Crime and Policing Bill

Lizzi Collinge Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 17th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Lizzi Collinge (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Lab)]

It is worth being absolutely clear about what new clause 1 would and would not do. It would simply remove the threat of prosecution for women who end their own pregnancy: it would not change the abortion time limit, which remains. The rules around telemedicine remain. The requirement for two doctors to sign off remains.

In recent years there has been what I consider to be a worrying rise in the number of people being investigated, prosecuted and even imprisoned under the law. These prosecutions are deeply distressing and, in most cases, entirely disproportionate. It is far more common for a woman to miscarry or to miscalculate the stage of her pregnancy than to wilfully break the law.

To fully address the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins), I do not think it is right, in the context of what is actually happening in investigations and prosecutions, that any woman should be prosecuted. The harm caused by the number of investigations and prosecutions where it is absolutely not justified outweighs that.

[Deirdre Costigan (Ealing Southall) (Lab)]

A constituent came to see me yesterday and explained that when she was 16 she was coerced into a forced marriage by her family. She had not been allowed to have any sex education, so when she became pregnant she did not even realise. It was only when her mum noticed that she managed to access a legal abortion, but she told me that she could have been in a situation in which she would have had to get out of that marriage in order to have a late abortion. Does my hon. Friend think it would be in the public interest to go after women such as my constituent who were in forced marriages? Is that helpful?

[Lizzi Collinge]

I absolutely think it is not helpful to go against those women. New clause 1 would retain the criminal prosecution of men who force women to have an abortion, or indeed anyone who coerces a woman into having an abortion. One in eight known pregnancies end in miscarriage, yet we have seen women subjected to invasive investigations, delayed medical care and lengthy legal processes because they have had an abortion or a stillbirth.

Many colleagues have already spoken about the intense distress that legal proceedings inflict, whatever the circumstances. In the case of Nicola Packer, it took four years to clear her name. During that time, the scrutiny she faced was entirely dehumanising, with completely irrelevant matters treated as evidence of wrongdoing. For every woman who ends up in court, many more endure police investigations, often including phone seizures, home searches and even, in some cases, having children removed from their care. All that not only is distressing and disproportionate for those women, but makes abortion less safe. If women are scared of being criminalised, they will not be honest with their midwives, GPs or partner. Abortion is healthcare, and healthcare relies on honest conversations between care providers and patients.

I will rebut a bit of the misinformation that says that new clause 1 would allow abusive partners or others to avoid prosecution. That is simply not true. NC1 applies only to the woman who ends her own pregnancy. Healthcare professionals who act outside the law, and partners and other family members who use violence or coercion would still be criminalised, just as they are now, and quite rightly so.

The amount of misinformation about abortion is distressing—I have seen it within and without this Chamber. What are the facts? Some 88% of abortions happen before nine weeks. As a woman who has lost two very-much wanted pregnancies at about that stage, I am very aware of what that actually means physically, and of what stage the foetus is at then. Abortions after 20 weeks make up just 0.1% of all cases, and those are due to serious medical reasons. Women are not ending their pregnancies because of convenience.

NC1 would not change what is happening with abortion care, but it would protect women from being dragged through these brutal investigations, which are completely inappropriate in the majority of cases anyway. Women are extremely unlikely to try to provoke their own abortion outside the time limits. A criminal sanction for that, or a distressing and intrusive investigation, is entirely disproportionate. It is not in the public interest to subject these women to these investigations.

I will finish with this: women who have abortions, women who have miscarriages and women who have children are not distinct sets of women. Many of us will experience at least two of those things, if not all three. Let us stop making false distinctions and trying to pit groups of women against each other, and let us stop brutally criminalising women—many of them very vulnerable women—in the way that the current law does, because it serves no purpose. Today, we can end that.

[Rebecca Paul (Reigate) (Con)]

I rise to speak against new clauses 1 and 20, and in support of new clause 106, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson). First, it is important for me to say that I fully support women’s reproductive rights. I think that we generally get the balance right here in the UK, and protecting that is a hill I would die on. However, I am disturbed by new clauses 1 and 20, which would decriminalise abortion up to birth. If they become law, fully developed babies up to term could be aborted by a woman with no consequences.

The reason we criminalise late-term abortion is not about punishment; it is about protection. By providing a deterrent to such actions, we protect women. We protect them from trying to perform an abortion at home that is unsafe for them, and from coercive partners and family members who may push them to end late-term pregnancies. I have great respect for the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi), who has tabled new clause 1. We share many of the same objectives on other topics, but in this case I think she is trying to solve a very real issue—the increased number of prosecutions—with the wrong solution.

These amendments are driven by the case of Carla Foster, among others. Carla Foster is a mum who was prosecuted under UK law for carrying out an illegal abortion in May 2020, during the covid pandemic. She carried out the abortion at 32 to 34 weeks of pregnancy after receiving the relevant drugs through the pills-by-post scheme introduced during lockdown. This is a terrible case that harshly demonstrates the flaws with the current process, but the issue here is not the criminalisation of abortion after 24 weeks; it is the fact that Carla Foster was given the pills without checking how far along she was in the first place. She was failed by people here in Parliament who voted to allow those pills to be sent out by mail during lockdown without an in-person consultation. That was an irresponsible decision; and one that might have been forgiven in the light of a global pandemic if it had remained temporary. However, in March 2022 the scheme was made permanent.

If we want to protect women from knowingly or unknowingly acquiring abortion pills after 24 weeks of pregnancy and inducing an abortion at home, we must put an end to the situation in which those pills can be acquired without a face-to-face consultation at which gestational age verification by medical professionals can take place. These drugs are dangerous if not used in the right way, as we saw when Stuart Worby spiked a pregnant woman’s drink with them, resulting in the miscarriage of her 15-week-old baby. Make no mistake: the pills-by-post scheme enabled that evil man and his female accomplice to commit that crime.

It is also important to note that prior to the pills-by-post scheme, only three women had been convicted for an illegal abortion over the past 160 years, demonstrating the effectiveness of the safeguard. However, since that scheme was introduced—according to Jonathan Lord, who was medical director of Marie Stopes at the time—four women have appeared in court on similar charges within an eight-month period. Criminalisation of abortion after 24 weeks is not the problem; the pills-by-post scheme is.

If new clause 1 passes while the pills-by-post scheme remains in place, here is what will happen. More women will attempt late-term abortions at home using abortion pills acquired over the phone, and some of those women will be harmed. Many of them will not have realised that they are actually going to deliver something that looks like a baby, not just some blood clots—that is going to cause huge trauma for them. Many of those women genuinely will not have realised how far along they are, due to implantation bleeding being mistaken for their last period, and on top of all of this, some of the babies will be alive on delivery.

We in this place need to get away from this terrible habit of only considering issues through a middle-class lens. What about women who are being sexually exploited and trafficked? What about teenage girls who do not want their parents to find out that they are pregnant?