Decriminalising Abortion

Emily Darlington Excerpts

Monday 2nd June 2025 Westminster Hall

[Tony Vaughan]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend, and thank her for her work on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which engages that principle of autonomy. I find it hard to read about the cases I just mentioned and not feel that the time has come to abandon the practice of criminalising and imprisoning women for choices they make about their own pregnancies.

[Emily Darlington (Milton Keynes Central) (Lab)]

I thank all those who signed the petition to make sure that we had this debate. Is my hon. and learned Friend aware that more than 200 women have been investigated for this? Does he agree that some of the police tactics used—crime scene tape, excluding families from their own homes, and removing children even in cases where no charges are brought—are extremely traumatising to the family and the woman who has suffered the loss of a child, whether by her own decision or because of a miscarriage?

[Tony Vaughan]

I thank my hon. Friend for that statistic, which I was not aware of. Criminalisation involves traumatisation from the moment of investigation to charge, arrest and all the way through the system.

The time has come to abandon these outdated practices. I struggle to see how it can be a good use of the scarce resources in our criminal justice system to prosecute and imprison women in these situations. Our laws cannot be fixed relics of the past, but must reflect social attitudes and societal norms. A YouGov poll of 2,098 adults in September 2023 found that 52% of respondents believed that women should not face prosecution for having an abortion, while only 21% of respondents believed that prosecution was appropriate.

At the international level, and as the petition creator, Gemma Clark, has rightly reminded me, the World Health Organisation’s 2022 guidelines on safe abortion recommend removing medically unnecessary policy barriers to safe abortion, such as criminalisation. More than 30 organisations representing medical practitioners in this country support decriminalising abortion, including the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Nursing, the Faculty of Public Health, the Centre for Reproductive Rights, the Royal College of Midwives and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. Dr Ranee Thakar, the president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, has said:

“Abortion that happens outside of the current law generally involves very vulnerable women—including those facing domestic abuse, mental health challenges or barriers to accessing NHS care. Yet alarmingly, prosecutions of women have been increasing in recent years…Abortion is an essential form of healthcare and should be subject to regulatory and professional standards like other medical procedures, not criminal sanctions.”

As I mentioned, Northern Ireland repealed provisions criminalising abortion. Similarly, my hon. Friends the Members for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) and for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy) have tabled new clauses to the Crime and Policing Bill that would disapply such provisions, eliminating the risk of prosecution for women who self-manage abortions or seek care beyond current legal limits. Under the new clause of my hon. Friend the Member for Gower, access to abortion services would remain exactly as it is, as I understand it, including time limits, grounds for abortion and the requirement for two doctors. My hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow is in a much better position than me to talk about her new clause, which follows similar principles, so I will not stray into her territory by saying more at this stage.

The key point is that although we should maintain regulation, criminalisation is a very different matter. I appreciate that there are organisations passionately opposed to decriminalising abortion. I believe that decriminalisation does not mean deregulation. My hon. Friends the Members for Gower and for Walthamstow propose to maintain a body of rules on access to and provision of abortion, such as the existing time limit, which would remain in force.

Some people claim that decriminalising abortion would lead to significant increases in the number of women performing dangerous late-stage abortions at home, as the right hon. Member for Gainsborough suggested, but I think that would be highly unlikely. The latest figures available, from 2022, reveal that 88% of abortions were performed at under 10 weeks gestation. I have not seen, as I said in response to interventions, evidence to suggest that removing the criminal law deterrent would motivate swathes of women to have abortions after 24 weeks. Indeed, I have not heard of any campaigns in Northern Ireland to re-criminalise due to unforeseen consequences.

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[Emily Darlington]

I completely agree that we need to be respectful in this debate as people hold views on all sides. But does the hon. Member agree with me that when we criminalise women, their bodies and abortions, we get absolutely mad circumstances as we have seen in the US, where a woman cannot be saved in the emergency room or in A&E because it might facilitate losing the child, or she is kept alive by machines against her family’s wishes just because she was nine weeks pregnant at the time of her accident?

[Jim Shannon]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. I understand the point that she makes. I mentioned earlier that in every abortion two lives are involved. There is the life of the mum and the life of the baby—two lives that have to be considered. We also have to be concerned about backstreet abortions and where they can sometimes lead.

