When the far right stokes culture wars, so often women’s bodies are their battlefields. Those who oppose a woman’s right to choose are well funded and well organised; those who support too often complacent measures such as time limits and telemedicine consider abortion law to be “settled”. But currently parliament is considering updating abortion law as part of backbench efforts to amend the Criminal Justice Act, and end the Victorian criminalisation of basic healthcare. It’s essential that we win this battle, but if we don’t get ahead of the backlash that will come, there is a real danger we may lose more than we gain.
Women in England and Wales are already denied agency over our bodies – it’s still technically illegal to have an abortion at any point in pregnancy under the 1861 Offences Against the Persons Act (OAPA). The 1967 Abortion Act exempted women and those who assist them from prosecution under stringent conditions, but the impact of the offence endures. In the past 10 years there have been 67 prosecutions, with many more women investigated. In 2021 alone, 40 were subjected to such an invasion of their privacy.
