Stewart Jackson is a former Conservative MP and Special Adviser, and is the Founder and Director of UK Political Insight.
Freedom of conscience is an important principle – only a tyrant would compel their subjects to act against their moral beliefs. Parliament recognises this by designating certain matters as ‘conscience’ issues on which political parties agree to hold free votes.
Much of this is noble, but it also carries an accompanying danger – free votes can become means by which parties evade responsibility for making decisions on issues that may be uncomfortably controversial among the electorate or their MPs. The free vote can be an easy way out.
Free votes must also have limits. An issue should not automatically be deemed a matter of conscience simply because it requires moral judgements. Almost every issue, from taxation to immigration, requires governments to weigh up competing values, while some ethical issues are so clear-cut there is a moral imperative to whip – for example, prohibiting segregation or child pornography.
One of the best-known examples of a ‘conscience’ issue requiring a free vote is abortion. Rightly or wrongly, it has been a convention that the issue should not be decided upon party lines.
However, it should not follow that because some decisions concerning abortion, such as the reduction of the time limit in 1990 from 28 to 24 weeks (still double that of the EU median), have been designated free votes, all issues relating to abortion ought to be so. For example, few would see the horror of partial-birth abortion as a legitimate issue of conscience.
Moreover, where issues related to abortion impact other fundamental principles, a free vote may be the path of cowardice. There is more than a sneaking suspicion that Conservative governments in this Parliament have been running scared on the issue, buckling to the vocal abortion lobby even when it contradicts the Government’s evidence and leads to adverse effects.
Take abortion clinic buffer zones. Genuine harassment of women seeking an abortion is wrong, yet the Government’s own review into activities outside abortion clinics in 2018 concluded that buffer zones were unnecessary and sufficient laws already existed to prevent harassment. However, when the Government’s Public Order Act 2023 was hijacked by pro-abortion MPs to bring in buffer zones, the Government waved the white flag and failed to whip on a matter that primarily concerned free speech rather than conscience.
The result is that the same police who seemingly turn a blind eye to genuinely intimidating anti-semitic protests on the streets of London will soon be required to arrest peaceful volunteers praying silently or offering practical support outside abortion clinics – especially if the abortion lobby succeeds in its current efforts to overturn the balance of freedoms contained in the Government’s draft guidance on these buffer zones.
Perhaps worse was the Government’s decision not to whip against an amendment to its Health and Care Act in March 2022 that made permanent the ‘pills by post’ scheme. This scheme allows women to be sent abortion pills without an in-person appointment to verify their gestation is within the legal limit and that their desire for an abortion is not the subject of coercion.
The Government had strong grounds to whip on this issue: it had already announced the end of the scheme, which was introduced during the pandemic, after its own consultation found 70 per cent of respondents wanted it to stop. The risks to women of taking abortion pills without a proper in-person check-up are well documented. This ought to have been a public health issue but because abortion was involved, the Government caved in and the scheme was made permanent under a free vote.
The Government is about to face another such decision where a free vote would be even less justifiable. Diana Johnson, a Labour MP, has tabled an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill seeking to remove offences that make it illegal for a woman to administer her own abortion, a proposal supported by only 16 per cent of the public.
As Johnson’s explanatory note to the amendment states, this would apply to pregnancy “at any gestation”. In other words, women using pills to perform their abortion would be permitted to end the lives of their unborn child at any point up to birth, well beyond the current 24-week limit, and well past the point of viability.
Since the aforementioned ‘pills by post’ scheme now allows women to acquire abortion pills without an in-person appointment, meaning women can lie about their gestational age. As was the case last summer with Carla Foster, who knowingly took pills at 32-34 weeks gestation.
As such, this amendment would de facto allow women to perform their own late-term abortions. While Parliament may have decided MPs’ general view about abortion should be a matter of conscience, an amendment that removes any legal deterrent against abortion up to birth is a different matter; if the Government permitted a free vote, it would be signalling it has no fixed view on the morality of abortion at full-term, something supported by only 1 per cent of the public.
If this were not itself reason enough to whip, Diana Johnson’s amendment would also remove the important deterrent that exists against women taking abortion pills late in pregnancy – the Government’s own review last November found the complication rate for pills taken after 20 weeks gestation in a clinical setting was 160 times greater than before 10 weeks (the legal limit for ‘pills by post’).
Johnson’s amendment would thus gravely endanger women in a context where they can simply get hold of pills by dishonestly or mistakenly claiming to be earlier in pregnancy than they are. If the Government once again ignores its own review and allows this amendment to be a free vote, it would be guilty of sacrificing women’s welfare on the altar of an extreme ideology. It would be evading responsibility in favour of an easy way out.
The post Stewart Jackson: The Government must take a stand against abortion up to birth appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Stewart Jackson
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