New abortion laws

[Cheesetoastie537]

TW

I'm pro choice but the new potential abortion law changes feel a bit extreme to me. If I've understood right, if a woman was even in late stage of pregnancy (even say 35 weeks) could self abort the pregnancy and not face any charges for the death of a viable baby. I thought the 24 week mark was there for that reason. I know a woman still can't get a medically assisted abortion after 24 weeks (unless certain circumstances) but surely they'll just go home and do it now because theres nothing preventing them. No one should be in that situation surely. But if it was a case that a late pregnancy is now not wanted but a medically assisted abortion is not available and the woman knows they can do it themselves with no charges, wouldn't that just increase self done abortions?

If anything, shouldn't the law just change so that medical abortion at any stage is allowed then to at least make it safe for woman rather than them attempting a self abortion.

I'm not sure if the change in law opens up more issues than it fixes. And in part I feel that there's no protection for late pregnancies that the baby would have survived and now there's no legal charges for their life.

I've never really thought too much about abortion otherthan pro choice and felt the UK had a good middle ground.

Do grow up. It was an analogy....

Coercive control is a criminal matter.

You can't punish women in case they are being abused.

It was a crap one.

That is very hard to prove. Even harder if police aren't going to get involved.

Would they lock women up unless they looked really really sad which would prove it was spontaneous?

“Unless they looked really really sad which would prove it was spontaneous.” It’s this bit. You’re being sarcastic here then?

Sorry I thought you was being serious and there are people out there who think women who have had a termination won’t be devastated afterwards about it.

But it's the woman who will be under investigation and prosecuted.

How is this helping her?

Fairly obviously, decriminalising abortion does not mean the police will not get involved in cases of domestic abuse. It just means the woman won't be investigated.

My point is that it will lead to more late term abortions. So whilst it may protect some women in exceptional circumstances, it will make the lives harder for lots of women.

I think the recent prosecutions owe much more to the relatively recent introduction of medical termination at home than to the US evangelical right.

This was a settled issue before the NHS changed practice and allowed home abortions without assessing what stage of pregnancy women were in. By making that change they've effectively reopened abortion as an issue because we're now having to deal with the consequences of the choices/mistakes people make when access is liberalised.

I think the law as it is is fine, and if we don't want women facing prosecutions then we should just go back to having medical assessment before termination.

I mean for the women already experiencing domestic abuse, that are too scared to involve the police. The police aren't going to be getting involved in something that is legal for them to do. That is the point.

Since 1967 women have been making good decisions for themselves. Most terminations are before 10 weeks. Most of the "later stage" by this i mean 20 + weeks are mostly down to access issues, medical diagnosis for mother/baby, time to mqke complex decisions.

I think women can be trusted with their own healthcare. Theyve been doing so for almost sixty yrs.

How will it lead to more late term abortions?

This law means women who have miscarriages and still births won't be investigated.

Punishing women in abusive relationships is never the answer.

It is important to understand why these two amendments are coming from and why now. We've had messily compromised abortion laws in the UK for a long time. I'm saying this from memory and not Google, but I think the 1862 OAP Act makes abortion illegal, and the 1967 Abortion Act provides some exemptions from that.

A number of those exemptions are no longer rational (like two doctors having to approve) and the whole grounds for abortion thing has been a nonsense for a long time and especially since the advent of early medical abortion. Plus, recent reforms have catapulted N Ireland from being the only place in the UK where you couldn't get an abortion, to the UK cou try with the most liberal laws.

For years, pro-choicers have discussed introducing a new abortion law, but always worried that that would provide an opportunity for pro-lifers to flood it with amendments, the most successful of which would affect the very small but very vulnerable group of women who need late abortions. (The UK is generally supportive of legal abortion but very queasy about later abortions.) It was felt safer to stick with the messy make-do of the existing law.

So why has that changed now? Two things, mainly. First is that since the introduction of early medical abortion and then telemedicine (under covid), women have been able, legally and legitimately to have very early abortions with very little medical supervision. And there have been a number of cases where women were prosecuted and criminalised for what was seen as abuse of this eg. lying about their dates in order to use abortion pills in the second trimester.

It's not a good idea to lie to doctors and misuse medication, obviously. But criminalising women who do so is a really poor answer. It incentives vulnerable women to lie and conceal their reproductive situation even more. It doesn't help us understand what is going on and make any necessary changes in service delivery. And we don't do it in any other area of healthcare.

