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Vera
Drake Movie About Backstreet Abortion Opens
in U.S. New York loves Vera Drake. Even lunchtime showings of Mike Leigh's film about backstreet abortion are filling two city cinemas. It seems strange to me, a visitor, that the stewed tea, rigid morals and lurid wallpaper of Fifties England should jump cultures so easily, but why not? Manhattan may not be big on nostalgia or faded Constable prints, but it takes its sexual politics seriously. When the Republican convention came to town two months ago, tens of thousands of pro-abortionists marched over Brooklyn Bridge. Same-sex couples outnumber heterosexual ones at many restaurants, and the wedding pages of the New York Times feature gay commitment ceremonies alongside brides in veils. Vera Drake fits well with this progressive backdrop. Imelda Staunton's motherly cleaning lady is also a social pioneer, moving from one council flat to the next with her biscuit tin containing rubber tubing and carbolic soap to 'help out' girls with nowhere else to turn. Her impulse, never financial but not self-consciously charitable either, is the reflex altruism of someone who sees a need and meets it. Finally, Vera, who judges no one, meets the forces of censoriousness. Her son considers her a killer, her employers treat her as a pariah, and she must make her case before a law that regards abortionists, except for those providing a discreet service for the rich, as murderers and corrupters. Leigh's homages to the poor are sometimes cloying, but this one has a special relevance for a Britain in which pro-lifers urge tighter curbs on terminating pregnancies. It is also an eerily apt fable for today's America. Vera Drake's 20 years of back bedroom abortions begin a timeline that has always been more erratic in the US than the UK. In 1965, all 50 states retained a ban. In 1973, the case of Roe v Wade legalised abortion. In 1984, three clinics were bombed on Christmas Day and the perpetrators called their actions 'a birthday gift for Jesus'. And in 2004, on the cusp of a new presidential term, Vera Drake is less a snapshot of an ancient world than a glimpse of how tomorrow's America may look. If George W Bush wins, he will be able to replace four retiring supreme court judges with candidates who share his beliefs, thus opening the way to state bans on abortion and a God-driven social creed. Liberal Europe is horrified that Rocco Buttiglione, who thinks that homosexuality is sinful and that marriage is for breeding, is on the brink of becoming justice commissioner. That prospect, though obnoxious, is less alarming than the apex of the US judiciary moving wholesale to the grip of neocons. When the stakes are so high, it is not surprising that the election is being fought out over a petri dish. John Kerry, whose campaign resembles a biology GCSE course, promises to overturn Bush's block on funding embryonic stem cell research. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Nancy Reagan, Christopher Reeve's widow and a large chunk of 100 million sick Americans are on Kerry's side. God is not, though. The Catholic church opposes therapeutic cloning and wrangles over Kerry's pro-abortion stance. Right-wingers want him excommunicated, while Vatican sources say banishment should be reserved for those who 'procure or perform' an abortion. Mr Kerry is no Vera Drake, but neither is he palatable to the churches or to family fundamentalist groups which call their other fight, against gay marriage, 'our Stalingrad'. How, commentators are suddenly wondering, did religion and politics get so entwined? But why should anyone be surprised, when Bush signalled from the start his intention to merge heaven and the state? In the beginning was Pastor Marvin Olasky, his first guru and prophet of 'compassionate conservatism'. More recently, when asked by Bob Woodward if he took his father's advice, the President said: 'There is a higher father I appeal to.' If God-Botherers Anonymous existed, then Mr Bush, an addictive personality who holds cabinet prayer sessions, would have joined up long ago. What's new in this election is the collision of faith and tactics. More than 40 per cent of Americans say they have been born again, while a quarter of the electorate are white evangelical Protestants. Of that group, four million did not vote in 2000. Among Catholic grandees, debates about Kerry's dissident behaviour have eclipsed church reservations over the Iraq war. No wonder that Karl Rove, Bush's political strategist, saw God's way as salvation alley. In secular Britain, the Almighty is more problematic. Tony Blair's Bible-by-the-bed godliness soothes few voters. His comment about answering to 'my maker' for the deaths of British soldiers was met with alarm, and advisers vetoed his wish to end a prewar broadcast with the benediction: 'God bless you.' There is nothing furtive about George Bush's faith and yet objectors are only just waking up to the double danger of lobotomised evangelism. The first threat is a supreme court likely, if Bush wins, to skew the law against compassion and science. Already, Bush has brought in a ban on late abortions. Many of the 70,000 women who die each year of botched terminations, mostly in the developing world, might be saved but for the rule forbidding NGOs with US funding for family planning from providing abortions. The second danger is aired by Ron Suskind in his New York Times essay, published last week, on faith. Though Suskind's analysis is masterful, it should be no shock that Bush has adopted a knit-your-own reality based on hunch and the arrogance of the unquestioning. Simplistic notions of good and evil and the sacrificing of objective truth to God-given certainty were evident long before 9/11. Those of us educated by nuns saw early on how this sort of implacability works. At my Catholic primary, it was a sin for girls to wear trousers and missing Mass led straight to hell. Such dubious certitudes seemed out of vogue until Mr Bush, a hardline Methodist, took over the White House. He might as well have hung a sign marked 'Narnia' on the gate. This fantasy land inhabited by the US President - and occupied by Mr Blair on a time-share basis over the Iraq war - has odd rules on killing. You cannot harm a blastocyst, but you can execute a young prisoner on death row. Embryos are sacred, but the children of Falluja are expendable. Science promises cures and miracles, but the most advanced country in the world risks heading back down a Via Dolorosa to the time of Vera Drake . George W Bush has marked out the election battlefield as a fight over the sanctity of existence. He is right. The argument about the destruction of human beings is critical, but it should not be focused on driving abortion into the backstreets or halting scientific progress. It should dwell, instead, on a war mandated by God and run by idiots. The question is which candidate is more likely to forge domestic and foreign policies ordaining suffering and squandered lives. And the answer is that people of every faith and none should wish, for all our sakes, that John Kerry wins. << The Guardian -- 10/24/04 >>
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