Abortion decriminalisation ‘undermines feminism’ - Kathleen Stock

I think this is a really excellent example of how we don't have to agree with everyone on every single issue. This is how adult debate and decision-making works. I agree 100% with KS on trans issues, I disagree with her 95% on abortion issues. Its excellent.

Does anyone know why a previous amendment, to stop pills by post, was rejected?

Is that the case with the pills people were buying online? I understand that the authorised pill for abortion in the UK acts like that, but could people get hold of different pills that do different things?

I'm interested in this too. Reading Stock's Unherd article I don't think she's understood that abortion pills bring on labour rather than kill the baby - so if you take an abortion pill at 36 weeks, say, you will probably end up with a live baby. So I don't think we're going to see a spate of very late terminations.

But what we might see is a spate of women using the pills to bring on labour at about 24 or 28 weeks, and then giving birth to a live, very premature baby, with all that entails - a baby that dies soon after birth, or has severe developmental injuries because it wasn't taken to special care on time. I think the onus here is on abortion clinics not to send out abortion pills by post unless they are absolutely sure that the woman is in the early stages of pregnancy. Realistically, I don't see how you can be sure unless you bring the woman in for a scan.

I think this is the kind of confusion that needs resolving before passing legislation

AFAIK you are right, that situation would be treated as infanticide, as the infanticide act hasn't changed.

www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/1-2/36/section/1

@StandFirm you may be right on that, I’m genuinely not sure of the previous or changed legalities of this since the amendment. But I’m more interested in what happens if eg a baby is born at let’s say 24 or 26 weeks and is likely not going to survive very long without modern medical input ie being in an incubator in a neonatal unit. And the mother does not do anything to actively hasten the baby’s death but also doesn’t call 999 for an ambulance to take the baby to hospital and so it then dies. Would that be infanticide? Or simply the expected consequences of a late term abortion done at home with no medical input and now decriminalised? And thus something that we will see happening with no legal consequences?

I'm not sure that is correct. The new legislation bars women in England and Wales from ever being investigated, arrested, prosecuted or imprisoned for terminating their own pregnancies — no matter what term or trimester they're in.

By that point it's called an induction of labour. If the mother then does something to harm the baby, it's infanticide/murder.

I've read https://unherd.com/2023/06/the-perils-of-reproductive-extremism/ . She seems to be arguing that fathers should have a say in abortion. I can see the emotional logic behind that, but there's an obvious danger of putting men in a position where they could force a woman to carry a child to term - or conversely, to abort the child.

Well, I have a lot of respect for her but often disagree with her. As I do here. Plus, I get very irritated when people set up a hypothetical argument with a strawman, then pat themselves on the back for winning it.

Well, in this scenario if the baby was born alive and the mother didn't get medical help for it causing it to die, that would be manslaughter, maybe?

If the baby wasn't born alive, the mother could still be prosecuted if she lied to get abortion pills.

I think this about a balance of rights (again).

Women have rights to bodily autonomy.

A late term gestating baby has a potential life outside it's mother. They are also capable of feeling pain and suffering.

It is best for society that all children are born to families who want them and have prepared to care for them. Harm can occur to mother and child when this is not the case.

Not every woman is living a calm life making rational decisions about their pregnancy - some are in coercive and/or violent relationships or are in the grip of addictions, mental health illness or have been trafficked into the country and their decisions are taken by others Are these women capable of making informed consent decisions about late term abortions? Is it possible that they could be forced into this decision?

I am glad that there is still prosecution for those 'aiding' women in late term abortions - I think this may help in some situations described above.

I don't think jailing women for abusing abortion pills is useful, but I do think the harm they cause to the baby inside them needs to be acknowledge by society and not just brushed aside. I think there needs to be consequences for them - even if it's just reduced access to the pills another time.

I consider myself to be pro choice, however this legislation troubles me. I can't believe it was just waved through. Where is the cut off? If someone self aborts at 37 weeks at home and the baby is born alive and subsequently dies, is that still considered an abortion and OK, or is it infanticide?

55% is a majority (coughBrexit!).

Only 25% said they thought the law should remain unchanged.

I am not sure how else public opinion could have been gauged on this, other than via polls.

I didnt see that, thank you. But 55% is pretty middling. And of course there hasn't been debate - it has come from next to nowhere. So people generally have not heard arguments to help them decide.

