Carla Foster, the woman handed a 28-month sentence for terminating a pregnancy after the 24-week legal limit for an abortion during Covid lockdown, has been released. The mother of three was forced to spend 35 days in prison, until her appeal was granted under pressure from public outrage.
Shockingly, there remains no legal right to abortion in Britain. Within the 1967 Abortion Act, authorisation from two doctors simply sets out exemptions from prosecution. The Socialist Party supports demands for decriminalisation.
But, as Christine Thomas says in her article in the July/August issue of Socialism Today: “The fight to defend and extend abortion rights is a political fight that cannot be limited to legal changes. It’s a fight for the reversal of all cuts and privatisation of reproductive services, and for abortion and other services to be publicly funded and provided as part of a fully funded NHS.”
“It’s a fight for policies that will allow people to have a real choice about when and whether to have children, such as a minimum wage of £15 an hour, decent benefits, universal, free, flexible, good-quality childcare, and massive investment in building genuinely affordable public housing. And to maximise the fight for all of those things we need a collective political voice in the form of a new mass workers’ party, based on the trade unions, in which the discussion of a socialist alternative to a capitalist system in crisis would be central.”
