Nadine’s not a feminist, but….
I found myself in the unenviable position this week of actually agreeing with Nadine Dorries about something. But don’t worry, it was a short lived affair.
Now despite the fact that I appear to be one of the few lefties she hasn’t yet blocked on Twitter, I’m not renowned for holding Dorries in any high esteem (see here for example), so you can imagine my surprise when she tweeted this:
…and I found myself nodding along.
Yes she’s right, the political new media is dominated by men – in fact it’s something I’ve been intending to write about for a while now.
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Abortion Rights: A delay not a setback
So, efforts to update the UK’s existing abortion law through amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill appear to have ended in a politically expedient cop-out and some of the worst excuses in living memory, despite bill having originally been drafted in such a way as to allow, if not invite, the submission of abortion-related amendments.
Oh well, at least it saves me the bother of pointing out the belated Field-Dorries amendment, which proposed that a joint ‘grand committee’ of 17 MPs and Peers would ruminate on the subject of abortion for 9 months before bring forward recommendations that parliament would be required to enact within two years is a complete and utter constitutional nonsense – parliament cannot be bound, in advance, to a future course of action even by a unanimous vote of both houses let alone by the deliberation of ad hoc committee.
Meanwhile… continue reading… »
I blame the lazy liberal media
Both Polly Toynbee and Cath Elliott have written good pieces for the Guardian on this government’s failure to stand firm on HFE Bill amendments and follow through with a progressive pro-choice stance that should be the cornerstone of any vaguely left-wing government.
Instead, as Ms Toynbee rightly points out, New Labour has become scared of Nadine Dorries MP and the tons of supportive, misleading propaganda that has poured from the Daily Mail and Telegraph. Which begs me to wonder why the hell there wasn’t an equally vicious counter-attack in the left-liberal press. Why haven’t the Guardian or the Independent asked the sort of questions about Nadine Dorries MP and her campaign that we have on this blog?
Partly, I’m beginning to agree with the feminist complaint that the male-dominated left actually ends up saying very little on issues like abortion. They’re out there campaigning against the war in Iraq but when a bit of solidarity is needed with women from Northern Ireland, the comrades are busily inspecting their shoes. Liberals especially, too afraid to touch an issue like abortion for fear of offending anyone, have barely attempted to go on the counter-attack in the media.
The Channel 4 documentary that exposed Nadine Dorries’s close links to the bigoted, fundamentalist Christian organisation: Christian Concern For Our Nation, offered a veritable feast for an angle that could be used to ask questions about how was funding Ms Dorries’s campaign and why she was hiding her true agenda on abortion and smearing journalists like Ben Goldacre. What did we get? Uncomfortable silence, and some bleating now the vote has came up again. I admire the right on this regard: they have ideological positions and they’ll run happily run a quasi-propaganda campaign to support it. The left-liberal press is on the side of public opinion and has a ton of bullshit to shoot down, and they still can’t do a good enough job to push their case. No wonder New Labour is in retreat.
Sins of Omission
Over the last year or so, perhaps the defining characteristic of the anti-abortion lobby’s ‘contribution’ to the public debate surrounding the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill has been their willingness to resort, increasingly, to tendentious and disreputable lines of argument.
Why this has happened is relatively easy to understand.
The major problem facing the anti-abortion lobby is that, for all their efforts to poison the public debate in support of their prohibitionist agenda, public support for the principle that women have the right to access safe, legal, abortions services remains rock solid at around 65-70% in any reputable poll. If nothing else, the majority of the British public understand that the alternative to legal abortion is not no abortions but a return to unsafe backstreet abortions will their attendant horrors.
The ‘moral’ argument for prohibition has been lost and lost decisively and its because of that, that anti-abortionists have turned, instead, to a stream of extremely specious and sophistic arguments about the supposed ‘rights’ of the foetus and to the wholesale misrepresentation and bastardisation of medical and scientific knowledge about pregnancy, foetal development and abortion. continue reading… »
Our complaint against Nadine Dorries MP upheld
A few months ago I submitted a complaint, with the help of some Liberal Conspirators to the Parliamentary Standards Commission against Nadine Dorries MP. In short, it was regarding her blog. Last weekend I had a response.
