The news that the US Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade has divided opinion. Here is our first debate piece on the issue: we have two different views from two different young women about the issue.
Pro-Choice:
Olivia Lever is the director of Blue Beyond. You can follow her at @liv_lever on Twitter:
‘I feel very annoyed and frustrated. A woman should have the right to choose in the 2022, and the state should never have interference over a woman’s body – it is very similar to the vaccine debate, the state should have no say in what you do with your body. In a practical sense, sex education and social infrastructure in the States is very poor.
On a post note, there is no mention of social infrastructure being made better to help those that have to have babies not be struck down by the financial burden or making sure that these children don’t have less of a life than they should. The whole thing is so poorly thought out, plus the US is supposed to be secular. It’s the constitutional principle. We could lose same-sex marriage and gay marriage. It’s stupid to lose contraception seeing as it prevents abortion.’
Pro-Life:
@BeatriceSEM takes the opposite view:
‘Absolutely delighted and feeling pretty emotional. The number of babies who will now be given a chance at life is massive! I hope very much other countries follow suit!’
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Why The Tories Should Be Afraid of the Australian Labor Party’s Victory
The Australian Labor Party’s victory in Australia marks the end of almost a decade of Liberal Party rule. Indeed, the Liberal Party bears many similarities and its philosophy and ideology derived from the Conservative Party in their mother country. Having just scraped a majority in 2019, Scott Morrison has led the Liberal Party to its worst defeat since 1944. This claim however isn’t based on losing government but more critically losing its affluent seats like Goldstein, Higgins, North Sydney, Mackeller and former Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s seat of Warringah failing to be won by the Liberals again. But with the shock victory of independent Dr Monique Ryan in Kooyong suggests a worrying foreshadowing of what is yet to come in Britain.
Poor Leadership, Good Results
Firstly, the presumptive narrative that ‘Keir Starmer is an awful leader, so we’ll get back in’ is to be questioned due to the Australian election. Net satisfaction with Labor leader Anthony Albanese’s performance fell to a record low of minus 14 per cent – the worst for an opposition leader since Bill Shorten – just in mid-April. Starmer too shares an abysmal rating with 53 per cent of respondents to a YouGov poll in April judging him to be ‘doing badly’ as Labour leader in Britain. Nevertheless, with a shared cost of living crisis due to high inflation and rampant house price increases, both conservative parties have failed on their perceived core mission of safeguarding the economy.
The Wavering Middle-Classes
May’s local election results in the UK display signs of dissatisfaction with the current Tory government. The Liberal Democrats (not to be confused with the Australian Liberal Party) exploited the dissatisfaction among middle-class Tory voters in historically safe Tory areas. Australian Labor too exploited this dissatisfaction with middle-class Liberal voters. Being dubbed the ‘teal independents’, predominantly female, middle-class, wealthy, small-l liberal and climate-conscious candidates swept through solid Liberal seats. Teal itself being a mixture of green and blue (the Liberal Party’s colour) displays similarities with NIMBY-minded candidates in solid Tory wards during the UK May election. England’s results saw a net increase of 194 councillors for the Lib Dems and 63 for the Green Party with Labour seeing an increase of only 22 councillors at the expense of a loss of over 336 councillors for the Tories.
Forget the ‘Red Wall’ concept in Britain and in Australia, the Tory Party and the Liberal Party are seeing their core base desert them before their very eyes.
Repercussions for Australia and Dangers for Britain
Republicanism is strong in Australia and the return of the Labor Party with outspoken republican Albanese at the helm, coupled with the culture war heating up over trans rights during the election, this presents danger to the future of the monarchy in Australia once again. For Britain, the story is already well understood since Blair that a Labour government (no matter how appealing to traditional middle-class Conservative voters) will irrevocably vandalise the British constitution once more.
One key lesson learned from this election is that it is a massive challenge to hold onto the prosperous middle classes (which are a core rightist constituency) without compromising on conservative social values. Values of ambition and enterprise have been consistently championed by each Tory government since around the 1860s, yet this current Tory government is the first to not encourage – or even boldly talk – about these values. To fight the culture war without a sound handling of the economy risks losing both to left wing manipulation and thus conservatives are once again in opposition dominated by a left-wing hegemony in economy and culture.
The implication of defending traditional values by the Liberal Party and – supposedly – by the Tory Party without the confidence of the middle-classes on the economy is to pave the way for a leftist victory. Due to the shared Anglo traditions of parliamentary sovereignty, this leaves Australia’s institutions open to vandalism and destruction.
