Abortion decriminalisation ‘undermines feminism’ - Kathleen Stock

[IwantToRetire]

The historic vote has divided public opinion, with many welcoming the “hard-won victory” for women, and others warning that it goes too far.

Kathleen Stock, a former philosophy professor at the University of Sussex, who was forced to quit her job following a row with the institution over her views on gender rights and its transgender policy, was among those criticising the ruling.

“Late-term abortions kill babies,” she said. “Viable babies.”

Writing on X, formerly Twitter, she added: “There is no good case for full decriminalisation as voted for today. And there is no genuine political will for it either, because most people haven’t been slowly boiled in a vat of hyperliberal feminism and progressive technocracy like overheating frogs, until they can’t tell which way is up.

“All this will do is further undermine the legitimacy of <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.is/o/ThZhc/www.telegraph.co.uk/feminism/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">feminism generally (by association, even if some feminists are actually against it) and also undermine public trust in lawmakers (How could this have been decided so quickly without any proper consultation or discussion of a wide range of views? Why wasn’t it in the manifesto, if it is so important?).”

available in full at https://archive.is/ThZhc

Extracts from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/18/abortion-decriminalisation-undermines-feminism/

If it’s the right law then it doesn’t matter when it was enacted. Thou shalt not murder has been in place since before Christ, but I don’t see a rush to overturn that?
I totally agree with her she is talking a lot of sense and put into words what I have been thinking, especially about the hypocrisy and hyperbole to justify the need for a law which everyone says doesn’t change anything. The key issue is that you shouldn’t be able to get abortion on demand up to birth which is what has been enacted, if you can get pills via the post by going whoops I got my dates wrong.

@myplace well that’s the thing isn’t it?! If what the public and lawmakers actually want is for termination to be available right up to birth on demand for any reason, they could make that happen. And essentially what this amendment has done is now say yes late stage termination is fine for any reason long as you do it unsafely and traumatically for both mother and baby at home without the right support. I’m not sure that’s really the message they want to be sending?!

KS uses colourful emotive language and this article will land well with many Telegraph readers. Whilst I disagree with much of her rhetoric, it’s an issue that troubles me, even though I wholeheartedly support it’s aims and don’t want to see women in desperate circumstances prosecuted.

I understand that nothing will change - legally - with regard to medically assisted abortion and that decriminalising women does not remove the strict requirements for HCP. However that isn’t how it will be interpreted by the wider public. KS does has a point that a narrative of “feminists always support late abortion” could gain traction. Our differing, considered and often nuanced views will be overlooked, along with the women needing late abortions and the reasons for them.

The likelihood is that late, unsupervised abortions without medical assistance will increase and the lives and health of women will be put at risk. I can’t celebrate that.

Late, gender selective abortions will also increase, sometimes due to coercion. Again, I don’t think this is a victory.

KS does has a point that a narrative of “feminists always support late abortion” could gain traction.

It absolutely will gain traction if that's what she says about the bill in a national daily paper. She's just given the narrative traction.

"Decriminalising women who do this" does not equal "always supporting late abortion" in the public mind until someone - like her! - puts it all over the press.

Such a huge change in abortion law should have been in Labour's manifesto and made more public. I only knew about this earlier in the week and seems to have caught many other people by surprise too. I was absolutely supportive of the law as it stood, this change makes me deeply uncomfortable for some of the reasons KS has mentioned.

I’m surprised anyone is shocked. Stock has made it abundantly clear that she thinks people should be controlled in how they are able to inhabit their own bodies. This is on brand.

On this thread though, most people who are against it are so because of women, not babies/foetuses or however they are regarded.

Women at risk of death due to unassisted childbirth.

Women’s mental health issues due to having no support during what is almost bound to be a traumatic process.

Women being coerced into having late term abortions due to a man thinking he has the right to decide a child’s sex.

There’s another case of a woman being investigated described here…
This has been happening.

and the direction of travel on abortion has been in the other direction. Since the odds for premature babies have improved so dramatically, it now overlaps the gestation point for abortion, which makes people (including me) very uncomfortable. The discussion last I was paying attention was to reduce the weeks where abortion was available.

And of course that has not changed.

@Britneyfan That's really the crux of my feelings and why I agree with Kathleen Stock on this. Whatever your feelings about late term abortions (and I understand the difference between decriminalisation and legalisation), the deterrent not to procure abortion pulls by post whilst not knowing (or confirming) how pregnant you are is removed. It leaves women open to the situation where it looks like a less serious thing to do.

It is serious. For the potentially viable baby and for the mother. In hospital, the foetus is killed before delivery after 22 weeks. I assume this is because there would be an expectation to save the baby in hospital if it's born as at a viable size. I believe in ancient times, this was also done (in a less sanitised way) and that as long as part of the baby was still in the birth canal it didn't count as infanticide. As I understand it, pills by post just induce womb lining shedding and labour (please do correct me on this if I'm wrong - there seems to be little detail available online). How horrific, painful and traumatic this would be for the baby (which is it is once born alive regardless of your view on fetal personhood) and a mother who doesn't know she's as far along as she is.

