Sorry, Sally Phillips, but a woman should be able to know if her unborn baby has Down’s syndrome | Hadley Freeman

I’ve always been a fan of Sally Phillips. I loved her as the chain-smoking feminist Shazza in Bridget Jones, of course, as well as the nightmare girlfriend from the past in Green Wing. But mainly I loved her for the 90s feminist sketch show Smack the Pony. Some women experience their feminist awakening when they read The Female Eunuch or Andrea Dworkin. For me, it came from Nora Ephron and Smack the Pony, in which Phillips, along with Fiona Allen and Doon Mackichan, gloriously satirised the rigid expectations placed on women, often by other women.

Which brings me to Phillips’ documentary, A World Without Down’s Syndrome?, which screened on Wednesday night on BBC2. There has been an enormous amount of publicity for this documentary, with praise for Phillips’ clearly heartfelt intentions. The actor has an adorable young son, Olly, who has Down’s syndrome, and one of her aims is to provide a counterbalance to the almost entirely negative depiction of Down’s syndrome in both society and the media. For this, she should be loudly applauded. True, her wholly positive depiction of her life with a child with Down’s syndrome is as partial as the wholly negative ones, not least because her son is relatively high-functioning and Phillips and her husband are able to afford help. Still, as I said, it’s a much-needed corrective, and hats off to her.

But that is not all Phillips and her film are arguing for. Rather, the documentary was pegged to the imminent availability of non-invasive prenatal testing on the NHS, which is a safe and more accurate method of screening for Down’s syndrome than the form currently available, and with no risk of miscarriage. This, according to Phillips, is “sad, it’s just horrible, really”. Later, she describes herself as “really quite angry” about it.

To argue for screening is not to argue, as Phillips suggests, that people with Down’s don’t have a right to life

Phillips makes no bones that she is coming at this subject from a deeply personal perspective, one that is occasionally blurred with tears during her film. This perhaps explains why such a bright woman repeatedly and determinedly conflated equipping pregnant women with knowledge about their unborn baby – that is, being screened – and the advice they are then given about it. No doubt some medical professionals have advised women to have terminations after receiving a positive test; there absolutely should be campaigning about how this kind of information is imparted to expectant women and mothers who have just given birth.

This, however, does not mean that women should be denied available information about their unborn baby’s health, and instead be unnecessarily surprised at birth with a situation for which they may be entirely unprepared. Phillips is right: rates of Down’s syndrome probably will decrease with the rise of easier, more accurate screening. But she is wrong to then draw the conclusion that women should therefore not be informed about the health of their in utero baby.

Phillips did not know Olly had Down’s syndrome until he was born. But this, she says, was a good thing, because by having no choice she was compelled to see how much Olly benefits her family. “That made me wonder whether choice is always the wonderful thing it’s cracked up to be,” she says, a statement which casts something of a shadow on her description of herself as “pro-choice”. But while not having a choice has worked out wonderfully for her family, no consideration is given to women who do not have Phillips’ aforementioned privileges. A single mother with two jobs and three kids, for example, might not find similar benefits from a lack of choice. It is very difficult to see how compelling women who genuinely feel they cannot care for a child with special needs to give birth helps anyone, least of all people with Down’s syndrome.

To argue for screening – and for women to have the freedom to make their own choice with the information – is not to argue, as Phillips suggests, that people with Down’s syndrome don’t have a right to life, or should never have been born. The point is it’s the woman’s choice about what’s best for her and her family, whatever the situation. Early in the film Phillips meets Prof Sue Buckley, who works at Down’s Syndrome Education. “We don’t believe that a diagnosis of Down’s syndrome should be a reason for termination,” Buckley says to a solemn Phillips.

And therein lies the rub: the idea that women should only have terminations for reasons someone else finds acceptable. How about if a woman feels too young to have a baby, or too poor, or doesn’t want to be tied to the man she conceived with for the rest of her life, or she doesn’t want a third baby, or any baby at all – are these permissible reasons for a termination? They are all pretty common ones. Or is it just a Down’s syndrome diagnosis that is deemed an unacceptable cause for an abortion? In more controversial areas, such as sex-selection abortion, the correct approach is to tackle the attitudes behind it, not ban abortion per se. Similarly, with Down’s syndrome screening what needs examining is the image around the syndrome and the way doctors discuss it, not the screening itself. It’s the attitudes, not the science, that’s the problem. Science is what gives women the choice. Which brings me to the nub of Phillips’ documentary.

