Abortion decriminalisation - how the far right will use it?

Ok, maybe I worded that wrong. A flaw in the moral argument then. Maybe we are not going to base our legal system on what we believe to be morally right any longer but that is a big step.

I don’t think things will swing to the right on this, but I do think if people believe it removes protections from women and children because of being given abortion pills by phone that it will produce an anti government backlash. The first time there is a case in the papers of a woman using pills at say 35 weeks to abort a viable healthy foetus there will be uproar in the papers. It will happen. There are always rare cases of things that are listed as “it will never happen”. Support for mothers should mean this can’t be done without an in person interviews-I think this could be done in a pharmacy.

As Baroness Casey said of the grooming gangs scandal, 'if good people don't grasp difficult things, bad people will, and that's why we have to do it as a society'. We can't uphold unjust laws for fear that doing the right thing will give Reform ammunition on abortion law.

Labour are already making the mistake of seeking to appease the far right with their rhetoric on issues like immigration. It's the wrong course of action. Whether it's by winning seats in parliament or by dragging everyone over to the right, Reform win when the parties of the left don't hold the line.

Some people really need to get a grip and do some research.

There are other countries which have decriminalised abortion. And no, women are not, categorically not, running around having late term abortions.

This change in the law is to protect women who have late stage miscarriages and still born babies.

I despair at women not wanting to support women in these situations.

I think there will be a lot of people who flip from thinking they were ‘pro-choice BUT’ to realising that they are actually ‘pro-life BUT’. This is the logical conclusion of the pro-choice argument - that full term babies have no right to life until after they take their first breath.

There is no flaw in the argument, it's being born alive that makes you a legal human being.

YABVU. It’s not the far right who will go to town on this - it’ll be the general public being outraged.

I’m a left wing pro choice feminist and I’m appalled at what parliament has done. There’ll be a huge backlash which will undermine the abortion rights we do have- and killing a baby past 24 weeks is killing a baby. It’s unacceptable.

Why do none of you know what the root cause of this is? Abortion pills by post being kept after Covid, without needing an in person appointment to assess length of gestation. The late term investigations by police directly correlate to when Labour MPs voted to keep abortion pills by post - it’s their screw up. Before 2020 late term abortions and investigations didn’t happen.

Now, a woman could call up BPAS at 30 weeks, pretend she’s only 8 weeks, take mifepristone and kill a near full term baby. But now there’s nothing that can be done about it and no mechanism for the state to even record that it’s happening.

Absolute bloody clowns.

YABVU. It’s not the far right who will go to town on this - it’ll be the general public being outraged.

I’m a left wing pro choice feminist and I’m appalled at what parliament has done. There’ll be a huge backlash which will undermine the abortion rights we do have- and killing a baby past 24 weeks is killing a baby. It’s unacceptable.

Why do none of you know what the root cause of this is? Abortion pills by post being kept after Covid, without needing an in person appointment to assess length of gestation. The late term investigations by police directly correlate to when Labour MPs voted to keep abortion pills by post - it’s their screw up. Before 2020 late term abortions and investigations didn’t happen.

Now, a woman could call up BPAS at 30 weeks, pretend she’s only 8 weeks, take mifepristone and kill a near full term baby. But now there’s nothing that can be done about it and no mechanism for the state to even record that it’s happening.

Absolute bloody clowns.

I saw a tweet on X about this point. It really did make me stop and think about the unintended consequences of this amendment. And people bang on about support for vulnerable women in coercive situations but there is hardly any. We all know the state of our maternity services so allowing these pills to be handed out over telephone and then decriminalising the consequences of taking them very late in pregnancy could lead to some horrific situations.

In your opinion. In mine, it is.

A slippery slope is a logical fallacy and not the basis for any argument.

On balance, I think that if a baby is otherwise going to be born to parents who so desperately don’t want it to be of a particular sex that they would consider a near-term abortion, it’s probably best for the child they don’t have that baby in the first place.

Though I don’t think it’s a particularly pressing argument anymore anyway, now that antenatal testing has advanced so much. Parents can find out the sex of their baby from well before 24 weeks already and abort if it’s the “wrong” one.

That is an unsettling point.

@Autumn38that is madness. The law should protect the vulnerable as well as the mother. I am pro choice, it not at the expense of the children. What is the difference between an abortion at 39 weeks and infanticide at 39 weeks? I think this suggestion that this wording is essential because of prosecution of miscarriage is ridiculous. They just need to change the law/criminal justice rulings on prosecutions. I find it hard to believe it goes on anyway. But if it does, that’s where the changes need to be, not in removing protections for mother and child late in pregnancy. I’m horrified by this.

Neither does Farage. It won't happen anyway. This is just on the back end of Roe v Wade - completely irrelevant to the UK.

Mothers tend not to murder their children full stop. It doesn’t mean people aren’t horrified by the thought of it.

You're not looking at the full picture. It comes back to the availability of remote access to abortion medicine, which came about during the pandemic and has been continued since. Whereas it would have previously been challenging to self-terminate a late pregnancy, it's now pretty easy.

He's pro life! ETA - his suggestion was not in the interests of taking away women' rights; it was in the interests of the babies. I meant pro choice, not pro life.

The logic is that the pro-choice argument is that it is the woman’s choice at any point in her pregnancy. The human rights of the baby don’t exist until it’s taken its first breath. The government has just encoded the pro-choice argument into law.

I see it as there are a very few women who do this and it's generally because they are vulnerable and in difficult situations for one reason or another. It's not that I think everything is fine, it's that it's not in the public interest, or the interest of the woman to pursue any criminal investigation. And it will mean stillbirths don't risk a police investigation (which I think was pretty rare, but this is still a positive change)

Yes, they are. The head of the Royal College of Obstericians and Gynaecologist was on Newsnight yesterday. He treated Nicola Packer and said that for every woman like her who is actually taken to court, there are 10 who are investigated following late still birth or miscarriage.

And it will bring pro-life arguments into the mainstream because many many moderate mainstream commentators will feel comfortable saying they don’t support abortion at full term when they wouldn’t feel able to say the same about abortion at 6 weeks. It makes debate much more acceptable to be honest.

but no doctors would be performing an abortion at 35 weeks medically, it would need to be self induced

its possible because anti abortion pills are given out by telephone. Therefore it’s possible for someone to abort late term by lying or by buying these pills on a black market.
People will say oh no one would do that. But there will be cases. I personally think there’s a risk where people want a certain sex of child, using this approach and now it’s not criminal to do so.