Today, MPs will have the chance to vote for one of the few truly moderate and medically sound abortion-related amendments proposed in recent years. Dr Caroline Johnson MP, a consultant paediatrician, has tabled a vital amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill. Her amendment would simply reinstate the requirement for an in-person consultation before a woman is prescribed abortion pills.
Dr Johnson is not proposing a radical rollback in abortion rights — or indeed any rollback at all. Requiring an in-person consultation was standard practice in Britain until the Covid-19 pandemic, when so-called “pills by post” were temporarily allowed. What began as an emergency response was subsequently made a permanent regime, despite warnings it would be a disaster. This scheme means women can procure powerful abortifacients based on a phone call alone, with no in-person examination, scan, or physical oversight. Even the Department of Health and Social Care’s own consultation found that 70 per cent of public respondents wanted in-person checks restored. Parliament irresponsibly ignored them.
Now it has a second chance to do the right thing.
The case for in-person checks should be obvious to anyone with even a passing concern for patient safety or ethical medicine. Without them, it is clearly far more difficult to effectively verify gestational age, diagnose ectopic pregnancies, or identify women who may be coerced or trafficked. Lest we forget that a 2022 BBC poll found 15 per cent of British women had experienced pressure to have an abortion that they did not want.
Moreover, these are not fuzzy hypothetical risks, but dangers that have already materialised in grave suffering. Take the case of Carla Foster. In May 2020 she told an abortion provider by phone that she was seven weeks pregnant. In reality, she was around 8 months pregnant. She took the pills at home and delivered a baby who died shortly afterwards. Her emotional devastation has been widely reported. However, what is often left unsaid is that her case was only possible under a system that refuses to see the patient — a system so lax it cannot even confirm whether a woman is pregnant at all, let alone how far along she is.
This is not an isolated failure. Last year, Stuart Worby was jailed for exploiting the same loophole. He persuaded a friend’s girlfriend to impersonate someone else to order abortion pills, which he later used to spike a woman’s drink and forcibly terminate her pregnancy. The current rules made this possible.
Proponents of “pills by post” insist their model is “modern” and “empowering”, the usual saccharine euphemisms for deregulation. But there is nothing empowering about a system that makes it easier for violent partners to control women’s pregnancies or for desperate women to suffer in silence. A single, face-to-face clinical consultation is not an attack on “bodily autonomy” but the bare minimum standard for any other medical procedure with comparable consequences.
Dr Johnson’s amendment does not limit access to abortion. It does not restrict pills from being taken at home. It merely insists that a doctor must see a woman once to ensure she is not being abused, lied to, or put at medical risk. This should not be controversial, it is common sense.
It would leave us with the most extreme abortion law in the world
Today’s debate will also see MPs consider Stella Creasy’s NC20, a proposal so extreme that even Britain’s largest abortion provider, BPAS, has expressed unease. Her proposals would repeal all remaining criminal protections for the unborn, opening the door to abortion up to birth for any reason. It would leave us with the most extreme abortion law in the world. It would also make it legally impossible for any future Secretary of State to restore restrictions via regulation. Once gone, these safeguards would be all but impossible to revive.
Creasy’s proposal is completely out of line with where women stand on the issue. Polling from Savanta ComRes on whether time limits for abortion should be increased showed that just 1 per cent wanted it to be increased right through to birth, in contrast to 70 per cent of women who favoured a reduction in time limits. If Johnson’s amendment fails, it will not be for lack of clarity or evidence. It will be because a cowardly political class, browbeaten by activist slogans, chose to ignore the real stories of women harmed by a dangerously deregulated system. Those, like Creasy, lobbying hardest against it are the same ones demanding that Parliament erase every legal limit on abortion.
Women deserve better. So do their unborn children. MPs must vote for Dr Johnson’s amendment, or risk cementing a radical change.