Conclusion
With the end of almost a decade of Liberal rule in Australia marks the beginning of a new era of Labor government. The recriminations inside the Liberal-National Coalition will begin as the moderates seek to flex their dwindling muscle to make the case that the 2022 electoral strategy of chasing ‘Red Wall’ voters cost them their heartlands. Right wing Liberals who protested Scott Morrison’s party by voting for the United Australia Party or Pauline Hanson’s One Nation may return home, but this election has marked the end of solid conservative dominance in Australia.
The Conservative Party in Britain should be worrying. The long-held belief that the Tories will stay in government due to Labour being unable to produce a competent-enough leader has been proven wrong. Ineptitude in optics over Partygate and 40-year high inflation (the highest among G7 countries, currently) is cutting away the Tory Party’s electoral backbone. Forget the insipid ping-pong of which party leaders held illegal gatherings during lockdown and focus on the disastrous state of the economy. If the awful May local election results weren’t a warning of what is yet to come for the Tories, this Australian election result should scare the Tories to death beyond the years of Brexit.
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Now more than ever, Farage must discern between converts and infiltrators
The recent defections of Nadhim Zahawi, Robert Jenrick, and Suella Braverman from the Tories to Reform have caused quite a stir – among both supporters and opponents – yet seemingly for the wrong reasons.
In theory, a political start-up winning the endorsement of a former Chancellor sounds like great news. It certainly looks good on paper. The support of a former high-ranking official potentially brings much-needed insider knowledge and some personal clout to the table.
Unfortunately, this endorsement isn’t just good on paper – it’s only good on paper. Despite it being his defining credential, Nadhim Zahawi was Chancellor for barely two months before being shuffled away under Liz Truss – probably for the best, all things considered.
Nothing of note was achieved during his brief internship at the Treasury. Zahawi’s tenure reminds us of a period of politics rather than any policy – specifically, the end of the last Conservative government; the unpopularity of which continues to contaminate the party’s standing with the public years later.
If Zahawi is known for anything of substance, it’s for being Vaccines minister; at best, some may recall him as a vaguely competent manager of the rollout, while others regard him as a sinister bio-authoritarian technocrat – most notably, the Reform voters who kept the party afloat during Lockdown, when it was jostling for third place with the Liberal Democrats.
Of course, he wasn’t just any Tory MP. Zahawi was among the core Cameron-era intake. When his defection was announced, commentators were quick to note his socially liberal positions, from his support for immigration – including mass amnesty for illegals – to his past support for progressive mainstays like DEI and BLM.
Moreover, his past attacks on Nigel Farage – such as comparing the Reform leader to Joseph Goebbels – and accusations of an unsuccessful bid for a Tory peerage a few months prior have all understandably created trouble for the supposed convert.
This all might sound a bit harsh. People do have Damascene conversions. However, Zahawi’s track record shows that authenticity is really not his strongest point. The day after his promotion to Chancellor under Boris Johnson – at the height of Partygate, no less – Zahawi publicly called for Johnson’s resignation. Only 48 hours earlier, he had agreed to serve in his government!
When Boris finally resigned, and Truss inevitably crashed and burned, Zahawi called for Johnson’s return to power – that is, only after support for his own leadership bid failed to materialise. Over the course of a month, Zahawi went from Boris loyalist to anti-Boris conspirator to Boris restorationist, and while people took wry enjoyment in his shamelessly serpentine manoeuvres at the time, it begs a question of loyalty now that he’s defected to Reform.
By contrast, Jenrick has been received more warmly by Reformers, although it’s hardly a match made in Heaven. Like Zahawi, he wasn’t just some Tory apparatchik. Jenrick won his Newark seat in a 2014 by-election at a time when UKIP was on-the-up and the Conservatives were under siege. Earlier in the year, UKIP beat the Tories to second place in the Wythenshawe and Sale East by-election. Later in the year, it would gain seats in the Commons following by-election victories in Clacton and Rochester.
As such, Jenrick’s election to Parliament was about more than filling space on the green benches; it was explicitly about refuting the idea that the Conservatives needed to move rightward on immigration, EU membership, political correctness, etc. – taking the form of strategic ignorance than anything overtly ideological. People don’t really want less immigration, so you can afford to ignore it; just marginally improve their living standards and they’ll stop voting for populists. Sound familiar?
A triumph for full-fat Cameronism over UKIP-lite, Jenrick was hailed by the kind of progressive interlopers who now view him as the second coming of Hermann Göring. Thereafter, Jenrick was identified with the centrist wing of the party. What little he did say about immigration was vague but ultimately liberal, and that was pretty much of the end of things until a few years ago.
