Abortion decriminalisation - how the far right will use it?

[Movingdream]

I think the parliament made the right decision yesterday to decriminalise abortion. This means women won’t be investigated for late miscarriages and stillbirths, which must just feel like one trauma after another.

The 24 week limit remains in place and you would still only see doctors performing later abortions due to medical issues. As people on here know, the vast majority of abortions take place before 12 weeks and the few that don’t, normally are performed due to a medical issue for mother or baby. After 24 weeks, a woman would have to self induce an abortion for non medical reasons as doctors wouldn’t perform it, which would pretty much be labour, how would a woman even do this?

But ‘the UK has legalised abortion up until birth’ is the soundbite I keep seeing from the fundamentalist right wing types. This isn’t true. It worries me though because they’ll run with it and I’m concerned things swing the other way.

@Dangermoo I know, that’s why it’s never just about the 24 week limit with him. Most people in this country wouldn’t want abortion taken away completely.

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.

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

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

@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.

That is an unsettling point.

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.

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

In your opinion. In mine, it is.

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.

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.

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

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.

@SovietSpy yeah maybe the argument should be more focused on access to pills then? Because you’d think a woman would have to be in a medical setting to take them later on anyway. But again, what are the facts on this, who is taking a pill to induce a late term abortion? Would we be talking about limiting access to hundreds of women who can’t get to a clinic for one woman every 20 years who takes a pill later on due to desperation/mental health? I just don’t know where I stand on this. Just thinking out loud!

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.

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.

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.

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.

A lot of Americans are surprised that abortion isn’t a big thing over here, that elections aren’t fought and won on it like there. I reckon it might be because of the status quo we had. Anti abortionists could say that technically it is illegal so they are happy with that, and pro choicers could say that any women who wants one below 24 weeks can get one. Because that is what it is like. You can’t technically have one when you don’t want a baby, but in reality you can with no issues.

Greater openness about the profile of the sort of women who might seek a late term abortion or perform one on themselves is what we need, and I think decriminalisation can be the conduit for that by making it a real conversation with and by the medical community and organisations which provide support to women in these sorts of circumstances,

OK, let's do that then. I think that this is an example of a woman who might do something like a late term abortion, so she could sell the body parts: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39v27p0mwyo. What support do you think that we should offer her? She wouldn't be going to jail anymore.

The absolute insistence that women are not capable of acting for any purposes that are not pure and virtuous is staggering. Feminism is the radical notion that women are people, which means that women cover the whole spectrum of personhood, from the highly virtuous to the utterly immoral. 30 million women in this country. Some of those women will be entirely capable of terminating late pregnancies for reasons entirely unrelated to tragic circumstances - perhaps to get revenge on the father after they have discovered infidelity. Perhaps because they have met a new partner who does not want the baggage of another man's baby. Anyone remember that woman who was 20 weeks pregnant and said she'd terminate the pregnancy in order to get on Love Island? Don't think being 35 weeks instead of 20 would have deterred her. This fetishisation of women's moral purity really has to stop, it isn't feminism.

This is it, absolutely.

How about spending more money on proper pre- natal care? Sending out pills by post was done in an emergency situation during covid, but it should be stopped. Women's physical and psychological needs seem to have been downgraded to save money. We deserve better than this.

@DurinsBane yeah I feel we had ‘landed’ in a pretty good place regarding abortion in the UK. I know we are essentially in the same place in that you can freely have an abortion before 24 weeks and after 24 weeks you can access abortion if medically needed. However, I fear these headlines will create kickback because they are misleading.

I'd like to know where he gets those statistics from, and what the extent of those investigations are. I suspect that in the vast majority of cases if there is no evidence beyond the fact of a late miscarriage or stillbirth nothing happens beyond a few questions to clinicians, and the woman never even gets to know about the investigation.

You can opine all you want about it, it doesn't make it a convincing argument.