Ask any blunt and un-nuanced question and you tend to get a blunt and un-nuanced answer.

there is no evidence that the public want it

There was a yougov poll the other day that showed 55% were in favour of decriminalisation.

There has been no debate though. Mps have taken advantage of what is basically a loophole here. They aren't changing the Abortion Act. They are decriminalising something via another Bill which just handily presented them with an opportunity. It wasn't in any manifesto and there is no evidence that the public want it, that the public share the unhappiness of pro abortion activists at prosecutions, that the public think that women should be able to choose to abort a child past 24 weeks.

Some of the "my body, my choice" rhetoric is far too strident in my view; people carrying banners saying " parasites don't have rights" is just distasteful in the extreme.

Women do have to be their own moral arbiters when it comes to pregnancy.....but once the pregnancy develops beyond a certain point the issue is no longer so straightforward, and as moral beings we have to recognise that.

Animals, for example, don't automatically have rights: they have rights because we are moral beings and recognise that not everything in life is just about us and our desires alone. Women, naturally...courtesy of their intimate role in pregnancy, childbirth and as mothers are necessarily aligned with this fact.

"Women are not just incubators" goes the other way too.......and which is why issues around surrogacy are so heated. Nobody carries a pregnancy without being symbiolotically entwined on every level with that pregnancy...even if the dominant feelings towards it are of rejection.

If wider trends are anything to go by, this will affect female babies more than male ones. That's something feminists need to think about seriously, at the very least.

I'm not buying the "only desperate women would ever do this" argument either. You could make exactly the same argument for mothers killing their children at any age, but that doesn't mean it should be legal to kill your sixth-month-old or your six-year-old. Neither does the fact that such killings are mercifully very rare.

(I note these arguments are suspiciously similar to "no man would ever identify as a woman unless he was in serious distress" and "no trans woman has ever done anything bad": it's the same catastrophic conflation of rarity with impossibility.)

Now probably we need more compassion in police investigation of stillbirths and in sentencing for this sort of crime. But you do that by targeting these things directly, not passing some all-encompassing decriminalisation law without even the usual process of public and parliamentary debate.

It's a serious issue that has been hijacked by extremist MPs who have fallen prey to the US Democrat approach of just uncritically adopting the polar opposite to what the Republicans think, aided by their do-gooder buddies who will vote for anything if you tell them it's progressive.

I think the point is that abortion, in certain types of circumstance, isn't simply a 'women's rights' issue. It is a human issue; a moral issue and one that society does need to engage with.

My sense is that some people have been poking the bear....pushing the boundaries....and for no good reason. in doing so they are re-igniting controversy around a settled issue.

I don’t have any opinion on Creasy as a person, I don’t know her or particularly pay attention to what she’s doing. But that was a personal attack of an article. If we strip out the mean stuff, Ditum seems to be saying that abortion rights are fragile so women’s asks need to not be ‘extreme’ and we must let sleeping dogs lie for fear of worse consequences coming in future. If the worse consequences come, then if we asked for too much, it will be our own stupid fault.
This has been the basic line of the Tories and Labour for more decades than I can remember. Women! Stop asking for stuff. You don’t understand, you’ll put people off if you look greedy. You can maybe start talking about this after we’ve sorted out xyz.

So actually I respect anyone- however much of an ego they may or may not be - who is trying to make pro choice change or push the Overton window on abortion issues. That goes even if I disagree the specifics of their policy ideas. We should be able to openly have debates about abortion rights and women should be able to point out where things are wrong and what could be done better. Because over my lifetime, the dial for women’s rights around abortion has still been moving forward incredibly fucking slowly. Less than no attention is paid to it in research. Doctors who can do surgical abortions are retiring more than joining

So I think the time is long gone to meekly accept that we are lucky to have rights to abortion at all because some women don’t have that. We are no longer a majority religious society in the UK. What we are left with is a culturally misogynistic society in the UK. So let’s stop telling women not disagree with each other on policy issues in public because it’s making the cause look bad. Or that it might alienate people. Or we’re being too extreme. Women’s rights should be able to move forward with social and medical changes. They should not be held in the 1960s because some people might not like women. That’s not how rights works.

Yes, anything that Stella Creasy proposes needs full scrutiny.

And a mature foetus is not just a lump of tissue.