The decision by MPs yesterday to decriminalise abortion is a seismic step forward for women’s rights.
When I had an entirely legal abortion, the better part of a decade ago, I felt like a criminal.
The process was lengthy – I had to meet a list of conditions, largely via a painfully prying consultation where a stranger at the end of the phone asked me questions about my lifestyle – and at the clinic, ghoulish people shouted at me in the street.
On the way out I was accosted by a woman holding a rosary. “It’s not too late,” she said, as I tried to get into a taxi. I kept my fingers crossed that I’d make it home before I started bleeding, and thought how none of this, with the shame and the protesters, felt that different to the back alley stories I’d heard from the 1950s and 1960s.
Years later, when I had a miscarriage and once again needed to take medication to pass a much-wanted pregnancy, I was staggered by the difference in the experience.
The drugs were prescribed on the spot by a kind doctor and inserted for me, next to my cervix. At the abortion clinic, I was expected to get them up there myself. The gentle, thoughtful nature of miscarriage care seemed a million miles away from the abortion experience, and it seemed to compound the message that with a miscarriage you’re a victim, but with an abortion, you’re doing something shameful.
Thankfully in the years since my abortion, things have changed. These days pills are available via telemedical abortion services, who post the medication out to you with no need for the examination (as long as you’re earlier than nine weeks.) And for those who aren’t able to use telemedical services, abortion buffer zones mean that those shouting men and women can’t get near the the clinics.
The experience of actually passing a pregnancy remains unpleasant, but the circumstances around them are dramatically improved, and like the vote in Westminster yesterday, will help anyone looking to access an abortion feel less like they are doing something wrong.
Of course it would be amiss to think that everything is all rosy – you only need to look across the Atlantic to see how women’s reproductive rights are under threat. And there are many people in the UK who want the public to misunderstand what yesterday’s vote was about.
Richard Tice of Reform UK – which seems inclined to import a US culture war on abortion – posted on X an inflammatory, inaccurate accusation the evening after the vote, which read: “Disgusting. Labour cheered as they voted to become the party of baby killers. SICK.”
For the avoidance of doubt, this vote was not about extending the time frame in which women are entitled to an abortion, nor changing the process. This vote was about preventing women whose pregnancies end after 24 weeks from being investigated and prosecuted, and further enshrining reproductive rights in UK law.
square ZING TSJENG Pregnant women are being treated like criminals, with phones seized and homes searched
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The limit at which an abortion is performed remains 24 weeks, and abortions at that late stage remain enormously rare and almost exclusively for medical reasons, as the child is incompatible with life. More than 90 per cent of UK abortions take place in the first 12 weeks.
All this legislation does is change a law, previously left mostly untouched since 1967, which made me – and many other women – feel like criminals for accessing a form of essential health care that had not yet been decriminalised.
Under the previous legislation, it was possible that a woman who lost a pregnancy could be investigated and even prosecuted if it was believed that she was actively involved in inducing her own miscarriage.
That is a very dangerous, very slippery slope. We have already seen women subjected to investigation for mistakenly taking abortion medication beyond the permitted week for usage. Again, a country in which a woman can be prosecuted for accidentally using medication incorrectly is a dangerous one for women.
Relief at a choice made by the powers that be is an unfamiliar but welcome feeling, which staves off my fear that we might have been moving backwards socially. And while I remain worried, more broadly, at the state of the world (and at the prospect of the bill going through the Lords), I am, tentatively, optimistic.
If I weren’t currently pregnant, I would be raising a glass to the brave campaigners who worked so hard to make sure that future generations of women will continue to be able to access essential reproductive health care.
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