Phillips, a committed Christian (which was not mentioned in the documentary), and her many online supporters insist that they’re not anti-choice – they just want women to make “informed” choices. The lie of this was revealed when Phillips met Kate, a woman who terminated her pregnancy after she was told her baby would have Down’s syndrome. Kate talked about how she read blogs, positive (“loads”) and negative, by parents of children with Down’s syndrome. She felt “informed”, and she then opted for a termination. Phillips says afterwards to the camera that she felt Kate was wrong: “Kate didn’t want a child like mine. That was difficult to hear.”

So it’s not choices that are “uninformed” that are the problem, it’s choices Phillips and others of her mindset don’t agree with. It is human for Phillips to relate these stories so closely to herself, but it is also astonishingly solipsistic and, given that she is doing so on such a public platform, potentially destructive. I am not generally given to making hand-wringing proclamations about what the BBC should and should not show, but it is genuinely shocking that BBC2 decided to screen a documentary with such a blatantly anti-choice message.

Phillips opened her documentary with the following questions: “What kind of society do we want to live in and who should be allowed to live in it?” The answer to the latter is, of course, everyone, which is the status quo – and more screening would not change that.

Phillips’ inference that screening will lead to babies with Down’s syndrome not “being allowed” to live in this society is dishonest. Anything that gives women more objective scientific information about their pregnancy is good.

The question of what kind of society we want to live in is, to my mind, even more simple: one in which women are not dismissed as “uninformed” or “wrong” on national TV – or anywhere – for making a choice about their pregnancy, and that goes equally for women who decide to carry their Down’s syndrome baby to term, or women who opt for a termination. Feeling is not fact, and being pro-choice means supporting all women’s choices, not just the ones you agree with. I’m pretty sure Smack the Pony once taught me that.

Sorry, Sally Phillips, but a woman should be able to know if her unborn baby has Down’s syndrome | Hadley Freeman

Sally Phillips: Do we really want a world without Down’s syndrome?

Sally Phillips and her husband, Andrew, didn’t find out that their first child, Olly, 12, had Down’s syndrome until he was 10 days old. Nobody noticed on the day he was born. “I had a caesarean because he was breech,” says Phillips. “I reacted badly to the anaesthetic so everyone was focused on me. Olly scored highly on all the tests and no one noticed there was anything different about him. I noticed. And I asked them to look at him. There was something about his eyes that was troubling me. It was as if his cheeks were really big and not allowing his eyes to open. I said, ‘Does he look like that because I ate a lot of cake when I was pregnant?’ They said, ‘Yes, probably.’”

Best-known for her roles in the Bridget Jones films (as Bridget’s best friend, Shazza) and Miranda (where she plays Miranda’s old school friend, Tilly), she has a knack of making comedy out of life, including her own. And she is not afraid of making fun of herself or her family. Indeed, showing that you can have a normal family life (because what is that anyway?) with a child with Down’s syndrome is one of the main points of a documentary Phillips has made for BBC2, A World Without Down’s Syndrome?

Her first documentary, it examines whether the new, non-invasive screening tests that are available will eventually eradicate Down’s syndrome. Phillips finds the prospect chilling.

She didn’t know that Olly would have Down’s syndrome. “Babies with Down’s syndrome quite often have poor muscle tone and find it hard to feed. We would stay up all night trying to feed him and by 10 days after his birth, he had gone down from 8lb to 3lb. Everyone was still saying, ‘You’re a first-time mum and you’re worrying. Babies always lose weight.’”

She had all the usual prenatal tests but they all came out as indicating an average risk. She admits she felt strange during the pregnancy but put it down to being a first-time mother. “I’m not one of these people who thinks they are psychic. But I just didn’t feel good during the pregnancy. I was all swollen up. It was like I’d been stung by a giant hornet. But everyone kept saying, ‘You’re a first-time mum, it’s all fine.’ Now, being politically correct, I wouldn’t say that I felt that something was ‘wrong’ but I knew that it was different.”

Phillips’ instinct was right. But she is evidently resilient and resolved to be open-minded about parenting a child with Down’s syndrome.

She has been pleasantly surprised. “There were lots of moments during Olly’s babyhood where I would think to myself, ‘Wait a minute, I am not experiencing this as a disaster.’ But you are so bought into the narrative. All the pregnancy books refer to Down’s syndrome as a ‘defect’. All you get is this information that says ‘High incidence of leukaemia, high incidence of deafness’ … It’s totally overwhelming and unhelpful.”

