Abortion decriminalisation ‘undermines feminism’ - Kathleen Stock

"What other reasons can there be for aborting a viable child at 40 weeks i.e. killing it in the womb rather than smothering it once it is born."

See above links to Sarah Catt case.

I understand that this is the intention, and I think it’s coming from a good place (similarly with the assisted dying legislation) but it also removes any ability to prosecute a woman who deliberately procures medication to abort her baby perhaps very late in pregnancy (and knowingly so). I think that is a bad thing. I think there should be scope to prosecute in a case like that.

I know that I am perhaps labouring a point, but this is what I want to see discussed by legislators. Their argument might well be that this happens so rarely that pragmatically it is better to balance the law in favour of women who unintentionally would fall within the scope of prosecution.

But arguing that women never do this because of some inherent womanly quality raises alarm bells. Stella Creasey also seemed to be hazy on the law and argued that there was scope for prosecution if the action was deliberate.

I agree with her. This matter should not have been the subject of a two hour debate and then passed. We already allow late term abortions for settled reasons: death of the baby, catastrophic malformation incompatible with life, and also allow early labours in the case of a mother who will/may die if she continues her pregnancy, the hope and intention there being that the baby will also survive albeit maybe needing intensive care. What other reasons can there be for aborting a viable child at 40 weeks i.e. killing it in the womb rather than smothering it once it is born (infanticide)?
This is a technocratic solution to a problem mainly caused by posting abortion pills through the post to mothers who may be unsure of their gestation or who are simply lying because they want an abortion and it is past 24 weeks. That this can happen has made the life of women who have miscarriages or stillbirths the subject of police investigation, and this is wrong. The solution is to stop sending pills out without seeing the patient, not decriminalising aborting a baby at 32+ weeks - a traumatic experience at that stage of pregnancy and a full labour with all its dangers, most likely unsupervised.
Much was made of the law governing abortions being archaic, passed c.150 years ago, when women had few rights. That it is 150 years old does not make it a useless, outdated or restrictive piece of legislation. In this case, quite the reverse.
As Chesterton said, don't pull down a fence until you know why it is there. This decriminalization has made the coercion of women into abortion much simpler and may increase the number of femicidal abortions.
And one of the women pushing this piece of legislation is opposing the Assisted Dying Bill, objecting that it is not getting enough scrutiny. The hypocrisy of that position whilst pushing this piece of legislation is monumental.

I understand that this is the intention, and I think it’s coming from a good place (similarly with the assisted dying legislation) but it also removes any ability to prosecute a woman who deliberately procures medication to abort her baby perhaps very late in pregnancy (and knowingly so). I think that is a bad thing. I think there should be scope to prosecute in a case like that.

I think @EasternStandard has it right to be honest - ensuring proper controls for the medication so it’s prescribed appropriately to women who are at the right stage of pregnancy is a way to safeguard women and prevent those either ignorant of their gestation or wilfully intending to abort later from doing so. We control plenty of drugs for plenty of reasons. If the controls are properly applied, then you could decriminalise ‘seeking’ an abortion at a later stage and rely on medical checks to pick up that it wouldn’t be suitable in that woman’s case. But with easier remote access to these drugs there is always going to be a risk of abuse.

Again, no woman waits and goes through all that to get an abortion at 24+ weeks. It's not an issue that exists.

So, the professionals who deal with them?

But this is precisely the point.

The situation that is the policy at the moment is that no one should be deliberately acquiring or facilitating late-stage abortions outside the very limited circumstances where it's already legal (when there are genetic abnormalities incompatible with life). But when a pregnancy ends unexpectedly it might be deliberate (therefore previously criminal) or due to someone's accidental,unintentional or misinformed action (eg in a case where a woman thought she was 10 weeks pg so legal to take abortificant pills, but was actually post-25 weeks, or didn't know she was pg and did something that's inadvisible during pregnancy) or may be due to no human cause and simply be one of the tragedies that happen entirely naturally from time to time.

I disagree strongly that there should be some way of differentiating - any process of differentiating will necessarily be horrifically cruel to a grieving woman who wanted the baby, or to a traumatised woman who didn't want a baby but didn't intentionally do anything wrong. The law change to decriminalise removes the need for this differentiation, allowing each woman to process her trauma without the added trauma of potential criminal investigation. But it deliberately isn't "legalising" and creating a pathway to make it happen.

And I agree with your points. But what about the unintended consequences - a man forcing his partner to take the pills against her will knowing he is now able to evade any scrutiny at all that may previously have taken place? There have been convictions of coercive men doing just this in the past - that will now cease.

This feels like a kneejerk reaction to what's going on in the US - Stella Creasy more or less said so.

And how responsible is it to decriminalise an act which puts a woman's life at risk without any additional safeguards? She can't seek medical help post 24 weeks unless her pregnancy meets certain criteria but she can try and abort her baby legally in her bedroom.

Agree Stock’s rhetoric here is disappointing and lacks any real argument. Her “because most people haven’t been slowly boiled in a vat of hyperliberal feminism and progressive technocracy like overheating frogs, until they can’t tell which way is up.” is particularly pathetic. And agree she talks about it as though the basis for provision of abortion had changed in a pretty disingenuous way

But I think she makes a somewhat valid point (badly) about the abortion debate undermining feminism. I do think both sides of the debate can engage in rhetoric that is unhelpful to coming to a consensus or really engaging the public in the issues. And I think the feminist movement on the whole has been fairly puritanical about insisting that choice must mean as early as possible as late as necessary and that any other position is anti-feminist.

