Decriminalising Abortion

I beg to move,

That this House has considered e-petition 700014 relating to decriminalising abortion.

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Vickers. The petition creator is Gemma Clark, and this is what it says:

“I am calling on the UK government to remove abortion from criminal law so that no pregnant person can be criminalised for procuring their own abortion.”

Gemma became involved in campaigning on this issue during the pandemic. She was particularly alarmed by the tactics of some campaigners harassing women trying to access abortion in Scotland. She also has a friend who experienced a stillbirth but was investigated by the police.

Gemma is worried that there is a lot of misinformation about abortion, especially late-term ones, and that that is linked to the rise of extreme ideologies and misogyny. She is a primary school teacher and is fearful that the young girls she is educating now will have fewer rights when they grow up than she does. I thank Gemma and the more than 103,000 people from across the UK who signed her petition. That includes 152 from my constituency of Folkestone and Hythe. I also thank 55 of my constituents who emailed me to express their views on the issue. That has fed into this speech.

How is abortion criminalised in the UK? It depends on where we live. Abortion is, in effect, decriminalised in Northern Ireland, whereas long-standing laws maintain the criminalisation of abortion in England, Wales and Scotland with two main offences: procuring miscarriage under section 58 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861, and child destruction under section 1 of the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929.

The hon. and learned Gentleman is describing the law. One of the justifications for the Abortion Act 1967 was that it would end back-street abortions; indeed, whether we like it or not, we have abortion on demand in safe environments. If the proposals we are discussing go ahead and, de facto, it becomes possible to have an abortion at home up to birth, does he not think that could endanger women’s health? Is he not worried about that, or are the movers of the petition not worried about that?

I am not aware that following the decriminalisation of abortion in Northern Ireland there has been a strong current to re-criminalise it, which might be expected had a situation such as the right hon. Gentleman referred to actually occurred. It is not my understanding that that has happened.

For each of the two offences I described, sentences of up to life imprisonment apply. A person is guilty of the offence of child destruction when the pregnancy is of at least 28 weeks and they commit a wilful act to cause the child’s death; it is a defence if the act was done to preserve the mother’s life. The offence of procuring miscarriage can be committed at any stage of gestation when a person uses a poison or instrument to induce miscarriage. As the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) said, there are defences, variously, under the Abortion Act when two registered medical practitioners authorise abortion in an approved clinic in broadly four situations. The first is when there is a risk of injury to the mother’s physical or mental health up to 24 weeks—that was the exception expanded during covid, so that women could access pills for medical abortions at home, following a consultation, for pregnancy of up to 10 weeks.

The hon. and learned Member made a point about Northern Ireland. It is important to note that Northern Ireland does not have at-home abortions—pills by post—and much of the discussion about decriminalisation of abortion in England, or here in the mainland, is focused on at-home abortions. Northern Ireland has a very different context, which should not be used in the same train of thought.

I note the hon. Member’s point.

It is also worth noting that the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission has explicitly called for telemedicine to be made available to women in Northern Ireland. Given that we have a human rights framework in Northern Ireland, the Government have to respond to that or risk being taken to court again by the chief commissioner for failing to uphold the human rights of women in Northern Ireland to access a safe and legal abortion. We have no such protections here in England and Wales as yet. Is that not the case?

My hon. Friend is right, and of course it was a 2018 Supreme Court decision that showed that the rules that were then in force in Northern Ireland violated the human rights of women. That has to be at the centre of our considerations.

Let me finish listing the exceptions so that I can get to the point. Risk of grave or permanent injury, risk to the mother’s life and substantial foetal abnormality are exceptions without any gestational time limit.

Will the hon. and learned Gentleman give way?

I will press on, because I am conscious of the time. Maybe we will come back to this.

We have three hours.

All right then.

The reason I knew that is because before the debate I checked with you, Mr Vickers, that we would have ample time to speak. It is important to put something on the record about the abortion legislation in Northern Ireland. I say this respectfully to the hon. and learned Gentleman, who knows that that is the way I always try to make my points: the legislation in Northern Ireland was imposed by Westminster because we did not have a Northern Ireland Assembly that was working at the time. The elected representatives therefore could not have an input into the process, and, according to the polls, the people of Northern Ireland were very much against the type of legislation coming in. He refers to the Northern Ireland legislation, but it is Northern Ireland legislation that the Government here imposed; Northern Ireland had no input into it.

I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. I come back to what I said to the right hon. Member for Gainsborough: whatever the position at the time of the law’s coming into force, I am not aware of there being a movement or democratic support for changing the law back to what it was before. When we talk about whether laws meet the current standards and societal norms, that is the most important thing.

Let me turn to how the law is applied in England and Wales. Until 2022, it was believed that only three women had been convicted of having an illegal abortion in the 150 years since the 1861 Act, under which most illegal abortions are prosecuted, but there has been a recent increase in the prosecutions of women for procuring miscarriage under the Act. The Crown Prosecution Service reports that in the period January 2019 to March 2023, six people were charged with child destruction and 11 were charged with procuring miscarriage under section 58 of the 1861 Act.

One of those people was Nicola Packer, who took home abortion medication following a teleconsultation, believing that she was less than 10 weeks pregnant. She was in fact 26 weeks pregnant, and was accused of having an illegal abortion. On 7 November 2020, she was in hospital. The next day—

Order. May I clarify whether this is a live case?

My understanding is that the case has been disposed of. Ms Packer was found not guilty of those charges last month, I believe.

Does my hon. and learned Friend agree that the best way of keeping women’s protections to have an abortion and to stop the criminalisation of women, which he has been talking about, is to support new clause 1, which my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) has tabled, to the Crime and Policing Bill?

I agree, and I will support the new clause.

Ms Packer was in hospital one day, and arrested the next, and it took five years before the courts could dispose of that case. Another case is that of Carla Foster, a mother who was jailed for illegally taking abortion tablets to end her pregnancy during lockdown. She was initially sentenced to 28 months in prison. She was a mother of three who was of exceptionally good character and had suffered from poor mental health. She had quickly admitted to police that she had provided incorrect information during a consultation, and the Court of Appeal reduced the term to 14 months and suspended the sentence. However, by that point, she had already served 35 days in prison and had been denied any communication with her children, one of whom is autistic. In reducing her sentence, the judge said that the case called for “compassion, not punishment”, and that there was “no useful purpose” in keeping her in prison.

I thank my hon. and learned Friend for introducing this important debate. Does he agree that at the heart of this discussion are some key principles, such as compassion, which he mentioned, as well as choice and bodily autonomy? Whatever stage we are at in our lives, it is important that we are allowed to make choices about our own bodies, free from the fear of criminalisation or judgment.

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend, and thank her for her work on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which engages that principle of autonomy. I find it hard to read about the cases I just mentioned and not feel that the time has come to abandon the practice of criminalising and imprisoning women for choices they make about their own pregnancies.