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/

Yes, I do in the sense that I think she has an ethical duty to seek medical care for the baby - the same as she would with any born children she may have. I think she also has an ethical duty to at least pick up a phone and dial 999 if she sees a stranger bleeding out on a pavement or whatever.

I also think a woman has an ethical duty to seek medical care in advance of birth if she can reasonably assume that a live baby will be born and that baby will require medical care - regardless of gestational age or whether the baby is wanted/unwanted.

I don't think she should be compelled to use her body to incubate a baby or to sustain another human life in any way (through bone marrow donation, for example). I also think that her life should be prioritised over the baby's until the point at which it is physically separate from her body - like in cases over severe shoulder dystocia for example, or a theoretical situation in which the baby needs to be born immediately but c-section would be a risk to the mother's health.

These positions are not set in stone. They are where I am at the moment.

Sorry, meant to quote this in my post.

Yep - we aren’t just incubators

So what's the problem with them being illegal then?

The issue is that late term miscarriage/stillbirth is a thing.

And to find the potential late term abortion, you would harass very existing women who haven't done anything wrong, just had the misfortune to lose the baby.

There are women who commission babies through surrogacy and don't them up because they have changed their minds or something has changed.

There are women who abuse or neglect their children even when they know it's wrong.

We cant assume that all pregnant women are doing all they can to have a successful pregnancy and outcome.

I find the comments about how vulnerable and desperate the women who go for late abortions are a bit infantilising. Where is the evidence that it's people like this who do it? Could it actually be steely, organised women with the organisational skills to go online, order drugs, take them at the time that suits them? Like Sarah Catt.

Not if they killed their baby. Avoiding questionable investigations isn't a good reason to legalise murder.

He should have been charged with child destruction - that is the killing of a child in utero. Why was he not?

Natural miscarriages/stillbirths will always happen. Which means dead foetuses in a "viable age" will appear. Sometimes without a clear reason.
Harassing those women is just wrong.

And, every woman have a natural right to eat, drink and treat herself medically as she wishes. It isn't illegal to smoke, drink, take medication not approved for pregnancy or do any other thing which can harm the foetus. Taking medication into her own body isn't a murder.

At the risk of falling into conspiracy theories I struggle to understand what the motivation around this vote was?

Despite the rights and wrongs it looked like a political lose/lose scenario due to how it would be reported.

A handful of vulnerable women aren't typically high on the political agenda?

I thought this was very good from Sarah Ditum and I agree with it. The furore around this shows we should beware of unintended consequences in what was a largely settled matter.
https://unherd.com/2025/06/stella-creasys-fight-for-relevance/

Whoah that is a serious hatchet job. It doesn’t make Sarah Ditum look great actually. Creasy only suggested an amendment that wasn’t popular. She’s not committed a crime.

I disagree totally with the idea that abortion law needs to be not touched for safekeeping.
That’s why Northern Irish women had to put up with decades of travel to mainland GB for their abortions- only if they had the means of do so of course. So many people love telling us not to ask for too much lest we upset the apple cart, when it’s women’s issues at stake. I don’t think it’s a tactic that’s serving women well.

I thought the Ditum article was fine. I'm not keen on the concept of tone policing, but SC always seems incapable of understanding why anyone would disagree with her, unless they were of evil intent.
Plus she has been hopeless on Gender Issues. I know that shouldn't matter in the grand scheme of things, but it does to me.

What should matter is the relentless campaign of harassment that SC and her constituency office have experienced from ‘pro-life’ campaigners.
The Spectator had an even worse article which used her motherhood as a reason she shouldn’t have that opinion. It’s all about controlling women into the perfect idea of motherhood.

Did she speak up to support Rosie Duffield when she was harassed? No.

On this thread, yes, and I have no problem with that.

And a mature foetus is not just a lump of tissue.

Yes, anything that Stella Creasy proposes needs full scrutiny.

