MPs must call time on abortion as a crime

When the US Supreme Court, packed with right-wing reactionaries by Donald Trump, overturned Roe vs Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalised women’s right to abortion, we in Britain were mostly shocked.

The decision, this time last year, to wind back the clock on female reproductive autonomy enabled states to make their own rules, with 20, at the last count, enacting partial or total bans on abortions.

The ‘pro-life’ lobby that is fundamentally against female liberation had triumphed and women were plunged into a medieval time warp, political capital to be manipulated for partisan ends.

We breathed a sigh of relief that the UK was a more civilised country, and that the toxic abortion debate that regularly engulfs America would simply not happen here.

But in the wake of the jailing this week of a British woman for terminating an advanced pregnancy, it seems that such sanctimony was misplaced.

The circumstances of Carla Foster’s case are troubling. She took medication when she was between 32-34 weeks pregnant, a ‘crime’ which saw her handed a 28-month sentence, of which 14 months will be spent behind bars.

It has reminded us that while David Steel’s law of 1967 legalised abortion in England, Wales and Scotland up to 24 weeks, the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act was never repealed and abortion services in the UK remain subject to criminal sanctions.

Women can still be criminalised for stepping outside the legal framework and penalised for choices that should be theirs to make, facing up to life imprisonment as the law stands.

At 44, Foster already had three sons and had moved back in with her estranged partner during lockdown, although she was carrying another man’s child.

She was able to abort her baby because of Covid rules, under which face-to-face medical help was largely abandoned and replaced by remote consultations and ‘pills by post’ schemes for abortions.

The thought of the termination of so viable a baby is harrowing whatever side of the abortion dilemma you’re on. For the woman herself the decision must have been taken in desperation and she has since said she is haunted by the face of her stillborn daughter. This will be her burden to bear for the rest of her life.

But what this should not have been is a matter for lawyers and judges to ponder over in the cold environment of the courtroom.

A former chief crown prosecutor, Nazir Afzal, surely represented majority opinion when he said it was not in the public interest to prosecute the mother and that he would not have pursued the case.

Yet Justice Edward Pepperall dismissed as ‘not appropriate’ the pleas from women’s health organisations for a non-custodial sentence and duly dispatched Foster to prison, although she is no danger to society and there can be no purpose served by her incarceration.

Vulnerable and denied the proper health care she needed because of the pandemic madness, now being uncovered by the Covid inquiry, she has been treated more harshly than many a rapist.

Only one in 100 rapes were reported to the police in 2021 and resulted in a charge, according to Rape Crisis. Of 70,330 reported cases in March 2022, only 2,223 charges were brought.

Harriet Wistrich, director of the Centre for Women’s Justice, said of Foster’s conviction: ‘When most forms of violence against women and girls go unpunished, this sentence confirms our very worst fears about contemporary attitudes to women’s basic human rights and an utterly misdirected criminal justice system.’

The case has challenged complacency in this country that abortion rights are settled and forced a debate on an issue sidestepped by squeamish MPs.

The last time abortion was a hot topic in parliament was more than 40 years ago, in 1980, when John Corrie, a Scottish Conservative MP, attempted to amend Steel’s Abortion Act.

Corrie was defeated but there has been no appetite to revisit the hostilities, which saw pro-abortion protesters clashing with police and the Commons galleries packed with Catholic nuns backing the bill.

But revisit this we must. The number of women and girls facing police investigations and the threat of imprisonment under abortion laws has risen over the past three years, according to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service.

Female oppression takes many forms. Gender wars have come to dominate sexual politics and women have had to fight to reclaim rights long taken for granted – to single sex spaces in hospitals, refuges, prisons, changing rooms.

When words like ‘mother’ or even ‘woman’ are deemed obsolete, or possibly offensive, by health boards, when women’s sport is no longer the preserve of female athletes, and when two out of three party leaders can’t bring themselves to define what a woman is, locking up mothers on medical grounds is par for the course.

Is this how we want Britain to be? Reforming the Victorian abortion law and affirming women’s sovereignty over their own bodies would begin to redress recent setbacks in female equality and signal that our culture is not, like America’s, entering a new Dark Ages.

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