AS spring approaches those who bizarrely style themselves “pro-life” stand coiled, ready to pounce on any unsuspecting woman who may want to exercise bodily autonomy. For 40 days these poor souls will pray for those of the women they harass, but now they must do it a couple of hundred metres from the clinics.
 
It’s an odd hobby, praying to — they would have us believe — an all-seeing force at a specific place and time designed to cause maximum upset to another human being.
 
Thankfully, I’m not plagued with the comfort of a god.
 
No god built the hospital, no god built the road pavement they pray on, and no god will chart our future — it’s all on us, I’m afraid.
 
My daughter is applying for university courses now and, as ancient as that makes me feel, it’s obviously a source of some pride. Thoughts of a life as an engineer have given way to a dream of making films, and while I find myself worrying a bit about how hard it is to make a living in that game, if you can’t have a crack at following your dreams at 17, when will you?
 
She’s become a little obsessed with the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and that classic of a fallback for anyone who has ever been asked about their favourite film, A Matter of Life and Death (1946).
 
I first saw it as a wee boy, sitting watching the TV Saturday matinee with my granny, but I’d never given it half the analysis my daughter has. Heaven is in black and white, and the earth in colour, is about as deep as I’ve got in.

As an unbeliever from the first, I liked that thought — a wonderful subversion of the idea of paradise once we’re gone. It seems to me that the short-term comfort any individual might gain from the idea of a heaven for ourselves or our loved ones has been outgunned time and time again through history by the hell on earth that it excuses.
 
The point is to live, now. That shouldn’t be a controversial thought, but increasingly it seems to be.
 
Armchair generals across what was formerly known as a political spectrum happily cheered this week as a Labour government magicked-up £13.4 billion to spend on armaments, on top of the billions of pounds worth of bombs sent to Ukraine to prolong a war and shorten the lives of hundreds of thousands.
 
According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, it would cost £3.3bn to end the household benefit cap and scrap the two-child cap — and with it the humiliation of forcing women to prove they’d been raped to win support for a third child.
 
That single act would lift 620,000 children in the fifth-richest state on Earth out of absolute poverty at a stroke, but instead, the Chancellor has told them to wait on growth for a fighting chance at life.
 
Maybe that growth will come by “reshaping the economy” to cater for the Ministry of Defence’s largesse, as the Prime Minister told the Scottish Labour conference last week. Maybe it will deliver jobs, maybe it won’t, but one guarantee is that it will deliver billions in profits straight into the hands of the arms manufacturers who have already been coining it in from booming sales in Israel and Ukraine.
 
As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, this money, here and across Europe, is going to come from attacks on the social wage. The rhetoric on benefit “scroungers” and “cheats” is already being ramped up in preparation for the forthcoming — the lines at the foodbanks regarded as a photo opportunity for the caring political axemen, rather than offering the merest hint that the system may already be a meagre, punitive attempt at the humiliation of an entire class.
 
Where are the pro-life campaigners here?
 
All this as we hear our health and social care system cannot cope with an ageing population — an exercise in lowering expectations. The population has been ageing for quite a while, but oddly enough, social care budgets have consistently fallen short. Glasgow, for example, spends £150m-a-year less on social care than it did 15 years ago — that’s not the sign of a system struggling for air, but a system being strangled to death.
 
What’s to be done then? Well, our liberal friends — across party lines — have the answer: kill yourself.
 
Gift-wrapped in that euphemistic triumph that is “assisted dying,” you may now be given the choice to relieve the taxpayer of the heavy burden you place on them by being bumped off on the NHS.
 
At Westminster and Holyrood, private members Bills are gently meandering their way through the parliamentary processes, gliding along on worthy calls to alleviate suffering, unencumbered by concepts beyond the individual.
 
It would be generous to call these Bills naive. I was once naive too. Around 15 years ago, I’d have been supporting this, but a chance conversation with a disability rights activist opened my eyes.

Like many, I had taken a glance at the subject and thought no further than the perfectly human urge to limit suffering. I’m now ashamed of my ignorance, and my utter failure to imagine the implications for people with long-term conditions, those disabled by the world, and those routinely made to feel guilty for drawing breath.
 
That activist, Pam Duncan-Glancy, is now a Labour MSP and continuing her battle against Lib Dem MSP Liam McArthur’s Bill, “a Bill so vaguely drafted,” she told me “virtually anyone” could be eligible for assisted suicide, adding:
 
“In a world where disabled people suffer systematic oppression, coercion is a problem already, never mind after a Bill like this. If this passes, the abuse we’ve had to put up with all our lives telling us we’d be better off dead or folk telling us they’d rather die than live our lives suddenly becomes not just normalised, but justified in law. It’s scary, and there’s no safeguard I’ve seen that does anything to stop that.”
 
If you doubt that truth, look no further than the handling of Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s UK Bill. Her original plans included the “safeguard” of a requirement of final approval of a High Court judge. When the legal profession protested the system could not cope with the additional workload, it was simply dropped. Compare and contrast with the battle disabled people had to even get to the committee table, never mind heard.
 
We live in a country where people with learning disabilities live on average 23 years less than the rest of the population after decades of having Do Not Resuscitate notices placed at the foot of their beds to “ease the burden” on their families, and where just five years ago during the pandemic, disabled people were the first to see similar notices appear.
 
Considering those laws without the basic understanding — or willingness to learn — that these material, systematic, discriminations exist is to deny the experience of millions.
 
We risk — as Kevin Ayres once sang — “making life easy, by making it worse.”
 
A few months ago I sat by a hospital bed and watched my father die. We were lucky. He had the best treatment imaginable and, when the time came, the best palliative care, but it didn’t make it any less difficult.
 
In those moments — like millions of others with their loved ones — we would have given anything to spare him the slightest discomfort. That seems natural, but we cannot forget that there is a world beyond, that as socialists a momentary, individual, craving for comfort — however instinctive — cannot excuse a greater ill.
 
If there is such a thing as a good death, then it comes from having a happy, fulfilled life with all the support you need.
 
Other than greed and the drive to war, nothing stands in the way of winning that for all.
 
Now that actually would be pro-life.