Change to decriminalise abortion law

[ArabellaScott]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2le12114j9o

'MPs have voted to change abortion legislation to stop women in England and Wales being prosecuted for ending their pregnancy.
The landslide vote to decriminalise the procedure is the biggest change to abortion laws in England and Wales* *for nearly 60 years.
Women who terminate their pregnancy outside the rules, for example after 24 weeks, will no longer be at risk of being investigated by police.
The law will still penalise anyone who assists a woman, including medical professionals, in getting an abortion outside the current legal framework.
Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi put forward the amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill, which was passed by a majority of 242 votes.'

Yes, that's a question I'd be interested in knowing the answer to. Surely there is some legal obligation on the provider not to give out pills on the basis of a phone appointment? (Obviously the Carla Foster case happened during lockdown, and was an exceptional circumstance.)

Two points: one, that we cannot assume that women are always in extreme distress and that their motives are always virtuous. As posters on this board have endlessly pointed out, safeguarding means that you legislate to prevent the unvirtuous, and to prevent coercion. There have already been cases where abortion pills have been deceitfully obtained by men and women have been forced to take them. There are other means to protecting the woman in such cases (by revision to prosecution or sentencing guidelines) without permitting women to abort full-term babies without consequence. Two, although an viable pre-term baby cannot legally have rights, he or she can ethically have interests. This amendment erases any consideration of the interest of the baby.

This is a most consequential change to abortion law, and it seems to me ethically most dubious that it wasn't in the manifesto and isn't primary legislation, but instead is an amendment to another bill. That means it gets hardly any parliamentary time and isn't subject to scrutiny. I think this is such a dishonest and cynical way to bring about social and ethical change.

One more thought on the abortion pills. According to Judith Green, who's a midwife, abortion pills on their own won't kill a baby in late pregnancy:

https://x.com/TybilAlper/status/1935294644159500297

I’m still confused about where the law stands around this.

I understand all the reasoning for the change in law, but my impression is that a woman would be treated differently depending on when it is judged that steps had been taken that harmed the baby.

I’m thinking particularly of Constance Martin here.

I’m uneasy with the ‘no woman would do this’ argument if the scenario flips depending on timing.

Surely the point is that, by introducing this change as an amendment to an unrelated bill, there is no possibility of seeking evidence, looking at impact, hearing expert views. Instead it's random midwives on twitter.

We're just not criminalising baby loss and accusing women of things they almost certainly haven't done anymore. And that's positive.

But apparently we are if the baby is born alive and dies shortly after?

I agree entirely that it needs to be properly researched and debated. I mentioned this because we were discussing upthread the likelihood of an abortion pill causing a baby to be stillborn, if taken late in pregnancy. I also don't think it's helpful to call Judith Green a "random midwife on Twitter" as if being on Twitter somehow means she has no expertise, when she clearly does.

I think that's right, having looked up the effect of mifepristone (and misoprostol), while being slightly grateful that my interested googling would never be held against me in court. But I'm not a medic.

If taking abortion pills leads to a live birth, and the baby then dies of extreme prematurity, the mother is not liable in practice at least. Because it would look like any premature delivery and neonatal death and the police would not interrogate why the mother went into labour.

If the mother deliberately kills a baby after delivery that would otherwise have survived, she is liable. It would show up on the PM, possibly.

Martens' baby was several weeks old.

I for one was grateful for the information as it was otherwise quite hard to find stats because of the prevalence of fœticide before or during delivery in the clinic. That thread makes it clear the drugs are relatively harmless in late pregnancy so women should maybe be warned that this method is in fact not effective. Might put them off.

The other thing to consider is what women would/will/do do if they are unable to procure pills for use outwith the 24 week limit.

i.e. what actual practical difference will it make? Stock talks about a 'deterrent' - okay, fine, but choosing to abort a baby that is likely viable at a late stage is such a specific choice and event I don't know that it can really be covered by the usual ethical mechanisms we imagine/rely on when considering criminal deterrents.

Great news. I think this makes abortion laws less vulnerable to people who want to restrict or remove bodily autonomy. It remaining illegal would have been a serious vulnerability for women's rights

I think you're right - women need to be warned of this. The real risk to my mind is that a woman thinks that taking an abortion pill in late pregnancy will be effective, when in fact it might simply lead to a baby who is alive, but very premature and therefore poorly.

I wonder if a safe haven law would reduce the number of very late abortions, or at least reduce the risk that women would be that desperate or coerced?

