Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Carter of Haslemere Excerpts

Monday 2nd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness very much for her point, because I appreciate that she is giving me a brief rest during a very emotional speech in my case. I apologise for it being an emotional speech, but when you have dealt with such patients frequently for many years, you forget exactly how serious this can be.

I have seen many women requesting terminations at all stages of their pregnancies, even very early and sometimes after in vitro fertilisation to get them pregnant. That is an extraordinary issue and you would not expect it to happen, but actually it happens throughout pregnancy. The women have such serious problems which may not show up as the kind of psychological problem that has been described.

I do not believe that any woman goes through a termination of pregnancy lightly. She certainly does not want to damage herself and do her own abortion. That is an extremely rare situation. The risk here is that we are trying to make law which is just impractical, in the real sense of the word, when we have such a range of syndromes and a population in which we cannot in fact diagnose pregnancy all the time, and never will be able to in people, for example, who are very poor or otherwise live in very serious circumstances and are damaged.

[Lord Carter of Haslemere (CB)]

My Lords, the debate that we have just been having illustrates perfectly why the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, is so apt. His amendment would insert a requirement for the Attorney-General’s consent before criminal proceedings could be instituted in these cases, and that consent would require the Attorney-General to examine all the circumstances of the difficult cases we have been discussing in detail.

I have a few brief comments. As we have heard, Clause 191 arose from an amendment to the Bill in the other place but, astonishingly, it received less than two hours’ debate, as I understand it. It was approved without evidence sessions, yet it would be a major change to abortion law. Given that polling apparently reveals that a mere 1% of the public support abortion up to birth, and having regard to the scant debate in the other place, I am hesitant about making such a radical change to abortion law. The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, is the perfect solution. It is a compromise: a balanced amendment which maintains the existing criminal offence but recognises that there may be more finely balanced cases—

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

This is not about abortion up to birth, because the Abortion Act 1967 still stands. It is really important that noble Lords try to be accurate in how they describe this. I am not disputing anything the noble Lord says, except that it is not the case that this is about abortion up to birth. This is about the 1967 Act staying in place and about not criminalising women, is it not?

[Lord Carter of Haslemere (CB)]

That does not detract from the fact that Amendment 456 would create a robust filter, through which prosecutions would have to go before instituting criminal proceedings. That would need the consent of the Attorney-General and without that consent—

[Lord Patel (CB)]

Can we just clarify what we are talking about? I am tempted to say that those putting forward these amendments are living in a world of fiction, but I am not so rude as to suggest that. I am not suggesting even that they are misguided. I think all these amendments and their proponents are doing this with a total conviction that wrong will be done if this provision gets through, so let us just address what wrong will be done.

The wrong that will be done is that a woman may try to abort or kill her baby at a late gestation or an early gestation. The criminality would be the same because she is doing so outside the 1967 Act. That will be the case, but that is not what the problem is. The problem is that hundreds of innocent women are wrongly accused of a criminal act and sent for police investigation. One person was sent to jail, and 10 of the other 100 that the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, mentioned had further investigations carried out and were then taken to court.

The Whip is trying to accelerate me, but we cannot accelerate unless I can address the issues raised.

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

I apologise, but can I remind Members that interventions are short and sweet? But because this is Committee, people can participate in the debate at their chosen point.

[Lord Carter of Haslemere (CB)]

My Lords, to conclude, I do not have long comments on this. The Attorney-General would be there in such cases to examine whether something illegal and wrong has occurred, and he could withhold his consent for a prosecution if he considered that that was not the case. He would look at the particular circumstances. He or she would act quasi-judicially and independently of government.

Amendment 456 strikes a perfect balance and should give reassurance to women who have good cause to have a late termination, while preserving the criminal offence for those cases where a late abortion cannot be justified. It therefore meets Clause 191 half way, and I urge fellow Peers to support it.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

Can I clarify something in relation to the amendment? Very often the women we are talking about are not prosecuted and do not end up in court. The problem is that the process is the punishment—as we know from other instances.

How does the noble Lord deal with the fact that the majority of the women we are talking about—it is still a small group—are having police raids when they have maybe just had a baby? There was a 19 year-old who gave birth, who did not even know she was pregnant, and there was a police raid. Her family were completely disrupted. She was completely distraught and traumatised, and that process went on for six years before she was cleared. This amendment would not solve that, would it?

[Lord Carter of Haslemere (CB)]

I cannot speak to that sort of case, and I entirely agree that it sounds terrible. But the police are there to investigate; that is their job. They have to do it according to rules and codes of practice and, if the system works properly, that sort of case should not arise. At least in this amendment there would be a filter before any criminal prosecution could be instituted.

[Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 460, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud—who very much regrets that she is unable to be here today—to which I am pleased to be a signatory. I acknowledge the support of the noble Lord, Lord Frost, who unfortunately cannot be here this afternoon, and of course the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick, who will speak later.

Amendment 460 would reintroduce mandatory in-person consultations with a medical professional before abortion pills can be prescribed. It is a common-sense amendment that would protect women and ensure good practice. Amendment 460 would also offer a more satisfactory solution to the supposed problem that we are told lies behind Clause 191—the small number of prosecutions in recent years of women who have induced their own abortions beyond the statutory time limit. These prosecutions have taken place because abortion providers have been able to send abortion pills to women by post without reliably assessing their gestational age. This includes those who claimed to be under the legal limit of 24 weeks but who, in reality, were not.

Indeed, the two most high-profile cases highlighted by supporters of Clause 191 would not have been able to take place if gestational age had been properly assessed in a face-to-face consultation. Carla Foster was found guilty of an illegal abortion at 32 to 34 weeks’ gestation after admitting to deliberately misleading the UK’s largest abortion provider, BPAS, about her gestational age, telling it she was seven weeks pregnant.

Nicola Packer was charged with an illegal abortion after the UK’s second-largest abortion provider, Marie Stopes, sent her pills even though she was over the legal limit. She was acquitted after telling the court that she was unaware of how far through her pregnancy she was. It is remarkable that one of our leading abortion providers should respond to its own mistakes—sending pills to women beyond the legal limit through a scheme for which it lobbied and from which it benefits—by trying to push for even more radical laws that minimise accountability.

The solution to such cases is not to decriminalise self-administered abortions up to birth, as Clause 191 proposes, which endangers women and renders the 24-week time limit largely toothless. Such a course would be irresponsible and widely out of step with public opinion. Polling has found that only 16% of the public support the removal of offences that make it illegal for women to induce their own abortions after the legal time limit, with a clear majority supporting the current legal deterrent. For that reason, I support the stand part notice opposing Clause 191 from the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton.

The obvious better solution to all this is to restore in-person appointments before women can obtain abortion pills. Such appointments were the norm before the Covid pandemic but, in response to campaigning from the same groups behind Clause 191, the pills by post scheme was introduced when the pandemic began. Although many had significant misgivings—based on concerns that later proved prescient—about how this was rushed through without due process, and suspected that it was a thinly disguised ruse to bring in such a scheme permanently, one could perhaps at least understand the logic during a pandemic.

However, it was never the intention that pills by post abortions would be permanent, and in February 2022 the Government announced that the scheme would end after 70% of respondents to a public consultation called for its immediate end. However, amid late-night machinations in this House—not too dissimilar from the way in which Clause 191 was added to the Bill in the other place—an amendment was tacked on to the Health and Care Bill at the 11th hour, making the scheme permanent for England and Wales.

Shortly afterwards, stories started emerging of exactly the kind of incidents that many of us were so concerned about, demonstrating how pills by post endangers women and weakens the safeguards in our abortion laws. Amendment 460 offers the Committee a chance to undo a critical aspect of this law change. Under the amendment, women would still be able to take pills at home, should they wish, but not without the safeguard of a prior face-to-face consultation with a medical professional.

There are three principal reasons why restoring this safeguard—or, should I say, returning to former best practice—is essential. First, it would enable reliable gestational age checks before at-home abortions can take place. This is the primary reason why recent court cases have happened. An accurate gestational age check ought to be the bare minimum that we expect of abortion providers, which receive, on average, a reported £580 of taxpayers’ money per abortion—an increase of 42% in the five years since the pills by post scheme came in—even though their costs have been slashed by the removal of in-person appointments. In-person gestational age checks would not only prevent women wilfully misleading providers about their gestation but protect women who may mistakenly believe that they are in the early stages of pregnancy but who are actually further along.

Secondly, reinstating the in-person appointments would protect women from the significant health risks that accompany taking abortion pills beyond the legal limit. Reliable gestational age checks protect women, since at-home abortions are permitted only up to 10 weeks’ gestation because of the increased dangers to women of taking pills beyond the early weeks of pregnancy.

Indeed, the introduction of pills by post has led to a significant spike in medical complications. The Express newspaper reported a study based on FOI requests to NHS trusts that suggests that more than 10,000 women—that is one in 17 women who took pills—had to receive hospital treatment following the use of abortion pills in England between April 2020 and September 2021, which was after the pills by post scheme was introduced.