In the past few weeks Labour Members of Parliament have tabled amendments to the Conservative Government’s Criminal Justice Bill that would decriminalise abortion – that is, remove it from the criminal law. They are using a method that has worked very effectively in recent years: hijacking a government bill to make extreme changes to abortion law.
Diana Johnson’s amendment, New Clause 1, seeks to remove sections of the criminal law so that “no offence is committed by a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy”. This would mean a woman could carry out her own abortion at any time, for any reason.
While Johnson claims in an explanatory note that the amendment “would not change any law regarding the provision of abortion services within a healthcare setting, including but not limited to the time limit”, this is disingenuous. More than half of abortions are now carried out by a woman in her own home, under the “pills-by-post” policy. A woman who took abortion pills at home at any stage of pregnancy, even just before natural birth, and so ended the life of a full-term baby, would not commit any offence based on the amendment.
New Clause 2, tabled by Stella Creasy, is in some ways even more extreme. In addition to repealing sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929, pieces of “Victorian legislation” the MPs object to, Creasy also seeks to repeal section 60. This section deals with the crime of concealing the body of a dead baby who dies before, during or after birth. (This section is currently used in criminal law when infanticide is suspected but cannot be charged due to lack of evidence.)
Why are these MPs proposing such extreme changes to abortion law? The reason they give is to end the prosecution of women for illegal abortion. Aside from it being somewhat illogical to want to repeal a law because a few people break it (and it really is a few – there have been five prosecutions of women this year against a backdrop of over 200,000 legal abortions annually), what they are not really talking about is why these prosecutions are happening.
Abortion providers have openly said that until the five cases before the courts this year, there had only been three prosecutions for illegal abortions in 160 years. What has changed in the last few years?
The answer is that it is now possible for abortion providers to send abortion drugs to women in the post, without an in-person consultation. This pills-by-post policy was supposed to be a temporary, emergency measure during the pandemic. But after the Government decided to return to previous arrangements following a public consultation, an amendment to the Health and Social Care Bill in the House of Lords made the policy permanent. We are now seeing its bitter fruits.
With no in-person check, and no ultrasound, there is no way for the abortion provider to know if a woman is really ten weeks pregnant or less. Some women will genuinely not know the gestation, and, as we’ve now seen, it’s possible to lie. The tragic story of Carla Foster is a case in point. Under this policy, Foster, pregnant by a man who was not the father of her other children, obtained abortion pills by giving false information that she was seven weeks pregnant over the phone to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS). BPAS then sent her the pills without correctly confirming the gestation of the pregnancy, leading to the death of baby Lily, who was found to be between 32-34 weeks of gestation.
None of this would have happened if Carla Foster had been seen and examined in person. In this instance the pills-by-post policy resulted in an illegal and dangerous late-term abortion, exposed a traumatised woman to prosecution and left a fully viable baby dead.
This policy was championed by the very abortion providers who are now using the case to call for decriminalisation. Public reaction to the Carla Foster case – horror that a baby near natural birth could be killed this way, and disgust at abortion providers using the tragedy to campaign for their agenda – showed that there is very little public appetite to change the law to make abortions like this legal. Unfortunately, however, this doesn’t seem to have got through to activist politicians. Rather than admitting their mistakes, and calling for women to actually be seen by doctors, pro-abortion MPs are using these cases to push for an extreme expansion of the abortion law.
How likely are these amendments to pass? It’s hard to say. Attempts to decriminalise have been made before and have failed. On the other hand, in the last few years, Creasy and Co. have successfully used amendments to Government bills to impose abortion on Northern Ireland, bring in buffer zones around abortion facilities, and, as mentioned, make the pills-by-post scheme permanent. We are seeing a repeated pattern of backbenchers – usually Labour – bringing amendments on abortion to Government bills, with the Government being too weak or lacking the motivation to stop it.
Admittedly there are Conservative MPs who also support decriminalisation of abortion. The new Health Minister, Victoria Atkins, has a terrible voting record on abortion. And while the Government tends to hold the line that it is not for the Government to legislate on matters of conscience like abortion, in a debate in June on the Carla Foster case, the Justice Minister Edward Argar as good as encouraged MPs to bring amendments on changing the law.
All this means that we can’t be complacent. At the Society for the Protection Unborn Children, we are mobilising supporters to lobby their MPs to oppose these amendments. SPUC was founded back in 1967 to oppose the Abortion Act, and we empower our thousands of grassroots members to take action (you can see our guidance and MP tool for fighting these amendments here).
Nobody wants to see women going to jail for abortion. But the answer is not removing the last vestiges of legal protection from unborn babies. The very least that needs to happen is to stop the dangerous policy of sending abortion pills through the post, leading to the death of babies and exposing traumatised women to prosecution.
Photo: An activist outside the Marie Stopes Clinic in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 12 January 2016. (Photo by Charles McQuillan/Getty Images.)
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