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.'

. It is the availability of this method of abortion that needs looking at, not decriminalising late abortion by the mother.
Does anyone know why parliament rejected an amendment to this?

Why would a woman, having escaped an abusive relationship, 'abort' a pregnancy at 38 weeks. This means killing a viable child - how can she do this without medical help? And she can have no medical help because any HCP would be committing a crime. Why not wait the few weeks to birth and then have the child adopted if the child is unwanted? Makes more sense than going through labour unsupported and having to cope with a dead, full-term baby, or a living one that may die quickly or that she may be so disordered as to kill (which is infanticide, a crime).

You talk constantly of 'forced birth', 'the government forcing a woman to use their body to sustain another' without any sense that you are talking of two people here, not one. Doubtless you support 'bodily autonomy' in the erroneous and arrogant belief that we should never be forced to do something with our body we do not wish to do. But we many times must do something with our body we may not choose - have a cervical smear, an operation, deal with the invasion of cancer etc. go to work. We do not have bodily autonomy and having it - the libertarian dream - can lead to a society with no thought for others, no moral compass of what is right or wrong. An unpleasant place to live where people do as they wish and to Hell with everyone else.
As for the situation you speak of you are thinking only of the woman - but a viable child has a moral right to protection, even though it is not a legal entity. Killing a viable, near full-term baby by expelling it is morally indefensible. Not wanting to be pregnant any more is no justification for such an act.
We are not islands and actions have consequences - the consequences of supporting your idea of bodily autonomy of the woman is trauma and probably long term nightmares.
Have you any children?
NB In many countries (though not the UK) you can be prosecuted for not saving a life which could have/might have been saved.

How is that supposed to work in practice? Who performs the abortion or are you thinking of this as induced labour? Are you imagining that the baby is born dead or alive? If the baby is born alive, but with health problems, who is responsible for care?

Leaving aside whether a foetus has rights, how are you factoring in the rights of all the other people involved?

I was concerned by how little debate there was around this change: it was framed as a solution to help women wrongly investigated for miscarriage focusing just on the stories of these women to create sympathy. And described as pro choice even though it goes further than many would argue is acceptable. The media had nothing I saw on what the reality of aborting a 24 week old plus foetus (i.e. essentially a baby) or debates from ethicists.

Taking the former, there are surely ways to change investigation guidelines without decriminalising abortion attempts after 24 week.

You can get all sorts of drugs on the dark web, and these are extremely hard to track who sent them. Some desperate women will take them now because they won't fear prosecution and will risk their mental and physical health - i.e. once they realise they have killed a baby or through effects of an unsupervised very late abortion. Others will not care and just want to get rid of an unwanted child.

That's not to mention that there's no real difference between a foetus a day before it is born and a day after. If you think it is completely unacceptable for a certain neonatal nurse to kill premature babies of that age how can it be effectively permitted inside the womb?

Yes I'm aware it is still a "crime" but if there is no prosecution allowed that's not much of a deterrent. As I say, it is very hard to track down where some drugs are from (as well as dubious age old "home remedies") and I guess this change won't be monitored either so we won't know how often this is happening.