Daniel Frampton is Editorial Officer at The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC).
An amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill proposing to decriminalise abortion will betray the very women it purports to protect. MPs must not allow themselves to be emotionally blackmailed into an unwise and dangerous law change promoted by abortion ideologues, whose objective is the proliferation of abortion at whatever cost to the women involved.
Dame Diana Johnson’s amendment, to be debated soon by Parliament, is intended to stop the prosecutions of women who abort a child past the 24-week limit. In practice, this means that women can self-induce abortions at home right up to birth without any legal consequence. The moral and bodily effects, which this amendment conveniently ignores, will be severe if not disastrous.
While many MPs are clearly uncomfortable with a system that prosecutes women for illegal abortions, the alternative proposed by Dame Diana is far worse: it will remove the only deterrent against dangerous late-term abortions and the complications they entail, which include haemorrhaging and sepsis.
Government data is clear: abortion pills have a complication rate of 3.3 per cent for women 13 to 19 weeks pregnant, and 4.8 per cent for aborted pregnancies over 20 weeks; there is a good reason why the limit for at-home DIY abortions is set at ten weeks.
The amendment is ostensibly a response to the prosecutions of women like Carla Foster, who was jailed for aborting her child at around 32-34 weeks. Foster, who lied to an abortion provider to obtain the drugs, was later released after an appeal, though potentially dozens of other women face prosecution.
Dishonest abortion advocates claim that the rise in investigations and convictions is a result of Britain’s “outdated abortion law”. Unfortunately, it seems that many MPs have accepted this false narrative.
Contrary to claims in the Independent and elsewhere, the rise in prosecutions is directly linked to the Government’s “pills by post” scheme – first introduced in 2020 in response to lockdown – which allowed women to induce their own abortions at home without an in-person consultation. Foster, for example, could quite easily lie to the abortion provider since no proper check of the true gestation of her child could be undertaken.
The other immediate effect of the policy was that no fewer than 10,000 women who undertook DIY abortions in 2020 required hospital treatment for complications, as revealed by 85 freedom of information requests to NHS trusts.
If Dame Diana’s amendment seeks to protect women’s well-being, it fails according to its own criteria. Once the sole deterrent in law is done away with, complications (especially from late-term abortions) will rise exponentially. One cannot help but conclude, then, that the amendment’s true intention is ideological rather than practical in intent.
Parliament has so far allowed itself to be played by cynical opportunists who took advantage of lockdown in 2020 to introduce pills by post, which in turn led to the investigations of women like Foster – another golden step along the road to abortion paradise. Now, as of 2022, abortion pills account for 86 per cent of abortions in England and Wales, 54 per cent of which take place entirely at home.
In 2022, MPs voted to make DIY abortion permanent, ignoring a Government consultation in which 70 per cent of respondents said it should end immediately, with 69 per cent stating that the scheme had a negative impact “with a particular regard to safety”.
A morally serious Parliament, in step with public opinion, should not assent to an amendment that treats abortion pills like sweets to be handed out at will and without consequence. If MPs wish to protect women, they should instead repeal the harmful pills by post scheme that created the problem in the first place.
This would be the pragmatic response, especially now that lockdowns are over, which would reduce if not entirely stop the prosecutions of women.
The disingenuous mantra repeated by abortion providers that “decriminalisation does not mean deregulation” neither stands up to reason nor the facts. A position paper published by abortion provider MSI Reproductive Choices stated in 2022 that regulation of abortion “should be a matter for clinicians, based on the best interests of the person ending their own pregnancy”.
But the Foster case and others have shown abortion providers to be incapable of ensuring women’s safety, whether that be through incompetence, the lack of safeguards inherent in DIY abortion, or simple bias. The idea that abortion providers can be trusted to regulate themselves and make decisions in the best interests of women is a naïve and dangerous assumption.
Take Dr Jonathan Lord, for example, the medical director of MSI Reproductive Choices UK, who authored controversial guidance issued this year by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) that warned medics that they should not report illegal abortions or risk “fitness to practise proceedings”. It’s worth noting the ideological tone of the guidance, which also stated that:
“In considering whether there is a valid justification for breaching confidentiality to protect the safety of others, the ‘safety of the fetus’ is not a valid reason because in law the fetus does not have personhood status.”
Dr Lord, the co-chair of the British Society of Abortion Care Providers (BSACP), was one of several providers rebuked by Justice Pepperall at the trial of Foster after they sent him an inappropriate letter that amounted to a “special pleading by those who favour wider access to abortions”. “I consider that it would have been better if the letter had not been written at all”, Justice Pepperall complained.
The current abortion law is “not fit for purpose”, states Dr Lord. Despite this, he actually concedes that the “unprecedented” number of investigations of women suspected of illegal abortions is at least linked to DIY abortion, a policy that is rather more relevant than a 163-year-old law that, up to 2020, resulted in very few prosecutions.
Moreover, an open letter signed by almost 500 medics this month urged MPs not to decriminalise abortions as it would pose “serious risks” to women’s health, and “there would likely be a significant increase in such complications”, and a 2017 survey of British adults found that only one per cent of the public support abortion up to birth.
Parliamentarians have a duty to protect citizens as well as represent their concerns, and it’s clear that the British public does not support an amendment that would impose decriminalisation at the behest of zealots bent on the proliferation of abortion. Dame Diana’s amendment will institute an abortion Wild West that will put women at further risk of both emotional and physical harm.
It’s time that MPs wake up to the cynical, agenda-driven manipulation of debate by the abortion lobby that has shamelessly used the prosecutions resulting from pills by post, which it sponsored, to pursue a dream of unrestricted abortion that would be a nightmare for women.
