After a bruising election defeat, former PM Rishi Sunak is standing down as leader of the Conservative Party, triggering a leadership contest. Nominations have now closed, and six candidates are standing to be the new leader.

This week saw the State Opening of Parliament, where the monarch (or, this year, Prince Charles) reads out the Government’s agenda for the upcoming parliamentary session.

Last Friday, there was wide reporting in the media of a study which shows “that enabling women to have early abortions at home during the pandemic is safe and effective.”

A number of news outlets have today carried articles reporting on a study which shows “that enabling women to have early abortions at home during the pandemic is safe and effective.” 

The government is currently consulting the public about home use of early medical abortion pills, a policy introduced last March as a temporary measure due to the pandemic. The key question in the consultation is whether allowing abortion providers to prescribe abortion pills over the phone, and then send them to women in the post, should be made permanent.

One of the lesser known functions carried out by parliamentarians is sitting on committees. Select Committees, comprise of a group of MPs and/or Peers who scrutinise a particular Government department – so the Health Select Committee looks at the work of the Health Department, for example. There are also committees that work on bills passing through Parliament – such as the recent Domestic Abuse Bill.

The other day I was reading an article about a mother who took to social media platform TokTok to describe how she reacted when she found out that her 17 year old daughter was pregnant.

On Tuesday, BBC news ran a segment on late term abortion, using “exclusive” information from abortion provider BPAS. Dr Patricia Lohr of BPAS said that abortion is needed for women with some medical conditions, comments that a doctor has dismissed as “untrue” and “bad medicine”.

Recent weeks have seen the announcement that the Department for International Development (DFID) is to be folded into the Foreign Office to create the new Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

When a colleague called me on Saturday morning to tell me that news had broken that police were investigating the death of an unborn baby at 28 weeks following a “pill by post” abortion, I swore down the phone. Not because I dislike being called at the weekend, but because I was so angry that this had been allowed to happen.
 

Ever since the horrific Government u-turn to allow women to self-administer ‘medical’ or chemical abortions at home with no medical supervision, politicians of every stripe have defended the move by insisting that it is only temporary. Among the many letters I have seen from MPs writing to their pro-life constituents about this, not one MP has explicitly said that these DIY abortions should be the norm. Even MPs who agree with the introduction of home abortions, have expressed concern that this change was not subject to proper parliamentary scrutiny.

Since June 2017, the British Government has been funding women from Northern Ireland to come to Great Britain for abortions. Just how much taxpayer’s money has been spent on flying women over to have their unborn children killed has now been revealed.