Legal Rights to Access Abortion

Debate between Stella Creasy and Ian Paisley

Monday 28th November 2022 Westminster Hall

[Stella Creasy]

I gently say to the hon. Gentleman that if he is dealing with families where that is a possibility, prosecuting a woman who is being asked to have a sex-selective abortion, rather than supporting her or recognising what is happening, is not the way forward. The cases set out so powerfully by my hon. Friend the Member for Gower show why decriminalisation is a very live issue. Although it is the 21st century, this country is still prosecuting women for having miscarriages and threatening them with investigation for a healthcare issue. Rather than recognising what other pressures might be in their lives and supporting them, we are criminalising those women, as women were criminalised in the 1800s with the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. I wager that the hon. Gentleman would not want to be on the side of arguing that a piece of legislation that put abortion at the same level as setting fire to this place or indeed murder would be the right way forward.

Right now, the penalty under that legislation is lifetime imprisonment. There may be some people who are comfortable with that, but many of us, who believe that when a woman is seeking healthcare, she deserves our support, compassion and tolerance, are not. For those of us who believe that we should be equals under the law, the question is whether the hon. Gentleman would accept being denied the basic right to decide what happens to his body in a particular circumstance, and for that decision to be taken by two other people who could give him that option only if they agreed that he would go mad or lose his life if he did not have it. I wager that he would not find that acceptable if it was perhaps about having a vasectomy.

[Ian Paisley]

Under the new dispensation that the hon. Member is arguing for, how would she propose to deal with, say, a very difficult case, such as the one brought to prosecution, namely that of Sarah Catt? The judge in that case said that it was not involuntary manslaughter or indeed an offence save murder. How would the hon. Member propose to deal under the new dispensation with a difficult case that the law would ultimately throw up?

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[Ian Paisley]

I thank my hon. Friend for that point.

In 2022, there were double the number of abortions in Northern Ireland than there were in the previous year. The number doubles each year, and will continue to double, because of the very liberal legislation that is now in place in Northern Ireland. The hon. Member for Blackpool South (Scott Benton) put on the record that one in four of all pregnancies in the United Kingdom end in abortion. In England and Wales, abortions can take place up to the extreme limit of six months, whereas the European median time limit is three months. We need to have a debate about why we have an extreme time limit and why some people wish to drive it even further, to the point of birth, as a right. I just think that is wrong.

We certainly need to have a debate about why there is so much abortion in the United Kingdom. To go back to the point made by the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), why are second and third-time pregnancies leading to abortion? Why are older women having abortions? Those questions need to be asked. It cannot all be ectopic, it cannot all be rape, it cannot all be incest and it cannot all be miscarriage.

[Stella Creasy]

rose—

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[Ian Paisley]

I understand the hon. Member’s point, but of course there are two sets of DNA, two bloodstreams, two lives and two heartbeats. It is more than just the woman’s body. While I accept that women have a very difficult choice to make and are sometimes put in a horrible position by irresponsible and selfish men, women are sometimes talked out of the choice to protect a life. I have seen and heard it, and I want to make sure that there is a choice to allow the life to flourish and to grow, and that there are other opportunities beyond the womb. That is something that we should of course be dwelling on.

[Stella Creasy]

The hon. Gentleman and I have debated this issue in many different ways, and I know he does not mean to sound like he is suggesting that it is okay if a man tells a woman that she has to have the baby but not okay if he supports her choice to have an abortion. That would be the corollary of what he is saying.

Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that when it comes to legalisation in Northern Ireland, we did not just have decriminalisation and we did not just take away the Offences Against the Person Act 1861? We also brought in laws to regulate how a woman can access an abortion. There is no late-term abortion or sex selection in Northern Ireland. The Abortion (Northern Ireland) Regulations 2020 cover precisely those issues, so it is not that enshrining a human rights perspective leads to no regulation; it removes the criminal element of our old regulation and allows us to have these debates.

