It’s a peculiar thing for a country that carries out a quarter of a million abortions a year to seriously field claims that women’s ability to terminate their pregnancies is under grave threat. But in recent years abortion proponents have repeatedly warned women’s rights are in jeopardy, threatened by Victorian abortion laws.
As in much of British political life, you can blame the Americans. When the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in June 2022, pushing abortion law down to the state level, the likes of Stella Creasy warned that It Could Also Happen Here, setting in motion efforts to put abortion law on a stronger footing.
Despite these claims that nefarious American Evangelicals are set to impose theocracy here, the past five years have seen abortion only become more readily accessible. Abortion activists are about to make the final jump, a parliamentary amendment seeking to wholly decriminalise abortions, allowing women to end their pregnancies legally up until the moment of birth.
While the newest legislation bears the authorship of Labour backbencher Tonia Antoniazzi, it echoes previous efforts in the last parliament, cut short by the general election. Should Antoniazzi’s amendment to the Crime and Policing bill pass, it will remove “women from the criminal law related to abortion”, allowing a woman absolute autonomy when it comes to ending a pregnancy. Already it has the backing of nearly 60 MPs across Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens, Alliance, Plaid Cymru, the SDLP and the Conservatives.
The amendment’s advocates cite the prosecution of more than 100 women over the past five years as justification for their proposals. As Antoniazzi argues, “this is not a criminal law issue, this is essentially a healthcare matter”. As an American activist might phrase it, “abortion is healthcare” — though of course the unborn child might take a different view.
Many recent cases do nonetheless invite compassion. Earlier this month, Nicola Packer was acquitted of unlawfully inducing an abortion at 26-weeks pregnant, having argued that she’d been unaware how far her pregnancy had progressed when she took abortion pills obtained through the NHS via remote consultation.
Even allowing for the pressure that the NHS was under in November 2020, Packer’s treatment when she went to hospital after home-delivering a “fully-formed baby” — her lawyer’s phrase — was appalling. After being sent to another hospital and undergoing surgery, she was arrested by police, who took her computers and phone.
This and other cases suggest that the Crown Prosecution Service had a special — and, given its lacklustre efforts concerning other crimes, surprising — zeal when it came to investigating women whose babies died in premature birth. Reasonable people should agree the police have no business arresting these women as they lie in their hospital beds.
And yet. It does not follow that heavy-handed policing and ill-advised prosecutions of some women mean that none are guilty of behaviour that has been legitimately criminalised. In fact, another case from recent years that is similar to Packer’s in many respects proves the exact opposite.
In June 2023, Carla Foster was convicted of illegally aborting her baby after 32 to 34 weeks of pregnancy. Like Packer, she had obtained abortion medication through a remote consultation during lockdown. Unlike Packer, it was demonstrated that she had lied to medical professionals about how long she had been pregnant, and was aware that she had already passed the 24-week threshold after which abortions are generally illegal in the UK.
Initially jailed for 28 months, Foster’s sentence was later reduced and suspended. In the end the courts shrugged that she had deliberately killed her child, despite our legal system ostensibly protecting unborn children during their last few months in utero, at which point they have a high chance of surviving in the event of premature birth.
Antoniazzi claims that her bill would not alter how abortions are provided in the UK, which would still require the signatures of two doctors and be subject to a 24-week time limit. But if there is no punishment for an abortion at 39 weeks, it is in effect legal.
Indeed, it would make much more sense to offer elective abortions up until birth, if this is what we genuinely believe is moral. Antoniazzi’s proposals, like those from the last parliament, seem to argue that in the third trimester women cannot have a professionally-administered abortion, but should be free to improvise — for instance by lying to their doctor to obtain abortion pills.
I must concede that the British public seem roughly supportive. YouGov research conducted in the wake of the Foster case suggested that only a fifth of the British public support prosecuting women who procure an illegal abortion. But the fact that the same research found half of us think the 24-week limit for healthy pregnancies is correct, and a quarter think even that threshold is too high, shows a fair amount of confusion on the matter.
I suspect if an MP did openly advocate for NHS abortions up until the due date, it would rather expose the brutality of the current amendment. British abortion law has until now struck a sensible balance, accepting termination in the early months as morally neutral, while protecting an unborn child’s right to life in the final trimester, with appropriate medical exemptions.
In doing this we have accepted that before 24 weeks, foetuses or embryos have no rights. In effect we have dehumanised them, as reflected in the often grim descriptions of more unhinged pro-choicers, who variously describe foetuses as parasites or clumps of cells. Antoniazzi’s proposal extends this logic all the way to a baby’s due date (or even past it for the tardier among us).
Were somebody to smother a premature baby after birth, they would be tried for murder
I’m sceptical this reflects what the average British person believes about life. Were somebody to smother a premature baby after birth, they would be tried for murder. And even for miscarriages that happen before 24 weeks, we recognise that the bereavement suffered by parents is as poignant and real as any other.
If campaigners want to reduce prosecutions of miscarrying women, they might consider reducing the easy availability of abortion pills for use at home, which necessarily fuel police suspicion. But Antoniazzi’s amendment should fall on its own merits, because it is immoral.