Laws, as I said, send messages and shape culture. More broadly, they are a reflection of our core values as a society. Although calls for abortion decriminalisation are repeated and vocal, I truly think—I say this with great respect—that many people do not understand the implications of decriminalising abortion. The hon. Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy) has her opinion and I have mine—I certainly have a different interpretation of what she refers to.

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[Alex Brewer (North East Hampshire) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Vickers. I thank the Petitions Committee for selecting this timely topic for debate.

From my experience running a women’s refuge and serving on the Women and Equalities Committee, I have seen how our criminal justice system disproportionately lets down vulnerable women. Since 2020, 100 women and girls have been investigated by police on suspicion of having illegal abortions. Very concerningly, that number is rising.

New guidance from the National Police Chiefs’ Council reminds police officers to search women’s houses for drugs related to ending pregnancy and to seize their digital devices to check internet search history and messages to friends and family, and even to access health data through their menstrual cycle and fertility tracking apps—subverting the very tools that are designed to keep us healthy. The guidance goes on to suggest how police officers could bypass the requirements of a court order to access NHS medical records. Who are the suspects that need such interrogation? Often, they are women who have suffered stillbirths, miscarriages and premature labours. Can we honestly say that it is right for police to be targeting women for criminal investigation at a point of such trauma?

That is what happened to Sammy. After a traumatic birth, she was resuscitating her newborn baby when seven police officers arrived at her house, ahead of any paramedics or medical staff. Her home became a crime scene, and she became a suspect. The police raided her bins, suspecting that she had illegally taken abortion medication. Her phone, computer and all communication with her partner were blocked by police. She provided forensic samples that did not show the presence of abortion drugs, but despite that, she remained under police investigation for a year, during which time she was allowed only limited supervised contact with her baby. To those in this debate who emphasise the life of the child, I ask, what benefit does such separation from a mother bring to a newborn?

Sammy’s story is not an isolated incident; it is part of a disturbing pattern that is creating a culture of fear around women’s reproductive rights. Sophie, a teenager, was arrested in the middle of the night following a police raid on her parents’ home. She was held in custody for 19 hours. Despite her age and vulnerability, she faced two trials, and it took six years for the charge that she ended her own pregnancy to be dropped. Sophie is not the last. We have already heard of the case of Nicola Packer.

[Emily Darlington]

I thank the hon. Member for her powerful speech and for reminding us about the mothers who are absolutely traumatised; often, they have other children, who are also traumatised. The tactics being used by the police are increasingly worrying, and I wonder whether the hon. Member shares my worry that the escalation we have seen in the last few years seems to mirror the escalation in the United States? We do not want to be in a position like the US, where women are literally dying because healthcare professionals are worried about intervening, given that they could lose their licence and be put in jail.

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[Ms Creasy]

I understand the position that the hon. Member is taking. Many of us believe that somebody standing at an abortion clinic and feeling the need to pray there, rather than in a church or 150 metres away from the abortion clinic, is not silently praying but intervening on the privacy of the person accessing an abortion zone. That is why this Parliament—[Interruption.] I can hear the hon. Gentleman chuntering. I want to make some progress, but let me be very clear: those of us who recognise that safe access zones balance rights in the best way recognise that the hon. Gentleman is not alone in continuing to attack them. The vice-president of the United States has sought to attack our nation’s ability to protect women’s access to abortion clinics via safe access zones. The threat that we are facing is therefore not theoretical.

[Emily Darlington]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech, as have all hon. Members who have spoken today. I am lucky never to have had an abortion, but I have had two miscarriages, and I cannot tell you how vulnerable I was at that time. Anybody coming up to me at that point would have made me feel even more terrible than I already did. I have friends who have had abortions, and it is a terrible choice to make, for whatever reason anybody makes it. Whether the child would not survive or was a child of rape—for whatever reason that choice gets made, nobody makes it happily. Does my hon. Friend agree that the reason there are exclusion zones is that the human rights of that woman, who is going through one of the worst times of her life, must be protected at such a horrible time?

[Ms Creasy]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for giving that personal testimony. What she touches on is what we have seen in the debate in this country for several years now: the expectation that women should give a reason why they want to have an abortion or seek that kind of medical care. That is why the Trump playbook being brought into British politics—as we now see it is—is so dangerous in this context. When the leader of Reform, the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage)—I note that he is not here to defend his views—talks about the “ludicrous” nature of our laws and calls for a reduction in the time limit, he is not thinking of all those people who get that horrific diagnosis. He is sending a bat signal to his colleagues and fellow travellers in America: that under his watch it would be open season in this country—