Her family life, as seen on the documentary, is the counter-narrative: water fights, paint fights, an obsession with Barcelona football club and a lot of dancing. Olly, it turned out, was completely different to the “tragedy” she was reading about. “Olly smiled his first smile at four weeks, like any baby, and it was this massive great big smile. I remember I had this one moment when I was going into town on the bus and there were these two mums with their ‘perfect’ babies and they were complaining and whingeing about everything. I thought, oh. I’m supposed to be having a dreadful time? I’m really not.

Sally Phillips in a scene from the documentary, A World Without Down’s Syndrome? Photograph: Brian J Ritchie

“At that point I was swinging Olly around the house in a towel, trying to teach him to crawl. That is something you would not have to teach a ‘normal’ child. But we were learning to crawl together and our bond was incredibly strong. We would laugh like lunatics for large portions of the day.”

We are talking in a large room overlooking the garden at her house in south-west London. Every two seconds we are interrupted by her two younger sons, Tom, four, and Luke, nine, showing off and being random. Their father, Andrew, a shipping industry executive, hovers nearby. She chases the boys out but they keep coming back. Eventually Olly wanders in with his iPad, looking for peace and quiet.

“Turn the sound off if you’re coming in here, Olly,” says Phillips.

“It is off,” he looks at us, witheringly, suddenly deciding against sharing space with two boring old people, “But bye bye.” It’s standard 12-year-old behaviour.

Olly attends a mainstream school and has disproved a lot of theories Phillips was told about when he was born. “I was told he would never ride a bike. He goes for a bike ride every day. I was told he would never be able to climb anything. Then we started having this problem where he would scale the back fence of the garden because he wanted to make friends with the neighbour’s children. None of the rest of us could scale that fence. The thing is, nobody knows what Down’s syndrome children can achieve.”

Do we really want to eliminate this community of people – 40,000 strong – in the UK?

It took years for her to decide that she was willing to front a documentary about Down’s syndrome. For a long time she had been hoping that someone else would make one and show the truth about how living with a child with Down’s syndrome is not depressing and life-ruining – in fact, the opposite. Eventually she realised that this wouldn’t happen and she would have to make it herself.

The tipping point? The new prenatal testing that should soon be available on the NHS – NIPT (non-invasive prenatal testing). This is a blood test that is done from week 10 of pregnancy and detects Down’s syndrome with 99% accuracy. In countries such as Iceland (which Phillips visits in the film), the introduction of the test has meant that 100% of Down’s syndrome pregnancies are terminated.

Phillips wants to pose the question: Do we really want to eliminate this community of people – 40,000 strong – in the UK?

“We have the most expensive state-of-the-art Down’s syndrome detection test and the ability to terminate right up until birth. But no allowance is made for the point of view of the other side. The families of people with Down’s syndrome are not consulted. People with Down’s syndrome are not consulted. There has never been an ethical debate about it.”

Phillips didn’t particularly want to be the one to start this debate, but that’s how it has worked out. Her status as an apologetic and reluctant activist is what makes the film appealing, funny and easy to watch. Although she has made no secret of the fact that she is a Christian and a lot of her fascination with ethics is clearly informed by her faith, she is keen to emphasise that she is pro-choice. Plus, she has a fierce curiosity about the views of those she disagrees with.

The film shows her struggling with her emotions as she interviews a woman who decided to abort a Down’s syndrome child. Phillips shows the woman a video of a Down’s syndrome woman competing at a gymnastics competition. The woman is unmoved and unimpressed. As the mother of a Down’s syndrome child, Phillips is clearly angry. But you can also see that she is empathetic, trying to understand. She’s a good person to put across two sides of the story.

There are, of course, two sides to her own story in this context: life before and after Down’s syndrome. “I didn’t know anything about Down’s syndrome at all,” she says. “I didn’t even know anyone with a disabled child. In fact, I don’t think I knew anyone who was disabled.”

Her point is that we are sleepwalking into a world where we could eliminate Down’s syndrome. Is that what we really want? There is a question she has faced all her life as a parent that has always bothered her. “I get asked, ‘Did you know?’ But what I hate is that I also get asked, ‘Didn’t you know?’” The implication being that if she had known, surely she would have terminated the pregnancy.

“And that’s what worries me.”

