To those familiar with the fraught battle lines around one of society’s most emotive issues, the reaction of anti-abortion campaigners in the hours after a woman was jailed for procuring a late abortion appeared muted.
Key voices from major anti-abortion groups were conspicuously absent in the coverage, while pro-choice campaigners’ calls for decriminalisation were tempered by the insistence that they were not calling for freely available abortion at any stage of a pregnancy.
For once, the opposing sides could agree on one thing: this was a case of extreme tragedy. A mother of three – including a child with disabilities – will spend at least a year away from her children. She is haunted by flashbacks of her dead child’s face, after taking the pills when the foetus was from seven to eight months’ gestation, according to the judgment.
It is a difficult case for both sides to use to advance their argument, said Dr Pam Lowe, an expert on anti-abortion activists at Aston University. “Talking about imprisoning women is a bit of a red flag and not the line that the anti-abortion people like to take in public,” she said.
But the late nature of the abortion creates problems for pro-choice advocates. “It’s a bit of a dilemma,” said Lowe. “Because they don’t think it’s right for women to go to prison, but it is harder to make the argument when someone has been publicly denounced by some as killing a baby.”
Nonetheless, the case looks likely to have significant implications, both in the short and longer term.
On Saturday the Women’s Equality party, the Fawcett Society and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (Bpas) are leading a march from the Royal Courts of Justice to Westminster in support of decriminalisation. They argue that the rest of the UK is now out of step with Northern Ireland, where a 2019 law legalising abortion put a moratorium on abortion-related criminal prosecutions.
On the other side of the argument, Right to Life has called for the government to reinstate in-person abortion appointments, arguing that the case reveals the risk of the “pills by post” abortion service, which was introduced during the Covid lockdown and continued after MPs voted to make it permanent in March last year. Christian Concern accused Bpas of “jumping on the back of this very tragic case”, and its CEO, Andrea Williams, said: “The real criminality here actually lies at the feet of Bpas.”
The circling of opposing sides is happening at Westminster, too, where the highly emotive issue has meant that the government and Labour have been ultra-cautious in their treatment of an issue that has traditionally been a matter of conscience for MPs in parliamentary votes.
While Labour’s Diana Johnson and Stella Creasy have been vocal, frontbenchers like Lucy Powell as well as a spokesperson for Keir Starmer focused on calls for a revision of sentencing guidelines and for the director of public prosecutions to look again at guidance on prosecutions in such cases.
In a sign of the characteristic caution, sources said that Starmer told Labour MPs during a closed-doors meeting this week that he had never backed decriminalisation of abortion. “He’s on the record saying the opposite,” said one disgruntled MP – pointing to reported statements during the 2020 leadership campaign that he backed the move. Labour did not comment when approached.
This reticence was mirrored by anti-abortion MPs in the Conservative party, who said they didn’t think the case would prompt a renewed political push on either side to decriminalise abortion or try to implement further restrictions. The justice minister, Edward Argar, said during a debate that followed an urgent question this week that abortion law in England and Wales has been settled by parliament and the government does not intend to change it.
“If the [pro-choice advocates] whip up a campaign to liberalise, then there would be significant pushback from us, and I think colleagues who would be in favour of that would find themselves isolated. I think more centrist Conservative MPs would also oppose it,” one MP told the Guardian.
“There are mechanisms like a private member’s bill or an amendment to a health bill which might be tried. But I think the government would keep its hands off and also there just would not be the numbers to support it.”
The anti-abortion movement is not without a vocal and organised block of MPs and peers, mainly from the Conservative party, but also spanning other parties. They include those members of the all-party parliamentary pro-life group, whose “secretariat” is the anti-abortion Right to Life charity.
That work – helping with administration and acting as a contact point – was valued at between £3,001 to 4,500 for last year, according to records filed in April.
Renewed political hostilities on abortion would also be a test of the impact of the National Conservatism movement that rallied at a conference near parliament last month.
There are potential flashpoints ahead: on Thursday, updated abortion statistics for England and Wales are likely to show a continued increase in the number of abortions taking place. October marks the 56th anniversary of the Abortion Act.
But against the current political landscape, even seasoned pro-choice campaigners privately admit to having reservations about pushing for legislative reform during this parliament. “It could actually backfire,” says one.
