As the Trump Administration ships abortion pills into states with laws against abortion, making it no wonder that three conservatives on the Supreme Court voted against Donald Trump on tariffs as one trusts on more to come, Callum Miller writes:
The issue of abortion is back on the agenda in Westminster, though you could be forgiven for asking why. After all, what current legislation lends itself to this subject? What large campaign have you missed? What broad consultation or public debate has there been that has somehow passed you by? Good questions. I’m afraid the answers are less than satisfactory.
On Thursday, 16 October, the Crime and Policing Bill had its Second Reading in the House of Lords. The Bill focuses on issues such as anti-social behaviour, sexual offences, and knife crime, as well as violence against women and girls. It is darkly ironic, the — indeed tragic — that an amendment to decriminalise abortion up to birth for women in relation to their own pregnancies was shoe-horned in at the last minute by backbenchers in the Commons.
The amendment was tabled by Tonia Antoniazzi MP and added to the Bill as clause 191 after only 46 minutes of backbench debate in the House of Commons, with no impact assessment, no Committee stage scrutiny, no evidence sessions, and a refusal to allow any interventions during the solitary debate.
Clause 191 would amend the law so that it would no longer be a crime for women to perform their own abortions, for any reason, at any time, up to and during birth. As Lord Frost highlighted during Second Reading, such an amendment would mark the biggest change to the law on abortion since the passage of the Abortion Act in 1967. Indeed, were clause 191 to become law, it would almost certainly lead to a significant increase in the number of women who perform their own late-term abortions at home, a process which carries with it severe health risks for the mother.
Quite apart from any in-principle view one might take on clause 191, this change is particularly galling because the reason dangerous late-term abortions at home are even possible is the “pills by post” scheme pushed by the same people who would say they advocate for women’s safety. The scheme, which allows women to receive abortion pills by post without the requirement to undergo an in-person consultation with a medical professional, was originally introduced as a temporary measure during COVID-19. However, it was made permanent soon thereafter, amidst warnings — including from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and the NHS’s safeguarding network — that the policy placed vulnerable women at risk of harm — a price considered worth paying for simple “ease of access” to so-called “abortion services”. Yet “access” must not simply be the trump card over all other considerations — the pills by post scheme is a policy which undeniably carries risks for vulnerable women.
As one example, the harm of which is amplified by the pills-by-post scheme, decriminalisation fails to account for the risk of coercion and the protective nature of the law as it stands. No longer can a woman say to her abusive partner that she cannot possibly obtain an abortion — even at a late gestation — due to the serious legal consequences she would face for doing so. Instead, the window during which an abuser or any other party may apply pressure is extended, with no legal safety net for a woman who may wish to keep her baby. There have already been several terrible instances of abuse of the “pills by post” scheme, in which vulnerable women have had their pregnancies ended against their will. This is not fanciful or alarmist, but rather reflective of the awful reality for some vulnerable women in our communities.
The position of the Government concerning decriminalisation of abortion is — extraordinarily — that they have made “no assessment”. Whilst abortion policy typically remains the subject of a free vote for parliamentarians and the Government likewise is concerned to stay neutral on matters of conscience, the impact on the lives of unborn babies and vulnerable women is anything but “neutral”. It is also worth noting that the decriminalisation proposals in Clause 191 go far beyond what the public is willing to countenance. A recent poll conducted by The Telegraph revealed that 91 per cent of 28,000 respondents opposed this amendment. Perhaps understandably, the balance of speakers in the House of Lords Second Reading debate was indicative of this, with 65 per cent of Peers who took a position on the issue of the amendment speaking against it.
One of the strongest critiques at Second Reading came from Baroness Monckton, who reflected that there “is no popular demand or pressure for this form of infanticide,” and also broached an uncomfortable subject for pro-abortion advocates, that of the impact of abortion pills. Rather than being a simple matter of taking the pills and the matter being resolved, Baroness Monckton noted that hospitalisation of women for complications arising from the use of abortion pills had increased by 50 per cent from before the COVID-19 pandemic. Could the pills-by-post scheme be to blame for this? Of course — and we all know this. Allowing women to abort their babies by themselves at home, well into the third trimester, is only likely to increase the already significant number of hospital admissions, with a study finding that one in every 17 women who performed their own abortion at home subsequently needed hospital treatment.
Baroness Monckton’s amendment to remove clause 191 entirely will surely attract significant support at Report Stage, as it should. This is not a matter of being for or against abortion in the round, or for or against decriminalisation of abortion, even. Rather, this is a rushed and ill-thought-through proposal which will have negative consequences — of course, for viable unborn babies, but also for women. This approach is not progressive; it embodies the worst form of ideological legislation, defined by a dogmatic belief in abortion, whatever the cost to women’s safety. The Lords must act to remove clause 191 — or at the very least, to require genuine scrutiny and public debate before such a momentous change.
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