The problem with this is that what is allowed becomes thinkable, and what is not allowed becomes in time unacceptable. The argument for outlawing corporal punishment by parents rests on this. It is not that it is possible to police what happens in private, but that it establishes an ethical standard, and in time hitting your children becomes completely abnormal. Conversely, changing the law to make abortion up to term may initially be conceived for vanishingly rare hard cases, but in time it will make the practice more acceptable. How long will it be until we see the law changed to allow doctors to assist with abortions up until full term?

Thats a slippery slope fallacy imo; its very likely that hospital staff would refer such women to maternal psychiatric services.

She's drawing a strange conclusion here:

"At term, mifepristone has been used as a cervical ripening agent for induction of labour without harm to the fetus. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31335266/ At term, misoprostol is widely used as a cervical ripening and induction agent.

...

The availability of 'abortion pills' via telemedicine (or any other means) thus has no relevance to many of the hypothetical scenarios at later gestations being explored on X - they would induce (unsupervised) labour but not an abortion."

Using a gel as a local cervical ripening agent is not at all the same as taking a pill of the same drug, which allows systemic distribution (like the difference between a vaginal oestrogen cream and a HRT pill). There are now multiple publicised cases of women successfully using that drug to harm the fetus so we can categorically say that women with abortion pills have that capability.

The slippery slope is no fallacy, or else we would not have seen the exponential increase in the numbers of abortions since 1967, when it was conceived of as a rarity, necessary in only the most desperate of circumstances. Now 1 in 5 pregnancies are terminated.

It's commonly agreed that the law defines what is thinkable by what is allowable.

And unless there is something in statutory guidance mandating that women wanting full-term abortions must be referred to maternal psychiatric services (which of course are under strain as it is), then I'd bet my own money that they won't.

I think this is interesting , in a tweet by Posey Parker.
This entire thing is a distraction that no one wants, I think it's merely to bolster the careers of the MPs pushing this and to reframe those who stood against women's rights in the "gender war" as pro women's rights. Running alongside assisted dying bills makes it more sinister, if you ask me.

I think that’s a perverse view, given that Tonia Antoniazzi, who proposed the amendment, has always been vocally gender-critical.

Yes, you're right about TA, but Stella Creasey wasn't

Two good articles on recent votes:

https://www.thetimes.com/article/62f8a805-2624-4f9a-921b-ff16d1dc0491?shareToken=a36b9f5d5e870ee758e976d47cb534cc

Not sure if the share token will work. Article from Hadley Freeman in the Times:

'Antoniazzi’s amendment upends the delicate compromise that existed until now.
Sensing their moment has come, politicians on the right are already arguing that the time limit here should be cut, in line with most of Europe'
...
'Progressive overreach and reality denial will always cause a backlash, something Maugham should know, given his own flailing gender activism. Creasy, too, has argued that “some women are born with penises”, suggesting a strong disconnect between her beliefs and actual biology. '
...
'The legal limit exists for good reasons, including the mother’s mental health, and maintaining public support for abortion. Arguing that a woman has the right to terminate a fully gestated healthy baby is the most self-defeating version of the pro-choice movement, because it will reinvigorate the anti-abortion argument in this country, just as arguing for the most extreme version of trans rights destroyed the moderate accommodations that existed before. Labour has kicked a hornets’ nest with this vote. And it’s women who are going to be stung.

Also, one from Sarah Ditum in Unherd:

https://unherd.com/2025/06/stella-creasys-fight-for-relevance/

'The most unfortunate thing about Creasy’s amendment is not that it’s given everyone a reason to talk more about Stella Creasy. It’s that it flattened the debate about abortion reform into a choice between “extreme” and “even more extreme”. MPs went with the better option, but at the expense of having a full discussion about the overall principle (a principle that was never even mentioned in the Labour manifesto). That cannot be the right way to address matters of the gravest ethical concern.

Protecting vulnerable women from prosecution is a worthy aim, but the Antoniazzi reform is wide open to unintended consequences. Decriminalising women, but not medics, creates a perverse incentive for scared women unsure about their date of conception to self-administer their abortion. That will lead, inevitably, to a small number of women going through the trauma of an induced late miscarriage on their own. Some will suffer complications. It will only take one horrifying headline for the public to get twitchy, and Nigel Farage is already making noises about reducing the time limit.'

Both excellent, thank you

It's not good and it's not progress. It is now not a criminal offence for a woman to abort her baby for any reason up to the point of birth. That's infanticide by any other name. It's appalling.
Medical reasons for abortions up to term - death of the baby, abnormalities incompatible with life, necessary to save the life of the mother (and hope to save the baby) - are already allowed in the UK. There are no other good reasons for aborting (bringing on early labour, in effect) a late pregnancy.