Daniel Frampton is Editorial Officer at The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC).
An amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill proposing to decriminalise abortion will betray the very women it purports to protect. MPs must not allow themselves to be emotionally blackmailed into an unwise and dangerous law change promoted by abortion ideologues, whose objective is the proliferation of abortion at whatever cost to the women involved.
Dame Diana Johnson’s amendment, to be debated soon by Parliament, is intended to stop the prosecutions of women who abort a child past the 24-week limit. In practice, this means that women can self-induce abortions at home right up to birth without any legal consequence. The moral and bodily effects, which this amendment conveniently ignores, will be severe if not disastrous.
While many MPs are clearly uncomfortable with a system that prosecutes women for illegal abortions, the alternative proposed by Dame Diana is far worse: it will remove the only deterrent against dangerous late-term abortions and the complications they entail, which include haemorrhaging and sepsis.
Government data is clear: abortion pills have a complication rate of 3.3 per cent for women 13 to 19 weeks pregnant, and 4.8 per cent for aborted pregnancies over 20 weeks; there is a good reason why the limit for at-home DIY abortions is set at ten weeks.
The amendment is ostensibly a response to the prosecutions of women like Carla Foster, who was jailed for aborting her child at around 32-34 weeks. Foster, who lied to an abortion provider to obtain the drugs, was later released after an appeal, though potentially dozens of other women face prosecution.
Dishonest abortion advocates claim that the rise in investigations and convictions is a result of Britain’s “outdated abortion law”. Unfortunately, it seems that many MPs have accepted this false narrative.
Contrary to claims in the Independent and elsewhere, the rise in prosecutions is directly linked to the Government’s “pills by post” scheme – first introduced in 2020 in response to lockdown – which allowed women to induce their own abortions at home without an in-person consultation. Foster, for example, could quite easily lie to the abortion provider since no proper check of the true gestation of her child could be undertaken.
The other immediate effect of the policy was that no fewer than 10,000 women who undertook DIY abortions in 2020 required hospital treatment for complications, as revealed by 85 freedom of information requests to NHS trusts.
If Dame Diana’s amendment seeks to protect women’s well-being, it fails according to its own criteria. Once the sole deterrent in law is done away with, complications (especially from late-term abortions) will rise exponentially. One cannot help but conclude, then, that the amendment’s true intention is ideological rather than practical in intent.
Parliament has so far allowed itself to be played by cynical opportunists who took advantage of lockdown in 2020 to introduce pills by post, which in turn led to the investigations of women like Foster – another golden step along the road to abortion paradise. Now, as of 2022, abortion pills account for 86 per cent of abortions in England and Wales, 54 per cent of which take place entirely at home.
In 2022, MPs voted to make DIY abortion permanent, ignoring a Government consultation in which 70 per cent of respondents said it should end immediately, with 69 per cent stating that the scheme had a negative impact “with a particular regard to safety”.
A morally serious Parliament, in step with public opinion, should not assent to an amendment that treats abortion pills like sweets to be handed out at will and without consequence. If MPs wish to protect women, they should instead repeal the harmful pills by post scheme that created the problem in the first place.
This would be the pragmatic response, especially now that lockdowns are over, which would reduce if not entirely stop the prosecutions of women.
The disingenuous mantra repeated by abortion providers that “decriminalisation does not mean deregulation” neither stands up to reason nor the facts. A position paper published by abortion provider MSI Reproductive Choices stated in 2022 that regulation of abortion “should be a matter for clinicians, based on the best interests of the person ending their own pregnancy”.
But the Foster case and others have shown abortion providers to be incapable of ensuring women’s safety, whether that be through incompetence, the lack of safeguards inherent in DIY abortion, or simple bias. The idea that abortion providers can be trusted to regulate themselves and make decisions in the best interests of women is a naïve and dangerous assumption.
Take Dr Jonathan Lord, for example, the medical director of MSI Reproductive Choices UK, who authored controversial guidance issued this year by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) that warned medics that they should not report illegal abortions or risk “fitness to practise proceedings”. It’s worth noting the ideological tone of the guidance, which also stated that:
“In considering whether there is a valid justification for breaching confidentiality to protect the safety of others, the ‘safety of the fetus’ is not a valid reason because in law the fetus does not have personhood status.”
Dr Lord, the co-chair of the British Society of Abortion Care Providers (BSACP), was one of several providers rebuked by Justice Pepperall at the trial of Foster after they sent him an inappropriate letter that amounted to a “special pleading by those who favour wider access to abortions”. “I consider that it would have been better if the letter had not been written at all”, Justice Pepperall complained.
The current abortion law is “not fit for purpose”, states Dr Lord. Despite this, he actually concedes that the “unprecedented” number of investigations of women suspected of illegal abortions is at least linked to DIY abortion, a policy that is rather more relevant than a 163-year-old law that, up to 2020, resulted in very few prosecutions.
Moreover, an open letter signed by almost 500 medics this month urged MPs not to decriminalise abortions as it would pose “serious risks” to women’s health, and “there would likely be a significant increase in such complications”, and a 2017 survey of British adults found that only one per cent of the public support abortion up to birth.
Parliamentarians have a duty to protect citizens as well as represent their concerns, and it’s clear that the British public does not support an amendment that would impose decriminalisation at the behest of zealots bent on the proliferation of abortion. Dame Diana’s amendment will institute an abortion Wild West that will put women at further risk of both emotional and physical harm.
It’s time that MPs wake up to the cynical, agenda-driven manipulation of debate by the abortion lobby that has shamelessly used the prosecutions resulting from pills by post, which it sponsored, to pursue a dream of unrestricted abortion that would be a nightmare for women.