As she says, the importance of the deterrent and change in public can't be underestimated. If this had gone through before the need for medical observation was removed, I think there would be stronger support. In a time where the pills can be easily obtained without confirmation of what the results will be (ie whether the foetus is viable or wont survive the process), it became necessary to investigate whether women knew how pregnant they were when they took the pills. This created the (understandable) worry of miscarriages being investigated.

The obvious solution seems to me to remove abortion by post until the finer posts and implications have been investigated. By decriminalising, surely there's still a chance that the next situation we get in, is someone takes by post abortion pills thinking they're 20 weeks, turning out to be 34 weeks, presenting with medical problems (and a deceased baby) and then being investigated to work out whether the baby was born dead (not illegal now) or alive and the mother didn't seek medical attention for it (no idea at what point this becomes concealing a birth or child neglect or causing the death of a child, legally) or something far worse. I don't think this protects women surviving stillbirth from investigation. If the use of these pills increases, it makes this situation far more likely, surely? People saying 'late term home abortions aren't a thing' seem to be ignoring the fact that that is what the latest investigation was around, surely - the taking of by post abortion pills far too late for them to be safe and past the point it was legal to do so (even if not knowingly).

Absolutely. Knowing how many women are nagged to get abortions by their abusive partners this means that some stupid men will assume she can "just get some pills" and make things go away.

Sorry that was a longer post than I'd thought it would be. TL:DR I don't believe this actually does protect women who've experienced miscarriage from investigation. And I think it increases the risk of women experiencing truly awful abortion situations rather than having it performed under medical supervision.

I accept it might not be the intention of the change, but can we be sure it won’t be the effect of it?

If your (general you, not specifically you @GrammarTeacher ) position is that abortion at any stage is morally okay for any reason then that’s a view I disagree with but people are obviously entitled to hold. From that viewpoint I can understand decriminalisation, it logically follows.

If your view is late term abortions are a generally bad thing, but women hardly ever do this and it’s always complicated so we should decriminalise and let those very few off then I disagree with the logic of that, not just the position. We shouldn’t decriminalise things we think are wrong just because it’s hard, or tragic, or rarely applicable.

But surely that’s always a risk no matter the term of the unborn child.

She's spot on.

Many feminists on this board have spent the last decade talking about the importance of nuance and balancing competing interests in the trans debate, and railing against facile slogans like "trans rights are human rights".

But the moment the shoe is on the other foot, and women are the ones trying to get egregious legislation though the back door to expand their rights at the expense of another group, they become everything they have fought against.

No nuance, no recognition of the competing interest of a healthy late term fetus, just a barrage of slogans - "trust women", "as late as necessary" etc.

Much, much more risk if a woman is effectively giving birth at home alone.

That is why the abortion pills are only supposed to be given to women who are less than 10 weeks pregnant.

Ironically, a major reason that abortion was legalised in the UK was to enable women to have safe abortions assisted by a doctor.

A separate and perhaps side point but it also feels like this is perhaps a bit of a reaction to what we see in the US with removal of abortion rights. But the US is a totally different landscape with totally different political and religious views on this, and I don’t think the discussion in the UK is ever likely to reach the stage of total abolition of abortion like in the US.

Sometimes I think we are too influenced here by American movements and rhetoric and forget that our values and challenges can be quite different.

I don’t think this needed to happen here, I think we had probably got the balance about right before this change.

I lost the article I was trying to post here…

https://apple.news/AMdQCAHn3ShSJhphz8urRYA

This is more a process and access situation to me.

The medication was meant to be overseen when it came in, the guardrails were there. It’s only due to Covid which was a novel event we have telemedicatiin with almost no controls. That wasn’t the aim for access.

I think we’re now the only comparable country with this set up. We should look to others to see how access is provided. Some do an ultrasound for example to determine term stage.

This is a mess up but on access basis.

Conversely, a larger number of women who have a late miscarriage or still birth in circumstances where there has been a relationship split, or an affair on one side or another, or a financial reverse, will be side-eyed and gossiped about as having procured the loss. Or indeed outright accused by partners or family members

This seems sensible @EasternStandard, a better safeguard. That would prevent the traumatic experience of a woman like Becca in the Cosmopolitan article linked up thread. I would feel much more comfortable about this.

Stella Creasy was quite open about this re: her proposed amendment (again in her interview on News Agents). She wanted to make abortion a human right in the UK because she is worried about the influence of JD Vance et al.

This really. I’m pro-choice for women but I don’t agree with her fully on this, but there are some inconvenient truths in what she’s saying.

When was the debate previously held in Parliament? Julia Lopez MP stood up and criticised such a major law change being rushed through in two hours. She didn't seem to accept that it's been worked on for years.

https://x.com/JuliaLopezMP/status/1935279545575215428

this right here.
i think the way a lot of people are framing it online for clicks is "omg abortions until 37 weeks everyone!" when actually, it's only about not punishing the woman who has a termination/stillbirth/miscarriage.

Women having stillbirths are already dealing with a horrifically traumatic thing - and removing the added trauma of being investigated for a much wanted baby. This is a WIN.

It's genuinely only about the actual woman, not the medical staff etc.