Heather Rawling, Leicester Socialist Party
This is the 21st century yet, outrageously, a 44-year-old mother of three has been sentenced to more than two years in prison for an illegal abortion. This is not only cruel, but a threat to all women seeking abortion.
My mother’s generation endured backstreet abortions which threatened their lives. Others were maimed for life. We cannot and will not allow those days to return!
In Britain, abortion is only allowed up to 24 weeks if a woman can obtain the signatures of two doctors, who can refuse to sign on grounds of conscience. And everyone knows how difficult it is to get a GP appointment these days.
Dire
The woman in question discovered she was pregnant in December 2019, just before the outbreak of Covid. I find it hard to believe that any woman who believed she was 24 weeks pregnant when asking for the abortion pill would do so without being in dire circumstances.
However, whatever the individual circumstances, unfortunately, this case is not an isolated one. In fact, the number of women and girls facing police investigations and the threat of life imprisonment under abortion laws has risen over the past three years, according to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS). In the ten years to April 2022, police in England and Wales recorded 67 cases of procuring an illegal abortion.
When the 1967 Abortion Act was passed, allowing abortion up to 24 weeks, the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act remained in force, under which it is illegal to “administer poison with intent to procure a miscarriage” outside the parameters of the ‘exceptions’ of the 1967 Act. The maximum sentence is life imprisonment. It was under the 1861 Act that the woman was jailed. Recently, a 15-year-old girl was investigated because of an ‘unexplained’ stillbirth. The 1861 Act should be scrapped and abortion completely decriminalised.
Cuts and closures
Women should be able to control their own fertility. We cannot separate the demand for the right to choose when and whether to have children from the crisis in the NHS. Women who require surgical abortions often have to travel many miles because facilities are not locally available. Because of the cost-of-living crisis, and difficulty in accessing contraception due to cuts and closures to clinics and the GP crisis, the number of women seeking an abortion is increasing but the services are not. 99% of abortions are funded by the NHS but performed by private providers. Facilities should be adequately funded and integrated into the NHS.
We need a fully funded NHS to enable free access to contraception, abortion and fertility services. But many women are forced into seeking an abortion because of the cost of raising children, the costs of childcare, and suitable housing, for example.
Real choice
So we need to fight for a programme that also includes the right to a minimum wage of £15 an hour linked to inflation, access to free, good-quality childcare, a massive programme of council house building, and services that will allow women to have real choice.
- Repeal the Offences against the Person Act. Scrap the two-doctor rule. Decriminalise abortion
- Defend access to telemedicine services and abortion pills by post
- A massive increase in spending on the NHS. Fully fund abortion facilities as part of the NHS
- No to cuts and privatisation. Full public funding of sexual and reproductive health services
- A £15 an-hour minimum wage, a flexible network of free, high quality, publicly provided childcare and increased spending on the services we need to bring up children free from poverty
- Build a mass movement to fight for the right to choose, including a new mass workers’ party armed with a socialist programme
