When it emerged last year that six women had been prosecuted in Great Britain for procuring abortions, that was a little more than a blip: it was twice as many women, in a single year, as had been taken to court in the previous 160 years combined. Behind those cases, of course, there’s an unknown number of women who were investigated but cleared, so their phones were seized, they were prevented from contact with their children, they were questioned under caution with the possibility of life imprisonment when they’d just had a miscarriage. All these women lived, if not their worst, then surely their most medieval, nightmare, and some are living it as we speak.
The natural question was: what the hell was going on? Had the police lost their minds? (When the Guardian asked one force about its actions last year, it chose to lie about them, which surprised me.) Was the director of public prosecutions anti-abortion? (Max Hill KC declined to comment.) Had medics suffered some kind of group amnesia around patient confidentiality? (The police generally become involved only when they’re alerted by a doctor or midwife.) All that is still possible, but when I spoke to the campaign organisation Doctors for Choice, it exhibited the kind of pragmatism you look for in a doctor. Never mind the finger-pointing – change the law. Abortion should not be in the criminal code at all. Life imprisonment is the harshest penalty for illegal abortion in the world, which gives England and Wales the dubious distinction of being more severe than Syria, Poland, Texas and South Sudan.
Doctors, midwives, nurses and students are launching a campaign this week – a protest outside the Old Bailey, posters on buses – in support of an amendment to the criminal justice bill that will come to a vote at the end of the month. And again, you’ve got to hand it to medics for driving this: between their pay degradation, the student debt overhang, the bizarre hostility from government ministers and the crazy hours, you’d think they’d have enough on their plate.
Abortion law in much of the UK is an arcane fix left over from 1967, which you maybe don’t think seriously about until you’re seeking an abortion. Given that one in three British women will at some point, that’s quite a lot of people who’ve been in this objectively comical position: you have to get two doctors to sign off on the fact that the pregnancy represents a grave, permanent threat to your mental health. Theoretically, you have to pretend to be crazy, and they have to pretend to believe you, in order to enact what will plausibly, besides dropping geography at GCSE, be the sanest decision of your life. I remember being genuinely unclear about what this situation would require: would a simple “yes” to the imperilled mental health question suffice, or would I also need to rend my garments and make nervous breakdown noises?
Just a “yes” was fine, but plainly the law was infantilising, removing my agency and delivering it to two doctors who didn’t want it. Equally plainly, who cared? It was the late 20th century, when all arcs tended to justice and legal anomalies were just boring parliamentary debates that hadn’t been had yet. The magnificent gynaecologist and campaigner Wendy Savage used to sometimes tell us on panels to wise up and fight a bit harder. But by and large, we stayed pretty polite about it. And now it’s 30 years later, and she’s 88, and she’ll be speaking on this week’s protest, and – without wishing to put words in her mouth – I imagine she’ll be saying a more elegant version of, “Holy shit, you lot – the arc is all over the place, and now you really need to wise up and fight a bit harder.”
Don’t wait to find out who’s driving these prosecutions; don’t wait until the first conviction is landed using period tracker data; don’t wait to see whether the US, in rolling back reproductive rights, was an outlier or a harbinger: fight for decriminalisation now, because staying polite has got us precisely nowhere.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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