US equality: Win some, lose some

So, more good news for civil rights in the US as New York makes gay marriage legal. Whether that means the more 'conservative' parts of America will follow suit soon is a different matter, but it seems an important watershed has been passed.

But as James Fenton hinted on Friday,there is an opposing movement away from progress. Namely, the right for women to choose whether or not to have an abortion.

Indeed, there has been an orchestrated attempt to undermine Roe vs. Wade by small increments, ranging from imposing emotional blackmail to stretching the notion of personhood (and so the definition of murder) to stretching point.

Elsewhere, vulnerable women are being shopped by self-righteous neighbours and the persecution of the Planned Parenthood organisation, where its women's health services are starved of federal funds because it also provides abortion (which isn't federally funded in the first place).

Apart from this being a sign of the US right going insane in a fashion that would put the post-1979, pre-Kinnock Labour party to shame, and probably ensuring its defeat in 2012, it is also disingenuous in the extreme.

And for all the Michelle Bachmans and Sarah Palins being used to draw in the female vote, they are more than willing to sell the daughters of their women supporters, and the supporters themselves, up the river. The hypocrisy, of course, is carpet-thick on the ground.

Thatcher was no friend to women either.

If marriage is a stabilising, civilising force, then so is letting women control what happens to their own bodies. Who really is happy with abortion? But who, with any degree of sanity and humanity, would prefer the alternative?