Lois McLatchie Miller is Senior Legal Communications Officer for ADF UK, a legal advocacy organisation that promotes freedom of speech.
Since 1967, abortion, though still criminal, has been permitted for effectively any reason up to 24 weeks (5.5 months) – and up to birth in certain circumstances, including if the baby has a disability, or if the mother’s life or health is at risk.
Over 50 years have passed. On all sides of the debate, we see a need for change.
For certain MPs, that change moves in a harmful direction. One amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill, proposed by Diana Johnson, would remove laws that prevent women from aborting babies aged between six and nine months.
At this point, many babies have proven able to survive outside the womb with appropriate support; this amendment would create a bizarre, dangerous scenario where abortionists would be prohibited from carrying out most late-term abortions, but women won’t be legally restricted from taking matters into their own hands on their own at home.
Another pro-abortion amendment was lodged this week by Stella Creasy. Though not yet public, the amendment is reported to fully decriminalise abortion up to 24 weeks at least. This is already around double the limit in place in countries across the EU, including France (14 weeks) and Germany (12 weeks); and past the point at which babies are generally able to survive outside the womb (22 weeks).
And evidence would suggest that Creasy has her eye on moving the dial even more: her previous amendment (withdrawn) decriminalised abortion for any reason all the way up to birth; and her comments in the Guardian this week indicate her beliefs that women should not be prosecuted for late-term abortion under any circumstance.
Demands to change the law became louder when Carla Foster was temporarily jailed last summer for deliberately ending the life of her sentient, pain-capable, 32-to-34-week-old baby in the womb.
Her sentence was very quickly reversed on appeal. But Carla’s trauma was not done or undone by her sentencing; she talked about the harrowing experience of delivering her stillborn daughter whom she had aborted with pills. She later named her baby, “Lily”. She said she is “haunted” by “nightmares” of what had happened.
The law doesn’t just exist to punish injustice. It’s there to prevent this traumatic horror from happening to any woman in the first place. And it protects the lives of babies like Lily, who could have survived and thrived with the right support outside the womb, if only born alive.
Compassion is important. But compassion does not mean loosening safeguards around abortions – it means guiding women to avoid horrendous experiences. And for those who still illegally abort their six to nine-month-old babies, the law still has flexibility to allow for compassion, per-circumstance; Carla’s sentence was, as mentioned, quickly reversed on appeal.
Compassion also applies to the child involved. Studies suggest that a child in the womb can feel pain from as early as 12 weeks. Moreover, for our human rights equality framework to exist, we cannot deny a human the right to life based on their age, ability, or dependency on their mother – many outside the womb could be jeopardized too, were this the case.
In 2019, the Conservative Manifesto promised that this government would work on “making Great Britain…the best place in the world to start a family.” Yet across the last few years, abortion rates have skyrocketed. Now, under the Tories’ watch, an ideological agenda to “liberalise” could steamroller common sense, wellbeing, and human rights.
MPs do have another choice. Two alternative amendments proposed to the same Criminal Justice Bill would seek to bring our outlier abortion laws in line with more humane European standards. One, proposed by Sir Liam Fox, would ensure babies with Down Syndrome are treated equally under the law as their peers, and aren’t singled out for abortion up-to-birth.
Another, proposed by Caroline Ansel, would reduce the 24 week cap down to 22 weeks, in acknowledgement of medical advances which allow premature babies to survive from as early as this. A child of 22 weeks shouldn’t be aborted in the same hospital where another of the same age is fighting to survive.
In these dying days of government, this is a chance for MPs to eschew ideological pressures and do the right thing. British women and their babies deserve far better than abortion decriminalisation. If there was ever a chance to be a party in favour of family, of women, and of protecting life, it’s time to show it now.
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Author: Lois McLatchie Miller
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