She would not have terminated the pregnancy. And with what she knows now, she wants to make more people aware of the fact that a Down’s syndrome child does not need to be in the “defect” category. Quite the opposite, she would argue.

She adds: “In a system where everybody screens and where you know at 10 or 12 weeks with 99% certainty whether your unborn baby has Down’s syndrome, it becomes ‘your fault’ if you choose to have the baby. We have imperceptibly flipped into a situation where the woman is under societal pressure to have that termination. Where does it lead? If you choose to have that child, should the government help you? After all, it was your choice. Why should anyone else help you?

“We are really close to that attitude already. There is already a new kind of pernicious discrimination towards disabled people, the idea that they are scroungers. ‘Why should you steal my taxes?’ Who, then, would want to have that child?”

• A World Without Down’s Syndrome? will be shown on BBC2 on 5 October

Sally Phillips: Do we really want a world without Down’s syndrome?

Arlene Phillips is a excellent 70

They say the best revenge is to reside nicely, I prompt. Phillips smiles serenely.

As properly she may well. Her diary at the moment resembles a Southern belle’s dance card, and we meet at the crack of dawn, the only time she has free of charge. In man or woman she is affable, girly and conspiratorial, although nonetheless retaining a single eye on the clock. She excuses this habit, saying she is “stupidly busy… it is why I’m so completely OCD about almost everything and keep countless ‘to do’ lists, yellow stickies all over the place. It’s what takes place when you don’t have a 9-to-five occupation and when you’re not positive the place you will be from one particular week to the subsequent. It’s a way of trying to keep control of your life”.

At the moment, the lists of this former dancer, founding member of Seventies dance troupe Scorching Gossip and now a planet-renowned choreographer, revolve all around her involvement with two new tasks: the Monty Python reunion display that comes to the O2 Arena this summer, and a celebration of Brazilian song and dance that Phillips is operating on with Pamela Stephenson and taking to the Edinburgh Festival.

Both tasks are primarily based in Britain. For the duration of the previous two many years, while other individuals her age may possibly be making use of their bus pass, Phillips has identified herself taking planes. “I was in Canada for 4 months choreographing The Wizard of Oz, then Hong Kong, New York, Baltimore… It’s a relief to be back house for a whilst, although I will be going to Las Vegas with Eric Idle up coming week. We’re watching two shows a evening. It is always good to see what the competition is undertaking.”

She describes the Monty Python reunion as “a terrific show with plenty of humorous sketches and some big song-and-dance numbers. I’m choreographing these and working closely with Eric, who’s directing the display. I’m completely loving it.”

She goes back a extended way with the Monty Python crew, when she choreographed their 1983 film, The Which means of Life. “We’re all previous mates.”

Without a doubt, there aren’t several folks in the company whom Phillips hasn’t worked with. She started out in her early twenties, when she subsidised her dance classes by operating as Ridley Scott’s housekeeper. “It was the tidiest, most stunning residence I’d ever been in. Every little thing had a spot. I undoubtedly caught my need for full purchase from Ridley.”

Right after forming Hot Gossip, she became the choregrapher of choice for several Eighties bands, operating on pop video clips for Duran Duran, Elton John and Queen, exactly where she met her lengthy-term spouse Angus Ion, a set designer.

They’ve by no means married but, in spite of the age gap – Angus is 11 many years younger – have been together nearly 25 many years. Just before him, Phillips had had a failed marriage and a daughter, Alana, to a guy she has never ever named.

“I’d been in and out of relationships, never ever extremely efficiently. Then, when I met Angus, I found somebody who also grew to become my very best buddy in the planet. And as soon as you have someone who you want to be with and share things with, it is great. He’s the complete opposite of me, but somehow with each other we are like one particular total man or woman.”

It was not prolonged following they got together that Phillips discovered, at the age of 47, that she was pregnant once again. Her obstetrician informed her she was the oldest mother he’d ever dealt with. “I’ve always been a late-developer,” she laughs. “But, nevertheless, it was a complete shock. I considered I was going via an early menopause.”

She describes her younger daughter, Abi, as “such a great, beautiful person. Emotionally, she’s a great deal like Angus. She’s exceptionally gentle. Alana, my eldest, is more like me and I know her within out. We’re a lot more dramatic, a lot more very strung. I do seem at the two of them and feel: ‘No matter what I have attained in my career, my daughters are the very best point I have ever designed.’ No competitors at all, genuinely.”

As a single mom, she admits that she was far tougher on her first daughter, who is now 25 and working as a make-up artist, than on her second, who’s 22 and operates for Selfridges.