The official narrative around Jenrick’s conversion is that his time at the Home Office was so gruelling that it pushed him rightward. This is certainly plausible. Jenrick’s tenure was mostly defined by low-grade cost-cutting measures and monitoring the situation. His most hardline decision was arguably the removal of a Mickey Mouse mural in a migrant detention centre. Such a record just as much indicates a Home Office strangling more ambitious proposals as a minister being insufficiently opposed to migration, so it’s hardly a slam-dunk example of ideological inauthenticity.
Nevertheless, Jenrick’s conversion was impeccably well-timed and rather recent. Dropped as Housing Secretary, Jenrick was appointed as Minister for Immigration in 2022 by then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak because he wasn’t particularly right-wing; allegedly, Sunak intended Jenrick to act as a counterweight to then Home Secretary Suella Braverman… who has also defected to Reform!
Out of the Tory Trio that have defected this month, Braverman’s is perhaps the easiest and toughest to square. Her credentials are far stronger than Jenrick’s and much stronger than Zahawi’s. The European Research Group’s former chairman does seem to have genuine socially conservative convictions, and is something of a ‘Deepa Kaur‘-esque figure of both hatred and ridicule for progressives.
Many will inevitably point to her track record as Home Secretary – and specifically, her inability to get the migration numbers down and presiding over the Afghan cover-up – but this (much like Jenrick’s record as immigration minister) is a question of authenticity rather than efficacy. matters, and Braverman needs to be criticised for this before being given any portfolio of any kind, but is not the central focus here. The point being is that she can’t be faulted on rhetoric; a vice in other contexts but technically a virtue here.
Her undeniable “uselessness” as Home Secretary aside, and resolve most likely born from conviction, it’s believable that she feels at home in Reform. The fact she didn’t run in the 2024 Conservative leadership race suggests sincere alienation from her former party, and the fact that pretty much everyone saw this coming down the pipe, are surely worth something even to sceptics.
Critics will continue to use the fact these people were Conservative MPs against them – including the Conservative Party itself, it seems – but this isn’t really the issue. Danny Kruger was a Tory MP, and everyone sees him as a major asset to Reform, and rightfully so; even Dominic Cummings had nice things to say about him, and he scarcely says nice things about anyone.
Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless, winners of the by-elections in Clacton and Rochester, were Tory defectors. Much of UKIP’s presence in the European Parliament was comprised of former Conservative MEPs alienated by the party’s embrace of Europhilia, including Roger Helmer – former Conservative MEP for the East Midlands and Jenrick’s rival in the Newark by-election of 2014.
If not assets, other former Tories have proven inoffensive enough. Lee Anderson has long since shaken his association with his old party – indeed, he’s done it once before. Jake Berry was obscure enough to get away with defecting. Nadine Dorries – arguably the worst defection thus far, courtesy her contribution to Online Safety Act – is made tolerable only by the likelihood that she won’t have any real power.
The simple fact of the matter is that Reform was always bound to take some Tory flotsam on board. When your modus operandi for the next decade is to supplant and replace the Tories as the main right-leaning party in Britain, it’s pretty much a given.
Rather, the problem is the reliability of Reform’s converts. To have lived a life of sin is less problematic than never converting at all; this is true of religion and it is true of politics. Farage is headed for the belly of the beast; the antibodies of the regime are going to be working overtime to make his time in Number 10 as unfruitful and frustrating as possible. If the Blob is resistant to Keir Starmer, of all people, it’s sure to have an existential hatred of Mr Brexit. The next election is scheduled for 2029, and we’re already hearing murmurs from Whitehall about how to stop Reform from within.
Now more than ever, Farage needs true believers around him, and while Brexit Braverman’s defection is intuitive, I doubt he’ll be able to rely on “The Boy from Baghdad” when he inevitably comes under fire.
The jury’s still out on Bobby J.
As we’ve seen in the United States – especially during the first Trump administration, but increasingly during the second – the recycling of staffers, advisers, and appointees can destabilise and inhibit the leader from the next layer down. Given that Reform’s success verifiably hinges on Farage’s personal capital, meaning Reform’s success in Whitehall will hinge upon Farage’s personal ability to Do Things.
One might say this is true of all governments, not merely those controlled by populists, and while this is true, it’s especially true of one plausibly (not merely technically) campaigning on the expectation of real, fundamental change; change that, at times, may wholly necessary but still deeply unpopular. The failure to match voter expectations is politics as usual, but Reform is promising exactly the opposite. Failure to translate executive will into tangible results will not only be used as ammunition by rival parties, but by the establishment (from all parties and none) and reactionaries desperately seeking to retrench it.
