Image – Wikimedia Commons: Stella Creasy speaking at the 2016 Labour Party Conference in Liverpool
There were several interesting things about the Westminster Hall debate last Monday, 2 June, on decriminalisation. One was the public spat between Tonia Antoniazzi and Stella Creasy over the merits of their respective amendments. It was also refreshing to hear the Conservative spokesman speaking about “the welfare of the unborn child” and recognising that “Criminal law is the manner in which we safeguard the vulnerable and uphold the sanctity of life in our system”.
What I want to talk about today is the apparent confusion among pro-abortion MPs as to what is behind the recent increase in prosecutions of women for illegal abortion. (The increase is real, though we shouldn’t forget that we are still talking about a handful of cases in the last few years, compared with about 300,000 legal abortions annually).
Stella Creasy said: “Many of us have been concerned for some years about the increase in investigations and prosecutions of women for abortion. We have not been able to get to the bottom of why there has been such a surge or why the police felt the need to produce that guidance.”
If she really is confused, this from Tony Vaughan MP, who led the debate, provided crucial context:
“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.”
What happened to create this change? Could it have possibly have been the new policy, introduced during the pandemic, and made permanent in 2022, that allowed abortion providers to send abortion pills in the post without in-person checks?
The cases that the pro-abortion MPs use to make their case during the debate made it clear that this was the case. Tony Vaughan referred to “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 to Carla Foster “a mother who was jailed for illegally taking abortion tablets to end her pregnancy during lockdown” and who “quickly admitted to police that she had provided incorrect information during a consultation”.
This was rather glossing over the details of both cases. The “incorrect information” that Carla Foster gave was that she was seven weeks pregnant, when she knew that she was in fact over 24 weeks gestation. Baby Lily was actually around 36 weeks gestation when she was born dead, a fact that caused widespread public horror. While Nicola Packer was recently acquitted, the investigation found that she had made internet searches, including “medical abortion from 10 weeks to 24 weeks” and “abortion at home at 15 weeks”. He also didn’t mention that Packer’s pregnancy was a result of a relationship with a married man, with whom she was engaged in a “consensual BDSM threesome relationship”. I don’t think it’s too judgemental to say that this is not a particularly compelling case with which to champion reform of the abortion law.
Nonetheless, the MPs using these cases are clearly aware that they came about as a result of the pills-by-post policy. If they still were not getting the connection, a contribution by DUP MP Carla Lockhart must surely have set them straight.
“Back in 2021, I wrote in The House magazine of my fears that the pills-by-post scheme for at-home abortions was leading to an increase in medical complications, dangerous late abortions and coerced abortions,” she said. “Plenty of others expressed similar fears. Sadly, those fears have all proven to be true. A study based on freedom of information requests to NHS trusts found that more than 10,000 women who took at least one abortion pill, provided by the NHS, at home in 2020 needed hospital treatment for side effects – equivalent to more than one in 17 women, or 20 women per day. Late last year, Stuart Worby was convicted of using abortion pills obtained by a third party through the pills-by-post scheme to induce an abortion of a woman against her knowledge or will.”
She continued: “All those cases could have been prevented if abortion providers had not lobbied, in the face of warnings about precisely those kinds of incidents occurring, for the removal of in-person appointments where health risks could be assessed and the woman’s identity and gestational age accurately verified. It is that last point about ensuring that a woman’s gestational age is accurately verified that has indirectly led to the debate we are having today.”
Just in case they weren’t getting it, Ms Lockhart spelled out why prosecutions were happening, and who was to blame.
“The abortion lobby has acknowledged – I quote Jonathan Lord, former medical director for abortion provider Marie Stopes – that until recently, ‘only three women’ had ‘ever been on trial over the past 160 years’ for illegal abortions. Since then, there has been an increase in investigations and prosecutions, albeit still a very small number in the light of the more than a quarter of a million abortions we now have every year in the United Kingdom – a national tragedy.
“Why has there been a small rise in prosecutions? It is surely not because the CPS or police have suddenly decided to handle the issue in a more draconian way; rather, the pills-by-post scheme has enabled women, either dishonestly or because they have miscalculated their gestational age, to obtain abortion pills beyond the 10-week limit when at-home abortions are legal and considered safe for women – they are, of course, never safe for the baby – and even beyond the 24-week upper time limit for abortions in this country. Tragically, that has led to viable babies’ lives being ended. The responsibility for that surely lies with those who lobbied for the pills-by-post scheme.”
Incidentally, Stella Creasy is unquestionably one of those who lobbied for the scheme to continue. To give just one example, she is quoted as saying that “telemedicine is safe, secure and preferable for many patients for a variety of reasons”.
Clearly, logic is not the strong point among these pro-abortion MPs, but Carla Lockhart again helped them out by offering the obvious solution to their problem of more women being prosecuted.
“What is the solution? Well, it cannot be to make matters worse by decriminalising abortion. That would be highly irresponsible, creating conditions where a woman could perform her own abortion, unsupervised, without any legal deterrent, away from a clinical setting, at a stage in pregnancy when doing so would carry great risks and when her baby would be viable. We would be de facto introducing abortion up to birth and reintroducing dangerous backstreet abortions. That is not pro-women, and it renders the time limit redundant in a context where pills can be obtained without any reliable in-person gestational age check.
“There is a clear alternative solution: end the pills-by-post scheme.”
Amen to that. The pro-abortion lobby must not get away with this evil attempt to cover up their own disgraceful actions that have allowed these traumatic illegal abortions to take place. It will suit abortion providers just fine to have no investigations or prosecutions when a full-term baby dies, and a woman is put in danger from taking abortion drugs late in pregnancy. But it is not compassionate and certainly not pro-women.
Please write to your MP and ask them to go after the real culprits of this mess, instead of removing any remaining protection from unborn babies.
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