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/

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.

Bollocks. AGPs trying to access women when they're vulnerable is not comparable at all to women having dominion over their own bodies. Unborn babies do not have 'rights' and women are not trying to land grab extra rights from another group.

The police should not be putting women who've miscarried in cells, the HCPs treating them should not be reporting them to the police, police should not be combing the period apps or internet searches of women who have miscarried, and women shouldn't be afraid to access healthcare in case they're accused of breaking the law. None of that is remotely comparable to saying men can't use women's changing rooms.

Yes you can decriminalise if wanted but prevent late term use which isn’t what it’s for anyway.

All that has to be done is similar guardrails for access to the medication. Plus women would have more support.

What are those harrowing headlines going to say? 'This year, like every year, 2,000 women in England suffered a post-24 week pregnancy loss. The police did not arrest any of them.' Its non-news.

This poll shows 55% support decriminalisation

Thanks @PandoraSocks

Just listening to Woman's Hour from yesterday and the MP who put forward the online pills amendment (defeated) is being interviewed. She makes a good point that coercive men have been prosecuted also - and that now investigations will no longer take place, these men will also go undetected.

She's talking a lot of sense actually. Says she's not debating from a pro choice or pro life position, but one of pro safety.

That Parliament have made it legal for women to abort late term pregnancies, but haven't given them a legal (and safe) mechanism through which to do it.

Also, as a side note, I think it's a real shame that genuine stillbirths and miscarriages get swept up in this - there should be some way of differentiating.

Point of fact, Late abortions after 20+ weeks can be very hard or impossible to get. Legally available yes but incredibly time sensitive to access and only available from a very small number of very specific HCPs at a very few specific facilities. Who could be at the opposite end of the country to where a woman lives even if they have appointments available within the under 24 weeks limit. These abortions require overnight stays and recovery stays and normally access to travel and accommodation ££££ for the woman and a support companion if she has one and time off work or education and child caring responsibilities etc so they are not always quick or easy to find.

There won’t be any headlines because there won’t be any investigations. But there will be women who knowingly or unknowingly take these pills late in pregnancy and have a horrendously traumatic time birthing a viable baby alone at home.

And any women who do it on purpose at a late stage (I appreciate this is likely to be very rare) won’t be investigated despite purposefully taking medication designed for use under 10 weeks at a much much later stage. Personally I think those women should be investigated, although I accept that’s not everyone’s view.

This amendment has not changed anything about provision of abortion care, the time limit, the right to conscientious objection or any other aspects of abortion law.

To my mind, it’s about giving confidence to women that they can still seek medical help after abortion, miscarriage or stillbirth without fearing criminal penalties - which will save women’s lives in a small number of instances.

It will give confidence to HCPs that they don’t have to report women to the police to be criminally investigated for possibly having acted outside the1967 Act, which has been happening as a report, increasingly.

HCPs can still act on any concerns they have for women’s welfare and safety just as they did before. But it brings the focus first to women being able to access medical care and support.

This change brings England and Wales into line with Northern Ireland. Scotland has never had the same laws.

Anyone who wants a bit more clarity on whats changed, take a look at this briefing supported by all the main relevant groups to women’s health care:

https://www.rcog.org.uk/media/00sjehln/multiagency-call-for-urgent-action-by-parliament-to-protect-women-s-essential-reproductive-rights.pdf

Anyone who wants a bit more insight into why accessing abortion could be delayed for several weeks, or abortion could only become needed very late on (this is only 20 weeks-24 weeks but gives some key themes which will be relevant): https://www.bpas.org/media/dmjf3y0l/why-do-women-need-abortions-after-20-weeks.pdf

The main women’s reproductive health medical bodies of the UK all support this change. They do so because they are rightly concerned for the women in really dire situations attempting to self administer outside the Abortion act who are then too scared to seek medical help, and they know of the women who have been criminally investigated for an stillbirth or miscarriage because it might look like to an HCP that they might have self administered something. They want to put their patients first and not deter anyone who needs help. It brings the focus on to women’s health and wellbeing which is where it should be.

And it’s not going to help any girl or woman to start wanting to row back on Pills by Post for abortions within the Abortion Act, which seems to be what some posters are saying?

Pills by post are a good thing in supporting access to timely legal safe earlier abortion. Pills by post remove delays and protect against loss of privacy or gain of knowledge by a third party about the abortion which could endanger her if she is living in a violent situation. Pills by post possibly enable access to an abortion for women at home who can’t straightforwardly leave home to get to a HCP for treatment easily for caring reasons, work reasons, privacy, or all three. This option lowers medical and social risk, and supports women’s privacy safety and dignity.

