I am pro-choice. It is essential for women to have access to safe and legal abortion in the early stages of pregnancy. However, despite the indignant response to this tragic case (Scrap this unjust verdict, scrap this law: no woman should go to prison for having an abortion, theguardian.com, 13 June), I am yet to understand how women’s access to legal abortion is threatened by punishment for this person, who lied to procure an illegal late‑term abortion.
Late-term abortion, other than for medical reasons, puts the mother at risk and is a grotesque misuse of the procedure. The time limit for legal abortion is not a minor detail, but incredibly important. Nerve formation, brain function and maturation of the organs progress with time, turning an embryo into a being able to live independently of its mother – a person, in other words. How can we provide every resource to save premature babies born at 26 weeks but allow free access to late-term abortion?
I am not without sympathy – life is messy and difficult, especially around the arrival of children, but this woman had other options. There was still the adoption route. This might have been unpalatable, but no less so than what she chose to do. Life and biology sometimes leaves us with no good options, just the least worst choice. And in this case, her choice to abort a healthy foetus at over 30 weeks is not one that should move into mainstream acceptance in a civilised society.
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• Under the current law a woman’s right to life takes priority over that of the foetus at every stage, but the right to choose abortion fades as pregnancy advances.
Our current abortion law provides for this, but it does not really explain why the foetus has growing importance, since it is not a person and therefore has no rights.
Using the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act makes no sense, since this act sets out rules about what cannot be done to other living people (it was intended to protect women from abortionists, not foetuses from mothers).
Our fundamental problem is that the law cannot treat a foetus as to any extent a person, yet it is clear that we recognise that, by 32 weeks, to some extent it is. The arcane legal rule that a foetus is a legal person only if born alive can only be changed by parliament.
It is time that parliament, when determining how to treat those who kill a foetus, considered whether a foetus is to any extent a person, whether it could hold increasing rights as pregnancy advances, and how we, as a society, agree such rights should be balanced against the rights of the gestator.
Until then the courts, as they have this time, have no option but to work with the legal rules that have already been established.
Mary Lowth
Dickson Poon school of law, King’s College London
• I have always supported a woman’s right to abortion and will continue to do so – within the law, up to 24 weeks. It is a woman’s right to choose what happens to her body and the choice to do so should not be criminalised. But I had a premature daughter at 33 weeks who is now a thriving 24-year-old. I do not believe the right to choose extends that far.
I know nothing about the woman in question and cannot imagine the trauma that she went through, taking abortion pills at that late stage. But there was access to healthcare and support even during Covid. Why did she not seek alternatives?
The law is out of date and unbalanced, and the courts continue to treat women far more harshly than men, who tend to commit more violent crimes more often, but I am uncomfortable with the blanket application of a social media slogan in this situation. It implies that women have the right to choose an abortion at that late stage. We don’t.
Alison Holman
Nottingham
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