Health Bill Newspeak

[sawyl]

As has been widely noted, the Dorries-Field amendment to the Health Bill is nothing if not deeply disingenous. Zoe Williams summarises it rather neatly in the Guardian:

The exact wording is this: the government should provide "independent information, advice and counselling services for women requesting termination of pregnancy to the extent that the consortium considers they will choose to use them". "Independent" is defined as "a private body that does not itself provide for the termination of pregnancies or a statutory body".

In other words, GPs decide how much counselling to provide, and it can be provided by anyone except those performing the abortion. There is no requirement that "independent" mean "not faith-based": we'd have to rely on the discretion of the Department of Health to keep out groups such as CareConfidential, whose "counselling" consists of misinformation aimed at discouraging women from having abortions.

So the use of the word independent in this context is not independent as in morally disinterested in the eventual outcome — as noted, the intention of the amendment is to reduce abortions by a third — but rather, it's a specious claim about the funding of the counselling service that is only being made in order put yet more (religious) obstacles in the way of women's rights to choose. So much, then, for religious ethics.

ETA: The government seem to have got cold feet and are now advising their MPs vote against the amendment...