You may agree or disagree with Kruger’s views on abortion. But he was right to air them.

Jun 30, 2022 by Jill

by William Atkinson, Conservative Home:

I have written before about the tedious obsession of SW1 and Fleet Street with America’s abortion debate. In a country where abortion has been legal and widely available since 1967, and where more than 200,000 abortions are performed a year, a political class raised on The West Wing and The Handmaid’s Tale have treated the US Supreme Court’s overturning of the Roe V Wade ruling as if it is the end of days.

Needless to say, in my habitually unenthusiastic fashion, I do not agree. Neither did the ever-excellent Dominic Sandbrook in a fantastic article for UnHerd yesterday – which essentially says what I aimed to say two months ago in a much more eloquent fashion – and nor did the erstwhile son of Prue Leith, fan of Edmund Burke, and MP for Devizes, Danny Kruger.

In a Commons debate yesterday on the ruling that was tedious, pointless, and unedifying even by today’s turgid standards of Parliamentary discourse, Kruger attracted attention to himself by stating that he doesn’t agree women have ‘an absolute right to bodily autonomy’. This did not go down well amongst those MPs who had arrived expecting an afternoon of uninterrupted liberal virtue-signalling.

As MPs tried to speak over him, Kruger added that he couldn’t ‘understand why we are lecturing the United States’ over the Court’s decision to hand the ‘political question’ of abortion rights back to democratic decision-makers. This drew a clear contrast with Labour MPs such as Dame Diana Johnson, who claimed ‘American far-right groups’ were ‘organising’ to roll back the 1967 Abortion Act this side of the pond.

Read here