Charlotte Grimshaw is an Auckland author and critic.
OPINION: In a chapter of Inside Story titled “Politics and the Bedroom”, Martin Amis is in Blackpool with fellow writer Christopher Hitchens. It is 1978, and they are covering a party conference for their respective papers. In the pub, Hitchens reports that he nearly got off the night before with the deputy treasurer of the Young Conservatives Association. Only drunkenness could explain this, they agree. Hitchens was always the guy rejecting suitors as insufficiently left wing.
Amis, for his part, felt no correlation between politics and the bedroom. It’s hard enough getting there, he says. Why throw obstacles in the way? When Hitchens suggests Amis would have been happy to get off with the Conservatives’ deputy treasurer, he replies, “Uh, yeah. As long as she didn’t actually goose-step into the bedroom.”
Trotskyist Hitchens rejects posh girls, too: he says they make him feel guilty, because the arc of history suggests he’ll eventually be stringing them up.
It’s all very droll and tongue-in-cheek, but it raises a good question. Are politics definitive, and does incompatibility on that front render a relationship untenable? The answer depends on the strength of your political instincts. Amis tended to be vague in this area; for him, it wasn’t crucial.
What about matters of conscience, though? In politics, beliefs are regarded as private, so political parties allow members to cast conscience votes freely on issues of moral significance. But is there a point when your conscience vote defines your character? A point when it becomes everyone’s business? That moment has been reached, you could argue, when those private beliefs are the ground zero of a human-rights catastrophe unfolding in a fellow Western democracy. It’s around this time, you could say, that the conscience stance needs to come out of the closet and answer for itself.
Since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade against the will of the majority, allowing states to impose abortion bans, we’ve been witnessing the suffering of American women. It’s time for consciences to be re-examined. The true effect of abortion restriction is now starkly in evidence. A “pro-life” society is on display in all its perversity, and everyone’s response to it is instructive.
It shouldn’t be possible to hide coyly behind the notion of personal views when we’re up against this reality. The 10-year-old rape victim who had to flee the state of Ohio to seek an abortion. The doctors threatened and harassed for treating her. The mothers who risk bleeding to death or dying of sepsis because an unviable fetus can’t be removed. The rape victims forced to bear the child. The women having to give birth to dead or dying babies. The women who want a baby, but are terrified, now, of being pregnant. The suffering of entire families.
Now that their minority view has been forced on a population, and they see the resulting damage, how do our anti-abortion politicians respond? What do Opposition Leader Chris Luxon, health spokesman Dr Shane Reti and like-minded members of our left and right parties have to say about America’s unfolding health disaster? How extreme does a private belief have to be before it’s off-putting or even disqualifying?
If “abortion is murder”, you can’t let an Ohio 10-year-old get away with it. So, what would you do with her? Would you force her to give birth? Your answer defines you as a person and also, importantly, as a politician.
No more private beliefs for you if you favour no privacy for women. Is your wife’s personal life really nobody’s business but her own? Or would you be quite happy with a government goose-stepping into her consulting room?