[Ian Paisley]

Of course, the issue is that the hon. Member cannot say that there is no late termination, because she does not know; she cannot say that there is no sex selection, because she cannot know. The law now masks that and does not allow us to know that, because it is a right to have it as of a right, not because there is a reason. That is the issue. Indeed, I know it is an issue that the hon. Member would like to have here—I know she would like to have termination right up to the point of birth, for whatever reason. It is an issue—

[Stella Creasy]

That is a misrepresentation.

[Ian Paisley]

Maybe the hon. Member does not want it right up to the point of birth, but she certainly wants the most liberal interpretation of the law that is possible. We will disagree on that, but the attempt to silence people from having the conversation on this matter is of course morally wrong. I hope we never get to that position.

I said that I wanted to touch on the issue of decriminalisation, because that has been an important point in this debate and there are difficult cases. Of course, we are talking about such a small number, which was touched on earlier: 17 cases in seven or eight years, I think, in the United Kingdom. Yes, it was difficult for the 17 people who have been questioned on this matter, and more difficult for the two people who have been charged.

Let us deal with one of the cases in which a charge was brought: that of Sarah Catt in 2010. The examples of women who were prosecuted following late-term abortions include Sarah Catt in 2010, who took abortion pills at a 38 or 39-week gestation and then buried the body of the child. The judge in the case said that

“all right-thinking people would consider this more serious than involuntary manslaughter or indeed any offence save murder.”

The judge also said that no remorse was detected. How would that case be dealt with under a new dispensation where there is no criminalisation? Would we create a gap in the law that would allow for people to, quite frankly, get away with murder? That is the unfortunate circumstance.

We also have circumstances in which men wrongly try to enforce or encourage an abortion on a partner who is pregnant by hiding tablets, by putting tablets into a drink to spike it, or by trying to encourage them to have a miscarriage and forcing that. With decriminalisation, how would a clever lawyer get those people off that particular charge? It would happen.

We could enter into this new dispensation of a rights base—putting this into the Bill of Rights in the United Kingdom—that would be abhorrent in terms of the law, because there are people who, unfortunately, do commit criminal offences and do commit them around pregnant women, and there are women who are pregnant and commit such offences, and the law should try to deal with it. Yes, the law should deal with it sensitively, but it should deal with it proportionately. I think 17 cases in seven years is proportionate, given that we have about 900,000 pregnancies in the United Kingdom annually.

Northern Ireland Protocol Bill

Debate between Stella Creasy and Ian Paisley

Committee stage
Wednesday 13th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Stella Creasy]

We are now nearly three hours into the debate and we have not named what the actual problem is. The honest truth is that the problems did not start with the protocol; the problem is Brexit and the necessity of the protocol. For the avoidance of doubt, to acknowledge that Brexit is the problem is not to say that we do not need to change the protocol, it is not to call for us to rejoin the European Union and it is not to call for a second referendum. It is to recognise that selective democratic deafness when trying to discuss what we need to do will continue to damage all our opportunities unless we recognise that there is not a protocol solution that is as perfect as the previous trading arrangements we had.

The risk is that this Bill will make a bad situation worse, like someone having a bad tattoo and taking a blowtorch to it to try to get rid of it. The Government are like the drunk at a party spilling red wine everywhere and then deciding that throwing white wine after it is the solution. That is what this Bill is, which is why Members need to stop saying, like Homer Simpson, that Brexit is a “crisotunity” and recognise that problems are coming from the opportunities they are looking for. There are problems for civil servants who have to go through 2,500 pieces of legislation, and problems for our constituents, especially if the Bill goes through and we have a trade war with Europe. That will hit everybody—not just those in Northern Ireland, but people in my constituency. There are problems caused by the fact that the EU has already launched legal action and could “restrict co-operation”, and problems for the 33% of businesses that have already given up trading with the European Union, including those mentioned by the right hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson)—I am sorry he is not in his place to talk about these things. [Interruption.] I apologise; he has moved and I could not see him.

