Georgia L Gilholy is a journalist.
In a week hardly pressed for dramatic news, a particularly bleak episode continues to make headlines.
On Monday, 44-year-old Carla Foster was sentenced to jail after admitting to a charge of administering poison with intent to procure a miscarriage between May 8, 2020 and May 12, 2020.
According to court documents, baby Lily was between 32 and 34 weeks gestation, a month or so away from being full-term.
If her mother, whom the court found was aware she was in the later stages of pregnancy, had been required to attend an ultrasound or a physical examination before requesting abortion pills from her provider, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), this tragedy would never have occurred.
These in-person checks are essential so that the gestation of babies can accurately be assessed to conclude whether the termination is legal.
Even by the most stringent pro-choice standards, such checks are surely vital for the mental and physical health of the pregnant woman. Taking such pills at home, when she may not even be aware of her pregnancy stage or potential complications like an ectopic embryo could be fatal not just for the unborn baby but the mother herself.
Which invites the question: why are abortion campaigners suggesting women’s rights are “at risk” from those of us concerned by current protocols?
In March 2020 it was BPAS, the UK’s largest abortion provider, which successfully lobbied for mandatory in-person appointments to be scrapped. While BPAS had been pushing for this move for years, the confusion and chaos of Covid allowed ministers to sign off this watershed change as an emergency measure, with little public scrutiny.
The following November, the Government finally launched a consultation on the matter, to which 70 per cent of respondents expressed concerns about inaccurate gestational estimates if over-the-phone checks became the norm permanently. In February 2022, the Government announced plans to reinstate in-person appointments.
These plans were swiftly thwarted after a coalition of prominent pro-abortion MPs, with BPAS’s support, successfully inserted an amendment to the Health and Care Bill to overturn the Government’s decision to end pills by post.
While it is generally savvy enough to hide such language from their media presence, BPAS is on the record urging for the legalisation of abortion up to birth for any reason.
In England and Wales, decriminalising abortion would require the repeal of both sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act and the Infant Life Preservation Act. Doing this would make the Abortion Act 1967 redundant in England and Wales, thus scrapping the existing 24-week time limit for abortion, making the procedure available on demand, for any reason, up to birth.
This would leave babies in the womb with zero legal protection, a status on par only with China and North Korea.
For years, modern medicine has allowed babies born as early as 22 weeks to survive outside the womb. Why should it be ok to deliberately end their lives inside the womb at the same point?
At the very least, the Government must take heed of this week’s troubling case, and ensure that compulsory in-person appointments prior to abortion access be restored.
Despite their huge complicity in pushing for pills by post, BPAS and its bedfellows now appear to be exploiting this tragic episode – for which the mother has herself expressed significant distress and regret – to reinvigorate its campaign for decriminalisation.
In a Newsnight appearance on Monday, Stella Creasy MP even suggested baby Lily had not been “viable” because she “did not draw breath”, despite the fact that this was of course made impossible as the abolition pills ingested by her mother killed her inside the womb.
Such dishonesty is not shocking; radical campaigners know the British public is not on their side.
Indeed, 2017 polling carried out by Savanta ComRes found that just one per cent of women in Great Britain supported raising the upper time limit beyond 24 weeks gestation. The same figure backed permitting abortion at any stage of pregnancy.
Meanwhile, an overwhelming majority of women (70 per cent) said they favoured reducing the time limit. Indeed, we Brits are outliers among our European neighbours, for whom the median upper time limit is 12 weeks.
Some campaigners on this issue are more honest. In 2016 BPAS’s then CEO, Ann Furedi, admitted during a launch event for its decriminalisation campaign: “I want to be very, very clear and blunt … there should be no legal upper limit”.
This government, and any future ones, must firmly reject these calls.
It is also obvious that a full inquiry into BPAS, and how it was able to send abortion drugs to a woman whose baby was 22 weeks beyond the legal limit for at-home abortions, is urgently required.
Baby Lily was a fully formed human child. If her mother had been given an in-person appointment by BPAS, she would still be alive today.