Personally I’m very pro-abortion. I’d like to see abortion be the default that people turn to for any unplanned or unwanted pregnancy and I don’t think fetal viability is of any importance in the matter, though there are a heap of reasons for pushing for as early as possible. But I think that’s a pretty extreme position and while I’ll happily advocate for it, I don’t think that people who don’t agree with me are anti-feminist or anti-choice.

But this is precisely the point.

The situation that is the policy at the moment is that no one should be deliberately acquiring or facilitating late-stage abortions outside the very limited circumstances where it's already legal (when there are genetic abnormalities incompatible with life). But when a pregnancy ends unexpectedly it might be deliberate (therefore previously criminal) or due to someone's accidental,unintentional or misinformed action (eg in a case where a woman thought she was 10 weeks pg so legal to take abortificant pills, but was actually post-25 weeks, or didn't know she was pg and did something that's inadvisible during pregnancy) or may be due to no human cause and simply be one of the tragedies that happen entirely naturally from time to time.

I disagree strongly that there should be some way of differentiating - any process of differentiating will necessarily be horrifically cruel to a grieving woman who wanted the baby, or to a traumatised woman who didn't want a baby but didn't intentionally do anything wrong. The law change to decriminalise removes the need for this differentiation, allowing each woman to process her trauma without the added trauma of potential criminal investigation. But it deliberately isn't "legalising" and creating a pathway to make it happen.

There are always going to be hard cases but in the main you either trust women around their own bodies or you don’t. I do trust women. I wonder if for those who don’t want to trust women, maybe expert professional views might be reassuring?

The UK’s expert bodies of HCPs who were supporting this amendment would know as HCPs if the women of Northern Ireland and Scotland had been acting reprehensibly towards their own pregnancies. They would come into contact with them.

Yet as you can see, these UK-wide bodies of HCPs believe that this aspect of the law was criminalising English and Welsh women, to no good outcome. Which is why they were all campaigning together to remove it.

She's talking a lot of sense actually. Says she's not debating from a pro choice or pro life position, but one of pro safety.

That Parliament have made it legal for women to abort late term pregnancies, but haven't given them a legal (and safe) mechanism through which to do it.

Also, as a side note, I think it's a real shame that genuine stillbirths and miscarriages get swept up in this - there should be some way of differentiating.

There are always going to be hard cases but in the main you either trust women around their own bodies or you don’t. I do trust women. I wonder if for those who don’t want to trust women, maybe expert professional views might be reassuring?

The UK’s expert bodies of HCPs who were supporting this amendment would know as HCPs if the women of Northern Ireland and Scotland had been acting reprehensibly towards their own pregnancies. They would come into contact with them.

Yet as you can see, these UK-wide bodies of HCPs believe that this aspect of the law was criminalising English and Welsh women, to no good outcome. Which is why they were all campaigning together to remove it.

You really cannot compare Massachusetts with California. They have similar laws but the population is totally different, like comparing two European countries tbh.

The case in the UK where a woman took abortion pills to deliberately kill her full-term child radicalized me, to the point where I believe she should have been jailed for much longer. Now is this sort of crime not going to be prosecuted at all (instead of massively downplayed?)

I would have thought that Stock, given her academic background, would actually have some evidence of the claims she has made.

She fears that without criminal sanctions hanging over women’s heads, they will have late term abortions for non serious conditions. But as far as I’ve seen that doesn’t seem to play out in places where there aren’t consequences.

If you compare Massachusetts (where abortion is available without any caveats at any stage) with California (where abortion is legal in similar situations to the UK), Massachusetts has a lower percentage of late term abortions at 0.5% compared to 1% in California.

It doesn’t seem like on demand access (which isn’t even what the UK law change creates) to late term abortion means that women end up aborting when they otherwise wouldn’t. Stock needs to provide the evidence for why she thinks otherwise instead of just hand waving.

There are always going to be hard cases but in the main you either trust women around their own bodies or you don’t. I do trust women. I wonder if for those who don’t want to trust women, maybe expert professional views might be reassuring?

The UK’s expert bodies of HCPs who were supporting this amendment would know as HCPs if the women of Northern Ireland and Scotland had been acting reprehensibly towards their own pregnancies. They would come into contact with them.

Yet as you can see, these UK-wide bodies of HCPs believe that this aspect of the law was criminalising English and Welsh women, to no good outcome. Which is why they were all campaigning together to remove it.

Unborn babies do not have 'rights' and women are not trying to land grab extra rights from another group.

Case in point. Late term unborn babies do have certain, limited rights (not entirely unlike how women have certain, limited rights to single sex spaces), such as the right to not be aborted in the absence of medical reasons. An expansion of women's rights to terminate a pregnancy is a land grab of those rights. Your denial of the existence of another group's rights is no different to TRAs saying that women do not have the right to single sex spaces.

I’m not surprised….she is wrong obviously.

how can’t he personhood of a foetus trump the personhood of the person growing it. This is distilling female personhood down to reproduction and maintaining that at women’s detriment.

yuck. Women’s value isnt rooted it what she does with her womb.