As early as possible, as late as necessary.
Nobody is forcing anyone to get an abortion who doesn’t want one, or feel they need to have one. It’s not always easy to find a sympathetic doctor in Britain which can add to stress and delay for women and their families- two doctors make the legal choice for women who come to them seeking an abortion.
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The choice is still legally not for the woman to make herself, even though these days the physical risks of having an abortion are much lower (at early stages) - and never more risky than labour and birth even right up to the legal 24 wk time limit.
And pregnancy, labour and birth doesn’t seem to require two doctors’ approval to be legal. there are very high risks to mental health and wellbeing and huge damage to personal autonomy and sex equality in being forced to continue with a pregnancy you don’t want. I’ll leave aside the potential ramifications for the resulting child because from my experience in discussion most pro life people aren’t very interested in what happens to them as long as they get to be born.
I can only guess that despite the horror of forced motherhood those who want to deny emergency contraception or abortion see forced motherhood as some kind of appropriate punishment of women for having sex.
(but that would be odd because the men who had the same sex.. no punishment needed.)
Parliamentarians still don’t trust women to legally make up their mind about their own body and decide if or when they have a baby or have more children.
Claims of a lucrative abortion ‘industry’ in Britain are not right - the NHS and two major British charities provide almost all abortions to women in the UK. Marie Stopes and BPAS.
That’s not an ‘industry’ unless providing any kind of healthcare eg the NHS is ‘industrial’? which is an unusual way to describe it.
The vast majority of these two charities’ abortion, contraception, and male and female sterilisation caseload is paid for by the NHS at tariff cost. Anyone who thinks the NHS makes a ‘lucrative’ profit from providing its own services under tariff could have a look at the current funding crises in public accounts which would show the radical opposite (unfortunately for all of us who rely on the NHS). Marie Stopes or BPAS accounts are also published on the charity commission website so freely available.
There simply isn’t the market share or demand from paying customers in Britain for a private provider to come in and make a vast profit margin providing abortion here, because the service free at the point of care is already no frills (no luxuries to undercut), but at least safe.
Oddly enough, exploitatively high-priced ‘profiteer’-type private provision tends to happen where abortion is legally restricted and/or not publicly funded. Of course these services tend to be provided by people who are less well qualified, trained, developed, invested in. So they tend not to provide up to date care or emotional support, thereby dramatically reducing safety for patients, because of the stigma around being an abortion provider or around getting an abortion. They may be working at the legal margins so not be inspected or insured for what they are doing leading to all kinds of scope for bad practice or abuse. Lovely job, anti-choicers!
The private caseload in the NHS and of the British charities tends to mostly from better-resourced women and girls who have travelled from Ireland or Northern Ireland, or other European countries with more restrictive laws.
Providing 10 or 12 weeks on demand coupled with only limited public funding as some European countries do, is not helpful to all girls and women especially the least resourced or vulnerable. This group might not recognise they are pregnant early enough or for whatever financial, social, geographical reason might not have the wherewithal to get the abortion they need within the time frame given.
thankfully in the UK our Parliaments have been in the majority relatively humane (since 1967 at least) and if they are not actively seeking to support women’s choice on abortion, they are at least pragmatic.
So they accept that society needs accessible, safe and legal abortion. Otherwise individuals and society have to pay the personal and wider social cost of not making abortion and contraception available to those who need it.
Westminster Parliamentarians could do much better by women though and it is a scandal and a national source of shame that any woman in Northern Ireland has to pay to travel to Britain for an abortion.
Then either pay for her care privately, or have to lie and give a fake address to get an NHS- funded abortion. Imagine the stress, cost and risks to your privacy of having to do all that.
Westminster should act on that and should also decriminalise abortion in the whole UK in line with what the medical professional groups are saying.