Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Baroness Thornton and Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest

Report stage
Wednesday 18th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest (Con)]

One letter I received pointed out that 22 week-plus babies aborted in a medical setting are clinically euthanised prior to surgery with a lethal injection into the heart. What would happen, she asked in her letter, to babies aborted at home and born alive? Would the baby be left to die? How would the baby be disposed of? Would the mother be charged with infanticide?

Clause 208, as confirmed by a legal opinion obtained by the Father of the House, Sir Edward Leigh, in the other place, would also make it legal for a woman to perform her own abortion on sex-selective grounds at any time. Data from NHS England shows that there is already an imbalance in the sex of children among certain communities that cannot be explained by pure chance. Do the proposers of this clause want to further facilitate what has been called femicide?

Let me be clear about what Clause 208 does not do. It does not, despite the claims of its promoters, leave the current law intact. If the 24-week limit can no longer be defended when women induce their own abortions, and they can obtain pills through the post via a phone call, the limit set by Parliament in 1990 is rendered meaningless. The reason why it was then lowered from 28 weeks was precisely because of concerns about the termination of viable children.

The most basic justification for all abortions is that the unborn child in question is unwanted. The slogan is that every child should be a wanted child, but we all know that there are so many couples who for medical reasons cannot have families themselves yet desperately want a family. When you think of the fate of a viable baby being aborted as unwanted when there are so many families yearning to provide that love and support via adoption, this clause is morally questionable, even on the purely utilitarian grounds of the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

The preamble to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that

“the child … needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth”.

Removing the offence of a woman terminating her own pregnancy, even at full term, would remove the few remaining legal protections for unborn children.

I am sure that the proposers of Clause 208 genuinely believe that they will thereby create a kinder and more civilised society, but I fear that the consequences, if this is passed, will be precisely the opposite.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, it is normal to take questions and interventions as this is a debate so, before the noble Baroness sits down, can I ask her whether she believes that all 50 countries that have decriminalised abortion are wrong?

Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Baroness Thornton and Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest

Committee stage
Monday 2nd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest (Con)]

My Lords, I oppose Clause 191 standing part of the Bill.

Our role as parliamentarians, especially in this House, is to ensure that laws that make it on to the statute book are safe. Good laws require careful thought and prior consideration regarding any unintended consequences. Clause 191 fails to meet these criteria and should not become law. It was hastily added to an unrelated Bill and concerns a proposal that was neither a government manifesto commitment, nor called for by the public, nor subject to even rudimentary scrutiny.

Let me be clear: the law change proposed by Clause 191 does not relate primarily to one’s views on abortion, on which there will be a range of perspectives in this House. The abortion debate is often presented as pitting the rights of a woman against the rights of an unborn child at varying stages of development. It is not accidental that the legal limit for abortion is 24 weeks. That marks roughly the stage at which the baby is fully viable when born. This clause not only fails even to consider that person but would endanger the mother.

Laws exist for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, they exist to deter us from doing things that would cause significant harm to ourselves or others, out of motives that may be devious or simply desperate. The current law prohibiting women from performing their own abortions after 24 weeks is one such law. The existing legal deterrent protects women. For example, if a partner seeks to pressure a woman into an abortion beyond the 24-week limit, a limit which I note is already double that common in most European countries, a woman can currently point to the criminal law as a reason for not doing so. Removing this would make it much harder for vulnerable women to resist such pressure and would be particularly troubling given the dangers of unsupervised self-induced abortions later in pregnancy.

There is a supreme irony that those who claim to support legal abortion on the basis that the alternative would be unsafe—illegal abortions—are now proposing that women can perform such illegal abortions, outside the terms of the Abortion Act, in an unsafe environment. This law change would, in effect, reintroduce back-street abortion, as women would not be able to have terminations in a clinic beyond the 24-week limit but could do so at home, on their own, without the prospect of any subsequent investigation, using pills not designed for use outside of a clinical context beyond 10 weeks. The potential consequences are terrifying.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

Does the noble Baroness accept that none of these things has happened in Northern Ireland? We changed the law and decriminalised abortion in Northern Ireland several years ago and literally none of the things that she is mentioning has happened there—nor in any of the other 50 countries where abortion is being decriminalised.