The second reason is that people (Inc Stella Creasy) are spooked about what happened in the US to Roe vs Wade, and by the noises Farage is making about abortion. They're worried that if we miss this opportunity to steer towards decriminalising abortion, we'll risk further criminalisation.

Decriminalisation isn't an abortion free for all, it's just saying that abortion should be conceptualised within UK law as healthcare, not as a criminal offence with exceptions. Until we do that, how do we get to having it resourced and provided appropriately, with NHS doctors trained to deliver it?

As for the hypotheticals about women now feeling free to do their own late term abortions, think about it. There is no way of inducing your own late abortion without putting yourself at horrific risk. And if you manage it and give birth to a live baby, you are still not allowed to kill it (there are laws - other laws!). And if you are so desperate/terrified/mentally incompetent that you attempt to poison yourself or beat your stomach or whatever, and you are rushed to hospital, should the doctors call the cops to haul you to prison, is that the best response? Is it really?

Abortion is healthcare. As with other healthcare, it works best when there is honesty between us and our healthcare workers, and good clinical processes to ensure drugs are administered safely and appropriately. It shouldn't be part of criminal law.

Because to some, legalising something = a socially accepted thing to push your partner into. At the moment pushing your partner to do this, or doing this to your partner leads to police involvement. If you can coerce your partner to do this without any police involvement, or coerce them into taking the blame they they will be more likely to do it.

Again, it just means women won't be getting investigated anymore.

You cannot punish a women for being in an abusive relationship.

The abuse is illegal already, and will remain illegal.

I understand that. As an example, many men push their partners to get abortions at the moment that they do not want. Legally, that is coercion. Men are not prosecuted for it. If abortions were illegal there would be less abortions that women do not want. I am not saying that abortions should be illegal or woman should be prosecuted for having them. But I believe that legalising them means that more women have them that do not want them.

Yes so I'm not sure how someone could physically perform a self abortion at home at 35 weeks. Many babies are born before this naturally anyway so even if you managed to start labour off them the baby has a good chance of being born alive

Yes, I was being sarcastic.

Yes it does. I've witnessed it happening with DD

I really hate daft pronouncements like this.

Not every issue is a black and white, all or nothing one. In fact most aren't.

The majority of people who think abortion should be legal, also think that there should be time limits on when an abortion should be allowed.

Abortion is not a straightforward moral issue as two lives are involved, the mothers and the foetus' /babies. Some people give absolute primary to the mother, some to the foetus/ baby and most have a view which shifts on who gets primary depending on the stage of gestation.

And some women don't make good choices. That's just a fact. I have spoken with a midwife who had the stand by and watch a labouring Mother make bad choices where she refused all intervention when her baby got into difficulty because she had believed a load of natural birthing crap that taught her to trust her body and not the medics. The baby died. The medics could not intervene as the baby had no legal rights until it was born. That's a tragedy for the baby and the Mother. Maybe, just maybe there are circumstances in which unborn babies should have rights.

The only published research on this, dating to 2021 and concerning telemedical abortions only, suggests that the split between coerced termination and coerced continuation of unwanted pregnancy is roughly 50/50, with slightly higher numbers for the latter. So one group will always lose out, if you extrapolate to late term abortions.

Which you can't, and even if you could, what benefit in putting a woman coerced into termination in jail? Keeping this type of abortion a criminal offence still only benefits men. They won't be deterred from forcing their partners into illegal abortions because they won't be the ones facing jail.

Abortion is healthcare. As with other healthcare, it works best when there is honesty between us and our healthcare workers, and good clinical processes to ensure drugs are administered safely and appropriately. It shouldn't be part of criminal law

I simply don't buy the abortion is healthcare argument. Pregnant women are not diseased or disabled or unwell. They are pregnant. No other form of healthcare involves ending a life. We don't even have legal assisted suicide. I do think abortion should be legal, but its not healthcare. Its something else.

I think it is hard to gain true statistics on abusive relationships. But I do believe it does deter men. They do not want serious criminal investigations in their lives, which they could be dragged into.

Either way, I'm not sure that legalising something incredibly dangerous to women is the answer.

The Justice Secretary is against it and considers it very extreme. She’s right.

It’s also an awful way of trying to change the law on anything, never mind something so important. If they wanted to do this they should have put it in the manifesto and given it some proper time for debate. It’s the same with the assisted dying bill. It’s massively dodgy using private members bills and not allowing proper scrutiny.

I agree.