Phillips’s cuddly side was never considerably in proof when she was a judge on Strictly Come Dancing, though. There have been some cutting place-downs. Fiona Phillips had “not 1 naturally moving bone in her body” Carol Vorderman was “emotionless”.

“When dancing’s involved, I can be really challenging. You want to push your self – and other folks – to be the quite ideal. If not, how will anybody get far better?”

She didn’t get in which she is these days with no being tough on herself, too. And if her life appears like a fairy tale – which, she says, it certainly did when she picked up the CBE from the Queen final 12 months – it has been challenging-earned.

A single of 3 young children, Phillips grew up in Prestwich, Lancashire, in a functioning-class household. Her father was a barber, her mom – who died from leukaemia when Arlene was just 15 – a dinner lady. “We were undoubtedly not wealthy – I really don’t know how my dad and mom ever paid for my dance lessons when I was minor. We even had to line our shoes with newspaper when there have been holes in them simply because we couldn’t afford to get them soled.

“I feel back to people times, which have been all the more tragic due to the fact I misplaced my mum who I loved so much, and I think: ‘Where on earth did that small ball of grim determination that lived within me come from, that point that stored whispering in my ear: Don’t give up, really do not give in?’.”

Unsurprisingly, retirement is far from her mind. She keeps her physique fine-tuned, hasn’t drunk alcohol for many years, doesn’t smoke, swims a couple of times a week, and has just lately taken up “water jogging”.

Her weight, she says, goes up and down. “I’m 5ft 2in and sturdily created – I might as nicely make a necklace out of roast potatoes and wear them, as they’ll just attach themselves to my physique as body fat.”

She has admitted in the past to obtaining Botox, though these days she says she’s a devotee of the non-surgical facelift, in which an electrical existing is employed to stimulate facial muscles. She also requires supplements specially vitamin D and GOPO – a brand for which she is a spokeswoman – to support with the arthritis in her correct knee. “It’s created from rosehip. About a month in from making use of it, I found that the ache had eased so a lot that I was hardly even considering about it. Just before, if I got down on my knees to pick one thing up, for instance, I’d struggle to get back up due to the fact the pain was quite poor. But now I can even do this,” she says, out of the blue raising her leg from a sitting place to someplace over her head.

She held a huge bash for her 70th at the Bloomsbury Ballroom. Notable absences were Len Goodman and Bruno Tonioli, her Strictly pals, who were judging the American version of the show at the time. “But they did send a video link. And yes, we are nonetheless wonderful mates.”

For years, she and Tonioli shared an agent, Michael Summerton, and his death from cancer shortly following she finished Strictly left her devastated – and ever a lot more determined to see life as a gift. “Hitting 70 when so numerous of your close friends really don’t make it can make you value that it’s a result in for celebration.”

She has been pondering, as well, if now may be the appropriate time to write an autobiography. “I’ve had a roller-coaster life. But you feel: ‘What ought to I put in and what must I depart out?’ There are people I must protect and items I have by no means spoken about.”

Put it all in, I suggest.

“Perhaps, I will!” she laughs, wickedly.

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ARLENE’S Tips FOR STAYING AGELESS:

“Don’t consider also considerably about your age. It is a amount. Especially do not feel: ‘In 10 many years time, I’ll be 80!’. Don’t search backwards and really don’t search forwards. I’m quite a lot a reside-in-the-second variety of particular person.”

“Stay physically strong and, especially, build your core strength by means of exercising like Pilates. Having a powerful core is the very best way to steer clear of turning into frail and infirm – your entire body will consider you on far longer walks with a sturdy inner core.”

“Retain your inner youth. You really do not have to sit on the sofa and view Tv all day. There is a entire world out there to be explored, and that remains true whether you are 17 or 70.”

“Keep your brain active. My father developed Alzheimer’s in his seventies and I’m now a patron for the charity. I’m not saying that it can be prevented but it’s such a very good idea to preserve the grey matter as match as your physique. If you can not do crosswords, educate your self. Play those childhood pat-a-cake games with any person who’ll play with you – or perform with the wall. It will genuinely maintain your co-ordination sharp.”

“Live and let reside. Personally, I’d never judge a person who’s had cosmetic surgical treatment. It’s your entire body and your encounter. Every single person should be allowed to do what they want to with it. It’s no one’s selection but your very own.”

Arlene Phillips is a excellent 70