Scottish independence debate must not distract from the need to safeguard fundamental rights – Christine Jardine MP

This week it has been difficult to decide what to write about. Not because nothing is happening, but because it feels as if everything is happening at once.

Protesters march around the Arizona Capitol after the US Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe vs Wade abortion decision (Picture: Ross D. Franklin/AP file)

Like that feeling as a child when you are running down hill and you are not sure if your legs can move fast enough to keep up.

So many challenges, so many threats, and all with a huge potential impact. How will we combat all of them and protect what we cherish about our way of life?

Some of them we had already known about and were beginning to tackle: the cost-of-living emergency, inflation, the aftermath of the pandemic, the war in Ukraine.

If that list were not already scary enough we now find ourselves confronted by an existential threat to women’s rights and an ill-conceived and badly timed attempt to break up our country.

I had originally thought that taking a week to compose my thoughts would allow me to find a calm, logical way to express my emotions about the ruling from the US Supreme Court on abortion.

I was wrong.

Every fibre of my being wants to scream in anger that Roe vs Wade is fundamental to women’s health, and right to free choice.

I am not going to spend words arguing for a woman's right to choose. I shouldn't have to. Until last week I didn’t have to. What’s more, until their historical volte face, the US legal and political community didn’t seem to think I had to either.

Every woman in the US had that right enshrined in law. Her body was hers and hers alone. Decisions about it and her future were also hers and hers alone.

But now it seems that entitlement will depend on which part of the United States you call home. In more liberally minded states like New York, you may still have the choice. But not in others like Arkansas.

So much for equality. Somehow that iconic section of the US constitution, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”, now has a hollow ring and one word stands out more than perhaps ever before. Men.

I don't mind admitting that I cried when I watched TV footage of health workers at a clinic in Arkansas explain to the distraught women who called that they were sorry but they could no longer help. That the traumatic process they had gone through to decide that an abortion was the best, perhaps the only option, for them and their family had been for nothing.

The finest legal minds in the country, as they claim to be, had decided that their choice, perhaps their medical need, would now be denied. Fifty years of progress wiped out.

I appreciate there will be those in this country who joined in the celebrations when Roe vs Wade was overturned. Who will see it as a victory. I respect their right to hold that view.

But, as someone who never wanted, or needed an abortion, who never had to go through the trauma of that decision, I cannot see it as anything other than a devastating defeat for human rights.

To deny women the right to choose is to make us all, male and female, less free.

Indeed it is key to my beliefs as a Liberal that individuals have the right to make their own life decisions so long as they do not harm others.

Moreover, tearing down Roe vs Wade has fuelled fears that the US Supreme Court may turn next to the reversal of same-sex marriage laws, gay rights and who knows what else.

In this country, it will be no use burying our heads in the sand and saying that this is happening in America, as if we should have no concern for our fellow beings there.

We are surely all aware that so often when America sneezes, we catch a cold. In a globalized world, that becomes ever more the case.

We see evidence here in Scotland of the emergence of political parties whose policies reflect the same anti-liberal beliefs which championed the loss of a woman's right to choose in the US.

We are still awaiting the introduction of buffer zones in Scotland to protect women from the vile and selfish protests around clinics, which harass and bully them when they are at their most vulnerable.

And trans women are currently having to endure widespread hysteria over rights they have enjoyed almost unnoticed, and without problem, for decades.

I worry that my daughter and those of her friends who are gay, bi-sexual or trans may have to fight to retain the rights that my generation won and took for granted were secure.

Young people are already seeing the erosion of their education, their employment opportunities and their financial stability.

How many 25-year-olds do any of us know who can afford the mortgages, without parental support, that lenders were throwing at my generation?

At Holyrood, however, and on their share of the green benches at Westminster, the SNP has another priority.

A second referendum. An expensive, time-consuming, divisive argument over which we have already spent a decade in bitter acrimony.

So while our rights, our jobs, our ability to feed our families are under threat, they will ramp up the grievance, divide us against each other and hold onto power for their own ends.

The danger, of course, is the damage that we may not notice is being done. How much was done in the US while Trump distracted everyone.

We should be careful lest, like our sisters across the Atlantic, we wake one morning – after years of political turmoil, polarised parties pitting us against each other and demonising anyone who is ‘other’ – to discover that our law has been turned against us.

How did it come to this?

Christine Jardine is the Scottish Liberal Democrat MP for Edinburgh West