A high-ranking Conservative MP has described UK abortion legislation as “very out of date” after a woman was jailed for more than two years for taking abortion pills after the legal cut-off (24 weeks). Caroline Nokes, chair of the Commons equalities committee, said the law used in this case should be overhauled.
The sentenced mother of three told the British Pregnancy Advisory Service she was just seven weeks pregnant to secure the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol. She was in fact 32 to 34 weeks pregnant, though is reported to have believed her baby was at 28 weeks’ gestation. After becoming pregnant at the end of 2019, the woman, too “embarrassed” to see a doctor, made a number of online searches, including “how to lose a baby at six months,” “how to hide a pregnancy bump” and “could I go to jail for aborting my baby at 30 weeks.” Describing the circumstances, the judge said: “Forced to stay at home, you moved back in with your long-term but estranged partner while carrying another man’s child. You were, I accept, in emotional turmoil as you sought to hide the pregnancy.”
After the mother took the drugs she had dishonestly obtained, they triggered labor, as intended. As a result, her daughter—named Lily—died before being born.
This tragic case has prompted Ms. Nokes to push for MPs to “decide in the 21st Century whether we should be relying on legislation that is centuries old.” She was speaking about a law dating back to 1861, which states that any woman who “unlawfully administer[s] to herself” drugs or any other instrument to cause an abortion could be “kept in penal servitude for life.” The Tory MP commented that “cases like this, although tragic and thankfully very rare, throw into sharp relief that we are relying on legislation that is very out of date. It makes a case for parliament to start looking at this issue in detail.”
The country’s nominally conservative publications have also been sure to feature strongly-worded columns by ‘right-wing’ commentators criticising the “abhorrent” ruling, while the liberal papers have failed to return the favour. In its coverage, The Guardian repeatedly referred to the unborn child as a “foetus,” a term both technically true and reliably distracting. At 34 weeks, a baby is around 45cm long from head to heel and weighs somewhere near 4.6 pounds. In searching online for details of the punishment for conducting an abortion at such a late stage, the mother in this case also referred to her named baby as just that (choosing not to type: “Could I go to jail for aborting my ‘foetus’ at 30 weeks”). The judge accepted that “you are racked by guilt and have suffered depression,” adding:
I also accept that you had a very deep emotional attachment to your unborn child and that you are plagued by nightmares and flashbacks to seeing your dead child’s face.
The mother was able to obtain the abortion pills because of a change to abortion rules approved by a Conservative Party government, which meant pills could be prescribed over the phone for unwanted pregnancies under 10 weeks without an in-person appointment. Following the news, crossbench peer Lord Alton wrote in a post on Twitter:
I specifically warned the UK Government that abortion pills in the post would lead to tragedies like this one … Ultrasound or an in-person appointment would have saved Lily’s life.
He is unlikely to be surprised by the Tory support given to the measure in the face of warnings, given the party’s long record of failing to take the subject of abortion seriously. The peer told me some years ago that Margaret Thatcher, often branded a hero of the Tory movement, was “an immovable object who has almost single-handedly prevented Parliament from considering the abortion issue further.” And today, Jacob Rees-Mogg, considered to be on the right of the Tory party and one of the few officials who is fairly open about his views on such subjects, declares that abortion laws, which he considers far too lax, simply are “not going to change.” This, it appears, is a topic the party would rather avoid altogether.
Responding to calls, including from his own party, for the law used in this case to be overhauled, a spokesman for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the current regime “provides the right balance and there are no plans to change them.”
