Bid in Lords to overturn move to decriminalise abortion for women

[IwantToRetire]

A landmark move to decriminalise women terminating their own pregnancies could be overturned as legislation is considered in the House of Lords.

In June, MPs in the Commons voted in favour of decriminalisation, with one saying it would remove the threat of “investigation, arrest, prosecution or imprisonment” of any woman who acts in relation to her own pregnancy. ...

But, with the Bill making its way through the Lords, an amendment has been tabled to remove the relevant clause. ...

https://nation.cymru/news/bid-in-lords-to-overturn-move-to-decriminalise-abortion-for-women/

Just a reminder of the real human lives affected by philosophical debates about the life of a foetus being determined by the law. Savita died at 31 years old because she was denied an abortion for an inevitable miscarriage of a wanted baby because her foetus was "alive". She died because that's what happens when the law requires you to wait for your very much wanted baby to die inside of you because they place an over importance on a very wishy washy emotive definition of life regardless of your wishes as a patient.

www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/23/ireland-abortion-referendum-savita-father-galway

We do allow it to the point of viability. But a lot of people are uncomfortable with allowing it beyond that. We are allowed to talk about when these lines should be drawn (there is no right answer here, only what society is able to live with)

I’d like to see actual proof of this happening outside of countries where abortion is totally banned or severely restricted

Again, this was in a country where abortion was totally banned. So not relevant

This might not be my first choice of source, but was my first search result.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/15/women-arrested-suspected-illegal-abortion-england-police

From 2024:
Abortion provider MSI says it knows of up to 60 criminal inquiries in England and Wales since 2018, compared with almost zero before.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68305991

It's not irrelevan though.. Abortion is currently criminalised in UK unless certain red tape is done, in Ireland it was criminalised without any red tape available. How is that irrelevant when we already grant access to abortion in the majority of cases, so why are we making women jump through hoops? Another real life example, my friend needed a hysterectomy for cancer and had an unexpected positive pregnancy test before surgery. She would have loved to have that baby and yet it obviously was impossible as she needed her womb removed. And so ensued a delay in the hospital needing to cancel and reschedule to get all the paperwork sorted with permissions so they couldn't be prosecuted (which the law would require currently because they'd be acting illegally otherwise) regardless of the common sense approach that she was happy to proceed and so were the HCP providing her care so why should there be a risk of prosecution, for who's benefit? Yes the few days delay didn't endanger her life and she recovered well but it was an unnecessary distress on top of an already difficult situation where she wanted her cancer surgery asap because she was scared of dying and leaving her living children behind. It's not good enough to say the deaths of women are irrelevant because it was fully criminalised in their countries when we are constantly battling to keep our current access to abortion while people lobby to have it restricted, and the red tape can cause unnecessary distress in some really horrible situations.

I'm shocked tbh that this is all you have to say about a young woman who lost her life when decriminalisation would have saved it.

She was happy to proceed and so were the HCP providing her care so why should there be a risk of prosecution, for whose benefit?

For whose benefit indeed, @Whyohwhyohwhy26. There's still a strong undercurrent of belief that society owns a woman's uterus. Otherwise, the woman's own consent would and should suffice.

Totally, it's not enough for her to just decide and she doesn't know best. I guess it tracks because PP think if we decriminalise abortion we'll have women committing infanticide because none of us will know the difference between getting an abortion and killing their toddler 🫠

we are constantly battling to keep our current access to abortion"

Who are we constantly battling? What threat is there to our current access@Whyohwhyohwhy26?

There's been multiple proposals to reduce the limit over the years. Even most recently Nigel Farage has said he believes 24 weeks is too late, so our limits are never guaranteed while they're subject to MPs decided when we can and can't have an abortion instead of it being a decision between us and our HCP.

Tory leader says plans to stop prosecuting women who have last-minute terminations are ‘too much’
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/03/19/badenoch-decriminalising-late-abortions-is-wrong/
and at https://archive.is/yRBsf

I think it is far more subtle than that.

