Abortion was a hot election issue in the US of 1984. The pro-family rhetoric of the Born-again Right predictably incurred the correspondingly doctrinaire derision of the women's movement and the Left. The National Organisation for Women (NOW) banned from its platform women who in any way opposed abortion. Both sides agree, it seems, that abortion is a primary and integral component of women's liberation and a crucial test of ‘reliability’ for or against.

All the more vital, then, is the search for ethical consistency and clarity which is being maintained in some wings of the peace and women's movements. This was given some force by the visit to Britain last autumn of the US Catholic pacifist Juli Loesch, who founded, in 1979, an organisation called Prolifers for Survival. She came to promote a parallel network here. This exploratory visit, (sponsored by Pax Christi, some members of London SPUC and Women for Life) provoked signs of increasing polarisation in UK. One reaction in Peace News-which in 1983 published a reflective consideration of the links between private and public violence-‘was to curl into a ball and puke’.