Abortion time limits to 12 weeks? How did Jeremy Hunt get responsibility for the public health?

Call for a general strike against the Government’s policies on the NHS – and a fig to Jeremy Hunt’s views on abortion

Marge Berer
Editor, Reproductive Health Matters

6 October 2012

At the Labour conference this week, Andy Burnham accused Jeremy Hunt of failing to make any statements about important current health service issues in Parliament since he became Health Secretary. What a pity Hunt decided to open his mouth today, because now we know just how uninformed he is. Hunt said he favoured reducing the abortion time limit to 12 weeks. Really? How much more irrelevant can it get with this Government? But he wasn’t alone. Maria Miller, who became women’s minister in the recent shuffle, had already expressed her personal opinion on the abortion time limit, Theresa May was then pushed to take a view on the Today programme, and (not to be left out) David Cameron joined in to insist that the government has no plans to put forward legislation. Still, every news outlet in the country seems to have picked up on it. Is that what the media are for these days – to report every off-the-cuff, unthought-out opinion that comes down the road? Give me a break. This is non-news.

What is news is that Andy Burnham found out that 398 contracts for health work in eight NHS areas went private this past week, contracts worth a quarter of a billion pounds, and that this is only the beginning , with another £750 million in contracts already lined up for next year. What is news is that Jeremy Hunt is going to preside over Tory plans to slash the number of teams of NHS specialists providing high quality care for cancer, heart disease and stroke, involving the loss of jobs of hundreds of senior NHS health professionals, down to fewer than half of current numbers – in a country with an ageing population, where cancer, heart disease and stroke are the three leading causes of deaths and services are needed more than ever. What is news is that a nurses’ leader was told that her seriously disabled daughter, who is unable even to cross the street on her own and needs 24-hour care, had been judged to be ‘fit for work‘ by an official who must surely be utterly incompetent. What is news is that The Royal College of GP’s ‘champion for commissioning’ has recently resigned because it has become clear that GP groups have been set up to fail, that commissioning will ‘fall into the hands of corporate commissioners’ leading to effective privatisation of the NHS. What is news is that the pathology labs run in partnership with multinational Serco had 400 adverse incidents reported in 2011, including losing and mislabelling of samples, exceeding turnaround times and breaching critical risk levels 14 times.

This is crisis-level stuff. We cannot wait to bring down this Government until 2015. By then it will have destroyed local council services, libraries, the education of our children, universities, Sure Start, the trains, social welfare services from home care to mental health services, disability and unemployment benefit, made more and more people unemployed, wrecked the life chances of a whole generation of young people, and sold off much of the National Health Service to private interests. There is a national demonstration against the cuts and privatisation of all health and social welfare services on 20 October in London. What we really need are demonstrations around the country. Everyone working in the NHS and everyone who has ever been a patient of the NHS, was delivered by an NHS midwife or doctor and owes their health and life to the NHS, as I certainly do, needs to support it in some form, whether on the street, at a local meeting, of which there are many, or through letters to their MP.

At the demonstration, I urge the NHS Federation, Keep Our NHS Public, 38 Degrees, and all the health professional associations and royal colleges to call for a general strike against the Government’s policies on the NHS. By next April, when all the changes set in place under the Health and Social Care Act go into effect, it will be too late to stop them.

As for abortion, I don’t expect Jeremy Hunt to know anything about that. As my MP Mark Field, a Conservative Party backbencher, said in an email to me on 7th September when I wrote to ask him for Hunt’s qualifications for the job of Health Secretary: ” As you will know, ministerial appointments under any government often bear little relation to a politician’s CV… Jeremy has experience in setting up and running his own businesses so at least has entrepreneurial and management experience.” So much for putting responsibility for the public health into his hands then.

In any case, I can assure Jeremy Hunt that if he does seek to reduce the abortion time limit to 12 weeks, he will face the fight of his life from the women of this country – and he will lose, because we will absolutely not accept it.