The fact is that women are carriers of human life. Their biological function is to carry, feed and nurture that. In every society there are rituals associated with major life transitions: births, marriages and deaths. These rituals serve to bring people together and to unite around our common humanity. Symbolism is a natural outcome and a means of converying deeper moral, ethical or spiritual truths or longings.

Personally, feel that women ( as biological females) have a very particular role in the wider context of human society. Not everything is about individuals and their personal preferences and there will always be limits to individual autonomy. We are all part of a wider society and the human collective - and to that extent we all have duties towards that collective and towards each other. There are sanctions on taking life in all societies, and when life is taken there has to be an accepted process for doing that, and consequences for breaching that.

Legalised abortion recognises that women are individuals too - but also that there does need to be limits to the idea that you can do anything you like with what society agrees is precious and important. You don't own the developing child; you are the custodian of it.....even though up to a point you are free to decide whether to continue to carry that life.

Pushing the concept of individual autonomy and ownership to the extreme by way of saying that abortion right up until birth is totally the privilege and/or decsion of the woman is highly provocative and merely serves to generate a backlash. Most people, including women, understand that there needs to be limits and boundaries to the termination of human life - and sanctions for ignoring those boundaries.

Thanks for the article. So investigations have happened prior to the two cases recently but no prosecution. I didn’t know that (but the first case mentioned was dodgy as hell, should have been investigated imo)

I don’t believe it’s in the public interest to allow someone like Carla Foster free rein to kill her child, that was a particularly heinous case. Of course it could have all been prevented by requiring scans before receiving this medication …

Or even this story linked upthread—mistakes like this will keep happening as long as you don’t require a scan beforehand—why wouldn’t you want to prevent this:

File on 4 spoke to Katie (not her real name), who has been under investigation for several years for illegally procuring an abortion.
She says she believed that she was approximately seven weeks pregnant when she contacted a provider and received abortion pills through the post.
After taking the pills at home, Katie says she went into labour and gave birth to a stillborn baby. She later realised the pregnancy had progressed beyond the 24-week limit.
"After I gave birth I just froze - nothing will ever prepare you for something like that," she says.
"I didn't know what to do. I just kept thinking: 'How did this happen? How did I not know?'"

Ireland had an abortion ban at the time, that’s a completely different conversation to this one.

Do you genuinely just not understand what you mean when you say abortion ban?

You weren’t allowed to have an elective abortion in Ireland at the time.

What had any of this got to do with the story PP was replying to? Where was the necessity or the benefit of there being a risk of prosecution in my friends case? It's all very wish washy what you've posted about about the preciousness of life until it rubs up to women's lived experience of this legislation interfering in their lives. Please explain also how this preciousness didn't absolute cause the death of Savita because she absolutely died because of this line of thinking.

I wasn't responding to your post...I was responding to the post that said that society thinks it owns a woman's womb. We can choose which points we'd like to address in our posts.

What you call "wishy washy" is to do with societal ethics. They are definitely a thing. Ethics are usually focused on the wider collective rather than just on the individual. Not everything comes down to the/an individual.

She died because abortion was illegal in Ireland at the time and the doctors were afraid of legal consequences. It’s just not relevant.

Except when you apply your own moral ethics to other people's actual lives you don't get to just bypass the outcome. So do you think the my friend and her HCP should have been at risk of prosecution or not? And if her womb and it's contents wasn't "owned" why was that the case?

How exactly is that not relevant to a proposal to remove legal consequences from abortion? Would she have died of abortion was decriminalised? It's a very simple yes or no question.

That's how ethics work. They apply to individuals within a society.

Good.
Any women who wanted an abortion before 24 weeks could get one in this country, and most were happy with the status quo. I believe that is why abortion had never been a really big topic here like it has been in the states. The law didn’t need changing like they are trying to do, and it definitely shouldn’t be changed by tacking it onto another bill like the commons has done