disquietingly, among those thinking they knew better, was the health secretary, Sajid Javid, whose department had previously set its face against telemedical abortion services. In Javid’s case, female constituents are not the only women who now deserve clarification of his views on their autonomy. Did he skip that bit of Ayn Rand? “An embryo has no rights.”
It would be reassuring to think, after six relevant abstentions, that Javid recognises the insignificance of his personal views on ensoulment. But his refusal, in 2018, to introduce buffer zones around clinics, when added to his recent opposition to at-home terminations, indicates that the health minister agrees on at least one thing with anti-abortion zealots: women having them can be righteously tormented. In contrast, the court of appeal upheld, in 2019, a judicial conclusion that Ealing council’s buffer zone was justified, since women’s “privacy was being very seriously invaded at a time and place when they were most vulnerable and sensitive to uninvited attention”.
With abortion still largely criminalised, a health secretary who is a hero to anti-abortion extremists, and a host of MPs who prefer embryos to women, I suppose it’s something to see Johnson reproach the US for its failure on reproductive rights. One day, he might even try it at home.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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