Hilary Freeman: Abortion should be a medical matter, not a criminal one. The law needs to change

By Dilip -
There has been a predictably overwrought response to the election manifesto promises of both Labour and the Liberal Democrats to decriminalise abortion. Rightwing and Catholic commentators alike imagined hordes of heavily pregnant women at abortion clinics, demanding their fully formed foetuses be evacuated from their uteruses. Just because the law said that they now could.

I, unfortunately, know far more than I want to about what utter nonsense this emotive, anti-abortion rhetoric is. On 26 September 2012 I ended the life of my much-wanted daughter, Elodie, at 24 weeks’ gestation. It’s the hardest and most painful thing I’ve ever done. One thing I now know, with certainty, following this traumatic experience, is that no woman would choose to terminate a pregnancy that late on unless she felt there wasn’t any other option. And no doctor would countenance it, whatever the law said.


Decriminalising abortion isn’t a policy promise designed just to win votes. It’s a sensible response to representations from many organisations, including the Royal College of Midwives, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the British Medical Association. It would bring the UK into line with more enlightened countries such as Canada. Most importantly, it would mean that consenting, adult women finally had agency over our own bodies. Because abortion should be a health issue, not a criminal one. We wouldn’t force a woman to donate her kidney to her sick child, would we? Yet the law still allows us to force women to carry foetuses to term against their will, to be vessels....
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/01/uk-abortion-criminal-offence-24-week-time-limit

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