Delaying abortion by removing the Pills by post option pushes more women into having surgical abortions at later gestations that could have been done medically and less invasively earlier on.

Pills by post have been available illicitly (outside of the 1967 Act in GB), since these pills have been around via groups like Women on Waves. They’re a very important recourse for women in countries where abortion is very restricted or not available.

It’s the telemedication system without process that puts us out of step with other countries.

It’s only in place due to Covid and at this point is an oversight.

The intention wasn’t to allow late term access, so we need something to ensure it has guardrails in place.

Does anyone want this?

If the answer is no then we need a better system. As other countries do.

This raises a good point. Although rare, women who make a decision to have a late abortion will almost always have circumstances which mean they are likely to need support.

It should have been thought through more. What about women coerced to take the pills by abusive partners or family? Female baby when they want a son? And can these pills be crushed and hidden in the mothers food by men who could not get her to agree to an abortion?

I keep reading stories from America where women who have had a miscarriage have been arrested, even before they have physically recovered from the miscarriage. So I’m glad to see our country take a stance that we won’t follow that way. I think the idea of late term abortion is horrific and really would be against it but the worlds attitude to women had me supporting this to protect miscarrying women in years to come.

it’s still illegal to help a woman do this if not medically justified which I think is important.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/12/appeal-jail-term-woman-aborted-baby-40-weeks

As far as I can see, the change is that this 2012 prosecution would not take place.

I wish that this case had been discussed, as well as the ones chosen to engage public sympathy. The arguments wouldn’t be different, but they would be honest.

See also the repeated reference to the 1867 legislation, and not the equally relevant 1929 legislation re: child destruction.

Unborn babies do not have 'rights' and women are not trying to land grab extra rights from another group.

Case in point. Late term unborn babies do have certain, limited rights (not entirely unlike how women have certain, limited rights to single sex spaces), such as the right to not be aborted in the absence of medical reasons. An expansion of women's rights to terminate a pregnancy is a land grab of those rights. Your denial of the existence of another group's rights is no different to TRAs saying that women do not have the right to single sex spaces.

It is not about which rights are most important, it is more about the moral questions inherent in late stage abortion.

You cannot say that women are completely detached from their role in the creation and gestation of new life. Just an incubator. The symbiosis of pregnancy is profound ( which is why a termination can sometimes be very upsetting), and certainly beyond the quickening when one becomes aware of foetal movement.

Wasn't the discussion so swift, because it was just about removing an old law which was clearly not fit for purpose, not introducing a new one? So no parametric discussion involved.

If I have a choice between the old law and removing it, I'm definitely for the removal.

It's an amendment to a much larger bill - the Crime and Policing Bill - so it's not accurate to say it's not introducing new legislation. But because it's an amendment and not a bill in its own right, it gets less parliamentary time.

The legislation it changes is the Offences Against The Person Act 1861.

There is valid criticism that for such an important decision, it shouldn't have been such a swift decision. I compare this to debate months ago about legalising euthanasia - that got hours of debate and reams of media coverage.

Unborn babies do not have rights. They do not 'have the right not to be aborted', that's not how the law is framed. That is a very slippery slope to go down and I'm glad there's no political appetite to do so currently in the UK.

And your agenda is clear from the description of women's 'certain limited rights'. Women aren't support animals.

Absolutely astonishing the level of concern over potential coercion when its pills by post under discussion, which completely disappears when its assisted dying.

There are always going to be hard cases but in the main you either trust women around their own bodies or you don’t. I do trust women. I wonder if for those who don’t want to trust women, maybe expert professional views might be reassuring?

The UK’s expert bodies of HCPs who were supporting this amendment would know as HCPs if the women of Northern Ireland and Scotland had been acting reprehensibly towards their own pregnancies. They would come into contact with them.

Yet as you can see, these UK-wide bodies of HCPs believe that this aspect of the law was criminalising English and Welsh women, to no good outcome. Which is why they were all campaigning together to remove it.

I don’t think it’s about this. It’s more to do with reasonable access to medication.

We haven’t changed the term length from 24 weeks but have a system without controls or support.

We’re the only ones with that in place and only due to Covid not by design.

You really cannot compare Massachusetts with California. They have similar laws but the population is totally different, like comparing two European countries tbh.

The case in the UK where a woman took abortion pills to deliberately kill her full-term child radicalized me, to the point where I believe she should have been jailed for much longer. Now is this sort of crime not going to be prosecuted at all (instead of massively downplayed?)

Obviously the powers that be don't trust everyone with paracetemol. Hence the restrictions. The abortion pills are open to misuse. I can see why they are convenient for many people. But if they are deliberately misused to cause a late term abortion it should be investigated.