Campaigners Vow to Fight “Disastrous” Abortion Decriminalisation in Lords After MPs Approve Allowing Women to Abort Own Unborn Children Up to Birth

Opponents of the decriminalisation of abortion have vowed to fight on to block it in the Lords after MPs last night approved allowing women to abort their own unborn children for any reason, using any method, up to birth. The Mail has the story.

Almost 300 Labour MPs helped push through an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill that means women will will no longer face prosecution for aborting their own baby for any reason and at any stage up to birth. 

The biggest change to the law concerning women’s reproductive rights since the 1967 Abortion Act went through with a majority of 242 after most Lib Dem MPs also backed a proposal by Labour’s Tonia Antoniazzi.

She told the Commons the current “Victorian” abortion law in England and Wales is “increasingly used against vulnerable women” and said her amendment was a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity to change the law.

But the relaxation of the law was backed by just eight Tories, including one Shadow Minister, Shadow Education Secretary Laura Trott. 

The amendment still has to clear the House of Lords, and opponents vowed to try to get the “hasty” move overturned, having been passed following just two hours of debate.

Lord Alton of Liverpool warned of “potential real risks for the safety of women in particular who will be encouraged towards DIY abortions”.

“I expect that colleagues in the House of Lords will wish to scrutinise its provisions very closely and to amend it as necessary to make it safe,” he added. 

The change, if passed unchanged by peers, will alter the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act – which outlawed abortion – meaning it would no longer apply to women aborting their own babies. 

Worth reading in full.

In the Spectator, Melanie McDonagh says MPs have opened the door to infanticide:

Well, it’s hello to prenatal infanticide now that Tonia Antoniazzi’s amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill has passed the Commons after all of two hours’ debate with 379 MPs voting in favour. Can we get our heads round what that means? Nothing a woman does in relation to her own pregnancy can make her liable to prosecution. At the same age of gestation when premature babies are admitted to neonatal wards with a very good chance of survival, less fortunate foetuses can be killed with impunity by their own mothers. So anyone like Carla Foster, who aborted her baby Lily at 32 weeks’ gestation, will now get off free. There are, in other words, no sanctions for those who kill a foetus at any time right up to birth, so long as it’s your own foetus you’re killing.

Many have pointed out the incoherence of allowing women to abort their own unborn children while it remains illegal for doctors to assist them. What happens if the dastardly act goes wrong and they need medical assistance? I suspect, though, that for the provision’s supporters this is an advantage rather than a defect: the blatant incoherence and the nasty scenarios it will throw up in practice will only add to the impetus for further liberalisation. This is just as the ’emergency’ pandemic pills-by-post abortion scheme threw up the scenarios of women being prosecuted for inducing their own late-term abortions that led to yesterday’s vote. If you can’t get the whole sausage at once, slice the salami till you can.