The most relevant parts of the letter stated:
The rules of the house, however, do require Members to make a clear distinction between websites which are financed from public funds and any other domain. At the time of your complaint, Mrs Dorries’ website did not meet that requirement. Nor was it appropriate that she use the Portcullis emblem on the weblog given its contents. And the funding attribution on Mrs Dorries’ Home Page should have been updated to reflect that the funding came from the Communications Allowance and not from the Incidental Expenses Provision.
To these three technical aspects, our complaint was upheld. But, the Commissioner adds:
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Dishonesty Dorries Rides Again
If there’s one thing worse than a cover-up, its a badly executed cover-up, and you’ll find no better example of the latter if you take the time to visit the website of Nadine Dorries.
To give a quick recap of the story so far, a short while back, Sunny put forward a formal complaint to the Commissioner for Parliamentary Standards in regards to Dorries’ ‘blog’ – i.e. the bit of her website that used to have a comments facility until she got caught making false allegations about Ben Goldacre in a parliamentary committee report.
The complaint, itself, raised two basic issues.
continue reading… »
Dorries facing Standards investigation – updated
I’ve already broken this development over at The Ministry, due to LibCon being offline for a while this afternoon, but I can now confirm that Nadine Dorries is being asked to give a formal response, by the Commissioner for Parliamentary Standards, to the complaint lodged by Sunny a little under a month ago in regards to her apparent failure to observe parliamentary regulations relating to the content of her official website, which she appears to fund from her parliamentary allowances.
The complaint, which is being dealt with under the new Communications Allowance regulations, alleges that Dorries’s personal ‘blog’, which is incorporated into her official website and which, it appears from the home page, is/was funded using the Incidental Expenses Provision, breaches regulations governing the content of websites funded from parliamentary allowances and the use of the House Emblem, i.e. the official portcullis device.
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It was Dorries wot lost it!
It came down to the crunch, and after everything, not even the 200 supporters Nadine Dorries said she had bothered to turn up to vote for a reduction in the abortion limit to 20 weeks. All the hype about the vote being close turned out to be bluster, with the amendment being rejected by a majority of 142, 190 votes for to 332 against. All the attempts by Dorries to turn to complete emotion, raising the issue of the baby boy she witnessed struggling to breathe once again during the debate, after saying that she hadn’t wanted to use it, have failed.
This was after she said that Labour MPs were supposedly on a three-line-whip to “attend” so that they knew which way they were to be expected to vote. Desperation doesn’t even begin to cover it.
continue reading… »
Ohhh-klahoma
As I write this, there’s less than 24 hours to go before the abortion-related amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill are debated and a touch over 24 hours to go before they’re put to the vote.
Is there, i wonder, anything more that I can say on the subject that hasn’t already been said? Well, perhaps there’s just one more thing by way of giving an illustration of the kind of mindset that lies behind efforts to restrict legal access to abortion.
To start you off, let me direct you to this article in, of all places, yesterday’s Telegraph, which trails a Channel 4 documentary that will air tonight – in about 15 minutes’ time, in fact, a documentary that looks at the emergence of US style Christian Fundamentalism in the UK:
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To the sceptical and uncommitted…
Over the last few days, both Matthew Sinclair and Chris Dillow have written ‘abortion debate’ posts from the standpoint of the sceptic/uncommitted, a perhaps usual looking position in a debate where taking sides can almost seem obligatory, but a respectable one nonetheless and one that should be addressed.
Chris is struggling a little with his instincts, noting both that there are secular arguments for placing some value on the life of a foetus but also, importantly, picking up on a socio-economic argument that veers, somewhat, towards a point raised in Steven D Leviitt’s famous/notorious ‘Freakonomics’ paper on crimes rates and abortion.
