Among the acres of newsprint devoted to plans to charge foreigners to use the NHS one suggestion is especially troubling: a proposal to deny foreign women access to free abortions.

This isn’t going to be about the rights and wrongs of charging for the NHS – although while I have the platform I’ll say the idea repulses me – it’s about what the production of this report tells us about the Tory-led government.

This is about a government whose members don’t acknowledge women in their policymaking and who are unable to feel an empathy with those whose lives and experiences are alien to them. And in a government dominated by wealthy men it’s no surprise that the needs and rights of women, especially poor women, don’t even cross their radar.

The Department of Health consultation would have us believe that this is about saving money. However, its own report acknowledges it has no figures for the cost of women travelling to the UK for abortions.

But that’s not to say money isn’t important here; in fact it’s the crux of the argument.

Implicit in this report is the belief that women are jetting into the UK to take advantage of the NHS, but this idea rests on the lie that for women abortion is somehow easily accessible. In countries such as Poland and Spain where abortion access is restricted the choice is between pulling together money to travel to the UK or pulling it together for a dangerous backstreet abortion.

Because, despite what anti-choice advocates would have you believe, when abortion is banned it doesn’t stop, it just becomes more dangerous.

Any children born due to this measure will more often than not be born into poverty because this, like all attempts to restrict access to abortion worldwide, is one that has the harsher impact on working-class women.

Social conservatism is the bedfellow of economic conservatism for a reason: those with money will always be able to bypass the law and, in this case, wealthier women will simply have a larger bill, while working-class women risk injury or death just to exercise the most basic control over their own body.

This government that tells us it wants to cut red tape and promote personal freedom would dictate to women when they have a child, tell rape victims they must have their rapist’s child, tell mothers that their family will be cast into poverty by having a child they can’t afford to care for.

The Tories might tell us what other countries do is none of their concern, but if they take this action they will be as guilty of snatching away women’s rights as their fellow conservatives who have legislated against them.

This isn’t an argument about what the NHS does or doesn’t do, it’s an argument about our government’s thoughtless approach to policymaking, an approach that further marginalises women. And it’s an argument we have to fight and win.

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 Estelle Hart is a Labour party member in Gower constituency Labour party. She tweets @EstelleHart

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Photo: Tony Roberts