My mother remembers that, when she was a child, a friendly woman, probably in her thirties, lived next door. One day, that woman was gone. Another neighbour had helped her to carry out a “backstreet abortion” – in the days when terminating a pregnancy was illegal, but coathangers were not – and she’d bled to death in her own home.
I don’t even know her name. But I thought of that poor woman this week when MPs voted overwhelmingly to stop women in England and Wales from being prosecuted for ending a pregnancy outside the law – for instance, after 24 weeks. Thank goodness, I thought, we live in a nation where women no longer have to risk death or imprisonment in desperate situations.
