The United Kingdom has spent two weeks convulsed in a frenzied debate over abortion law — not its own abortion law, but America’s. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision led the news for days, sparking a culture war that bore no relation to Britain’s own situation. Once again, we are reminded of the dominance of the American news cycle. As Boris Johnson put it, Roe v. Wade was “important psychologically for people around the world.”
So much so, indeed, that people seem to imagine it applies to them. Likable Labour MP Stella Creasy responded to the ruling by promising to enshrine access to abortion in a new British human rights code. “Most women in the UK do not realize abortion is not a right,” she said, “but there is only a law giving exemption from prosecution in certain circumstances. What the U.S. teaches us is that we cannot be complacent about entrenching those rights in law.”
This strikes me as 180 degrees the wrong way around. What the United States in fact “teaches us” is that judicial activism is a foolish and flimsy way to change policy. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg accurately predicted, “A court too sure of itself on these matters may, in its zeal, take a giant stride, only to find itself perilously positioned on an unstable doctrinal limb.”
In Britain, abortion law was not decreed from the bench but hammered out democratically. Because ethical questions are traditionally decided by free votes, there were no party lines, and MPs were left to exercise their consciences. In consequence, Great Britain (though not Northern Ireland, which opted for stricter controls) felt its way to a compromise that most people could at least live with, allowing pregnancies to be terminated up to 24 weeks, subject to various exemptions and safeguards.
True, some people feel that that law goes too far, and some that it doesn’t go far enough, but these two positions are (by U.S. standards) astonishingly rare. Only 8% think that it is too hard to get an abortion in Britain, and 6% that it is too easy; the remaining 86% are either happy with the status quo or not interested. Unlike in the U.S., abortion is not that big a deal.
Yet this has not stopped almost every British commentator from weighing in on Roe v. Wade. Conservatives gloated. Leftists posted stills from The Handmaid’s Tale and warned that Britain was bound to copy the U.S. Here, to pluck an example at random, is the socialist economist Richard Murphy: “Where the Republicans go the Tories follow. We take the right to abortion, contraception, gay rights and same-sex marriage for granted now. We shouldn’t. Very soon Tory think tanks will have their sights on all of them.”
Let’s leave aside that, if Murphy knew any Tory think tanks, he’d realize how hilarious it is to claim that they’re anti-gay. His bigger error is in comparing the U.S., where partisans on both sides feel strongly enough to disregard process in pursuit of their favored outcome, to Britain, where occasional amendments might nudge the law this way or that, but where true absolutists are rare.
Again, the U.K. is importing the parameters of its debate from the U.S. I wrote here a couple of weeks back about the bizarre way in which British people see their own race relations through the distorting prism of Jacksonville and Ferguson and Selma, culminating in the hilarious sight of almost all-white British BLM demonstrators protesting about the death of George Floyd by shouting “Hands up don’t shoot!” at unarmed London coppers. Now, another aspect of life that few previously saw as a problem has been inflamed by an imported row.
It’s your fault, my American friends, for making such compelling TV dramas. When the original Roe ruling was made half a century ago, it barely made the news in the U.K. But a generation brought up on The West Wing and, more insidiously, on various nonpolitical dramas, is attuned to a different vernacular. British people talk un-self-consciously of “taking the Fifth,” “statutes of limitations,” “Uncle Toms,” “curve balls,” “all-white juries” — all great figures of speech, all meaningless in our domestic context.
America’s debates resound far beyond its borders. I happen to agree that Roe was badly flawed. Judges should rule on the basis of what the law says rather than what they want it to say. But it’s surely possible to be glad that an error has been corrected without exulting outside family planning centers or threatening to prosecute mothers. Please, cousins, try to tone it down — for our sake, if not your own.