I don’t have any opinion on Creasy as a person, I don’t know her or particularly pay attention to what she’s doing. But that was a personal attack of an article. If we strip out the mean stuff, Ditum seems to be saying that abortion rights are fragile so women’s asks need to not be ‘extreme’ and we must let sleeping dogs lie for fear of worse consequences coming in future. If the worse consequences come, then if we asked for too much, it will be our own stupid fault.
This has been the basic line of the Tories and Labour for more decades than I can remember. Women! Stop asking for stuff. You don’t understand, you’ll put people off if you look greedy. You can maybe start talking about this after we’ve sorted out xyz.

So actually I respect anyone- however much of an ego they may or may not be - who is trying to make pro choice change or push the Overton window on abortion issues. That goes even if I disagree the specifics of their policy ideas. We should be able to openly have debates about abortion rights and women should be able to point out where things are wrong and what could be done better. Because over my lifetime, the dial for women’s rights around abortion has still been moving forward incredibly fucking slowly. Less than no attention is paid to it in research. Doctors who can do surgical abortions are retiring more than joining

So I think the time is long gone to meekly accept that we are lucky to have rights to abortion at all because some women don’t have that. We are no longer a majority religious society in the UK. What we are left with is a culturally misogynistic society in the UK. So let’s stop telling women not disagree with each other on policy issues in public because it’s making the cause look bad. Or that it might alienate people. Or we’re being too extreme. Women’s rights should be able to move forward with social and medical changes. They should not be held in the 1960s because some people might not like women. That’s not how rights works.

I think the point is that abortion, in certain types of circumstance, isn't simply a 'women's rights' issue. It is a human issue; a moral issue and one that society does need to engage with.

My sense is that some people have been poking the bear....pushing the boundaries....and for no good reason. in doing so they are re-igniting controversy around a settled issue.

If wider trends are anything to go by, this will affect female babies more than male ones. That's something feminists need to think about seriously, at the very least.

I'm not buying the "only desperate women would ever do this" argument either. You could make exactly the same argument for mothers killing their children at any age, but that doesn't mean it should be legal to kill your sixth-month-old or your six-year-old. Neither does the fact that such killings are mercifully very rare.

(I note these arguments are suspiciously similar to "no man would ever identify as a woman unless he was in serious distress" and "no trans woman has ever done anything bad": it's the same catastrophic conflation of rarity with impossibility.)

Now probably we need more compassion in police investigation of stillbirths and in sentencing for this sort of crime. But you do that by targeting these things directly, not passing some all-encompassing decriminalisation law without even the usual process of public and parliamentary debate.

It's a serious issue that has been hijacked by extremist MPs who have fallen prey to the US Democrat approach of just uncritically adopting the polar opposite to what the Republicans think, aided by their do-gooder buddies who will vote for anything if you tell them it's progressive.

Some of the "my body, my choice" rhetoric is far too strident in my view; people carrying banners saying " parasites don't have rights" is just distasteful in the extreme.

Women do have to be their own moral arbiters when it comes to pregnancy.....but once the pregnancy develops beyond a certain point the issue is no longer so straightforward, and as moral beings we have to recognise that.

Animals, for example, don't automatically have rights: they have rights because we are moral beings and recognise that not everything in life is just about us and our desires alone. Women, naturally...courtesy of their intimate role in pregnancy, childbirth and as mothers are necessarily aligned with this fact.

"Women are not just incubators" goes the other way too.......and which is why issues around surrogacy are so heated. Nobody carries a pregnancy without being symbiolotically entwined on every level with that pregnancy...even if the dominant feelings towards it are of rejection.

There has been no debate though. Mps have taken advantage of what is basically a loophole here. They aren't changing the Abortion Act. They are decriminalising something via another Bill which just handily presented them with an opportunity. It wasn't in any manifesto and there is no evidence that the public want it, that the public share the unhappiness of pro abortion activists at prosecutions, that the public think that women should be able to choose to abort a child past 24 weeks.

there is no evidence that the public want it

There was a yougov poll the other day that showed 55% were in favour of decriminalisation.

Ask any blunt and un-nuanced question and you tend to get a blunt and un-nuanced answer.