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On the Alabama IVF Ruling
On the 19th February 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos created through IVF are “children”, and should be legally recognised as such. This issue was brought by three couples suing their IVF providers due to the destruction of their children while being cryogenically stored under an existing Death of a Minor statue in the state. This statute explicitly covered foetuses (presumably to allow for compensation to be sought by women who has suffered miscarriages or stillbirths which could have been prevented), but there was some ambiguity over whether IVF embryos were covered prior to the ruling that it applies to “all unborn children, regardless of their location”. It has since been revealed that the person responsible was a patient at the clinic in question, so while mainstream outlets have stated that the damage was ‘accidental’, I find this rather implausible given the security in place for accessing cryogenic freezers. It is the author’s own suspicion that the person responsible was in fact an activist foreseeing the consequences of successful Wrongful Death of a Minor lawsuit against the clinic for the desecration of unborn children outside the womb.
The ruling does not explicitly ban or even restrict IVF treatments; it merely states that the products thereof must be legally recognised as human beings. However, this view is incompatible with multiple stages of the IVF process, and this is what makes this step in the right direction a potentially significant victory. For those who may be (blissfully) unaware, the IVF process goes something like this. A woman is hormonally stimulated to release multiple eggs in a cycle rather than the usual one or two. These are then exacted and then fertilised with sperm in a lab. There is nothing explicitly contrary to the view that life begins at conception in these first two steps. However, as Elisabeth Smith (Director of State Policy at the Centre for Reproductive Rights) explains, not all of the embryos created can be used. Some are tossed due to genetic abnormalities, and even of those that remain usually no more than three are implanted into the womb at any given time, but they can be cryogenically stored for up to a decade and implanted at a later date or into someone else.
In this knowledge, three major problems for the IVF industry in Alabama become apparent. The first is that they will not be able to toss those which they deem to be unsuitable for implantation due to genetic abnormalities. This would massively increase the cost to IVF patients as they would have to store all the children created for an unspecified length of time. This is assuming that storing children in freezers is deemed to be acceptable at all, which is not a given as any reasonable person would say that freezing children at later stages of development was incredibly abusive. The second problem is that even if it is permitted to continue creating children outside of the womb and storing them for future implantation (perhaps by only permitting storage for a week or less), it would only be possible to create the number of children that the woman is willing to have implanted. This would further increase costs as if the first attempt at implantation fails, the patient would have to go back to the drawing board and have more eggs extracted, rather than trying again from a larger supply already in the freezer. The third problem is that, particularly if the number of stored children increases dramatically, liability insurance would have to cover any loss, destruction, or damage to said children, which would make it a totally unviable business for all but the wealthiest.
The connection between this ruling and the abortion debate has been made explicitly by both sides. Given that it already has a total ban on abortion, Alabama seems a likely state to take further steps to protect the unborn, which may spread to other Republican states if they are deemed successful. The states that currently also impose a total ban on abortion either at any time after conception or after 6 weeks gestation (where it is only possible to know of a pregnancy for 2 weeks) are Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, Arizona, and Utah. There are other states with an exception only for rape and incest, with some requiring that this be reported to law enforcement.However, despite the fact that the ruling was made by Republicans appointed to their posts at the time of Donald Trump’s presidency, he has publicly criticised this decision saying that “we should be making it easier for people to have strong families, not harder”. Nikki Haley appeared initially to support the ban, but later backtracked on this commitment. In a surprisingly intellectually honest move, The Guardian made an explicit link between the medical hysteria on this topic and the prevalence of female doctors among IVF patients. Glenza (2024) wrote:
“Fertility is of special concern to female physicians. Residents typically finish training at 31.6 years of age, which are prime reproductive years. Female physicians suffer infertility at twice the rate of the general population, because demanding careers push many to delay starting a family.”
While dry and factual, this statement admits consciously that ‘infertility’ is (or at least can be) caused by lifestyle choices and priorities (i.e. prioritising one’s career over using ideal reproductive years in the 20’s and early 30’s to marry and have children), rather than genes or bad luck, and is therefore largely preventable by women making different choices.
I sincerely hope that, despite criticism of the ruling by (disproportionately female) doctors which a vested interest, the rule of law stands firm and that an honest interpretation of this ruling is manifested in reality. This would mean that for reasons stated above it will become unviable to run a profitable IVF business, and that while wealthy couples may travel out of state, a majority of those currently seeking IVF will instead adopt children, and/or face the consequences of their life decisions. Furthermore, I hope that young women on the fence about accepting a likely future proposal, pulling the goalie, or aborting a current pregnancy to focus on her career consider the long-term consequences of waiting too long to have children.