…a major motive for a woman to have an abortion is that she is not yet ready to be a parent. Having an abortion at 20, then, can be a way of clearing the ground so that she can be a good mother at 30. If this woman were banned from having an abortion at 20, the child she has at 30 might not be born at all – as she would feel unable to give it as much attention as she’d like.
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What is Nadine Dorries MP’s real agenda? (pt 4)
1) Consistency is not really her strong point, Bookdrunk said yesterday when Unity blogged the amendments Tory MPs are proposing to the HFE Bill. There’s Mr Edward Leigh supporting amendments to reduc the limit to 12, 14 or 16 weeks and there’s Nadine Dorries supporting reducing the limit to 20 weeks and 16 weeks! Is she not conviced by her own arguments?
But you see, that isn’t her ultimate agenda and neither is it of these other mysogynist MPs.
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Nadine Dorries MP and her hoax science
1) On March 19th Nadine Dorries MP published a blog-post titled The Hand of Hope, which featured this image of a small hand apparently coming out of a uterus. She said:
When the operation was over, baby Samuel, at 21 weeks gestation, put his hand through the incision in the uterus and grabbed hold of the surgeon’s finger, a gesture which was apparently met with a huge amount of emotion in the operating theatre. Dr Bruner said that it was the most emotional moment of his life and that for a moment he was just frozen, totally immobile.
Except, it was a hoax and Dr Bruner himself had said so. This was pointed out on several blogs including LC and Dorries wrote another post defending her actions with the view that the photographer, a born-again Christian, should be believed over the surgeon (who she had earlier quoted herself).
The Hand of Hope also makes an appearance on the pictures and video section of her new campaign. In other words, a member of parliament is actually perpetuating a hoax that has been debunked several times.
In many ways, this sums up her entire campaign.
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Who is funding Nadine Dorries MP’s campaign?
A week ago Nadine Dorries launched the 20 weeks Campaign through the Daily Mail, which wrote up this glowing story and dedicated its editorial comment strip to supporting it. The 20 Weeks website has Nadine Dorries MP’s picture on every page and she has promoted it relentlessly through her blog. So we can reasonably assume it is her campaign.
But who is behind this campaign? Is it just Ms Dorries? The website doesn’t say. On the Q&A page however it does have this question: Is this a religious campaign?. Answer: “No. There are people of all faiths and of no faith who support this campaign.”
But that’s about it. Shouldn’t we be told who is running a campaign fronted by a Conservative MP?
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The case against Nadine Dorries MP (pt 1)
Today on Liberal Conspiracy we have a treat for you. This week we officially launch our campaign: Coalition For Choice, to support the HFE Bill and develop an online advocacy group in favour of extending abortion rights over the longer term.
See the website for more about our aims.
To mark this launch we have a week of Nadine Dorries MP on Liberal Conspiracy! We will illustrate how this Conservative MP:
- has consistently misrepresented the arguments around abortion;
- is fronting campaigns by Christian groups without declaring so;
- is promoting hoaxes on her websites;
- has frequently and wrongly smeared reputable journalists and scientists;
- hides her true long-term intentions on the issue of abortion
continue reading… »
24 reasons for 24 weeks
As part of her campaign to force the government to reduce the 24 week limit within which women can legally have abortions, the MP Nadine Dorries yesterday unveiled 20 reasons for 20 weeks.
Today, we publish 24 reasons for 24 weeks, as part of our own campaign to fight for women’s rights to abortion.
continue reading… »
What about women’s rights, Mrs Dorries?
In the pages of the Daily Mail yesterday, anti-choice poster-girl Nadine Dorries MP was given a platform to put across her misogynist, reactionary views.
She and a claimed ‘coalition of 200′ MPs are calling for a reduction in the time limit on legal abortion from 24 to 20 weeks, despite a lack of evidence that fetuses can survive outside the womb before that point and despite the fact that most women are against further reductions in the time limit.
continue reading… »
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