We knew these problems were going to happen, yet the Government have done nothing other than introduce this Bill to make things better; they look only to provoke and to make things worse. We talked about oven-ready deals, yet the Foreign Secretary says that the problems were baked in. Frankly, Mary Berry would see the Bill as having a soggy bottom because it is so rubbish.

The report by the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law states clearly that the Bill is in breach of international law, and that is why I tabled new clause 7. I hope the Minister will recognise that simply repeating again and again, as the legal memorandum does, that the Government believe that the Bill meets the test of necessity under international obligations, without explaining how, is not tort, it is just a tautology. We cannot say something is necessary and not say why it is necessary, or whether the conditions might change—I agree absolutely with the right hon. Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman) on those matters. We know there are things we could do to make that clear, and at least to take back control—after all, the Government said that Brexit was about democracy, but it is turning out to be about Downing Street instead.

New clause 10 would ensure that the Government act within international law. New clause 7 is about evidence that we are acting within international law, and about explaining to our constituents why it would be necessary to take such extreme measures. As the Hansard Society tells us, the Bill is breathtaking in the additional powers it takes and the exercise of those excessive powers, with 19 delegated powers under 26 clauses—I have never seen anything like it in this place in the past 12 years. Those powers are based on ideas that Ministers consider “appropriate”, just as they consider what is “necessary”. As we have seen today, however, they cannot really define what “urgent” means. Most people would recognise that “urgent” probably means “immediate”, rather than “sometime in the future.” Considering that any provision can be made by an Act of Parliament, as the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) recognised, if we allow that with the Bill, we could see it for other Bills—literally taking back control from these Benches and sending it to the road opposite.

Finally, there is no way that the Bill supports the Good Friday agreement, which, in and of itself, is an international agreement. We want to stand and challenge President Putin as he rips up the rule of law, yet we say that there are rules of law that we think no longer apply to us. How can we say that we will also guarantee the protections of the Good Friday agreement? How can we give the constituents of the right hon. Member for Lagan Valley the certainty they want, and that we recognise they should have, to be able to go about their business and have peace and prosperity, if we act as if the rule of law does not matter or can be bent to shape the will of a particular political movement?

The Bill is about the Government needing Europe to be a bogeyman, and as we have seen from the leadership contest, there are bogeymen aplenty. In reality, this can do only harm. We must recognise that the problem does not start with the protocol. The problem starts with Brexit, and how we negotiate a trade agreement and deal with the problems that arise from leaving the single market and customs union. Our constituents in every part of the United Kingdom deserve that honesty. New clause 7 is about Governments being honest, and just as new clause 10 should not have needed to be tabled, nor should new clause 7, but it did need to be tabled under current circumstances. The people who rely on this place to make reasonable regulations, to admit their problems, as though they were 12-step problems, and to make amends, need and deserve nothing less.

[Ian Paisley]

Why is the Bill necessary? That is what the Committee has just been asked. That is the question. Well, the preamble to the protocol states clearly that its objective is to uphold the Belfast agreement. Why is its objective to uphold the Belfast agreement? Because the Belfast agreement creates something called power sharing. Power sharing has clearly broken down. Some people may not like the reasons for that, but it has broken down, therefore the Bill is necessary. It is as plain and obvious as that—perhaps we have to say it slower for some people to pick up on the reality that power sharing has broken down, and therefore the Bill is necessary. Do not take my word for it: last week in the Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs, two international lawyers gave us expert evidence. I think there is only one international lawyer in the Chamber today, the right hon. and learned Member for Torridge and West Devon (Sir Geoffrey Cox), who has stated his position. I respect those opinions, but I do not think there has been any other international law expert or practitioner in the Chamber. I can therefore only quote from experts who have given the Committee their expert opinion through the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee.