Labour’s decriminalisation of abortion
all but completes our slide into the moral
abyss.
Whatever Stella Creasy and the pro-choice police claim, terminating a pregnancy in the third trimester is not a healthcare matter.
Allison Pearson
18 June 2025 5:50pm BST
Hell is empty because all the devils are here. What is it about Left-wing women and killing babies? For all their bland, technocratic vocabulary about “stakeholder orgs” and “healthcare rights”, make no mistake, Labour MPs, led by a cabal of morally-challenged feminists, have just voted to make infanticide legal in our country. May God forgive them.
The House of Commons voted with a vast majority on Tuesday for the complete decriminalisation of abortion up to birth. Members of the present Government are of such distressingly low calibre that you would hesitate to allow them to euthanise a goldfish – let alone adjudicate on whether a human being in its third and final trimester of development should be terminated. Unbelievably, this is where we are. It makes you feel sick at what we have become, our slide into the moral abyss is almost complete.
Without consulting the British people, who oppose late terminations overwhelmingly, MPs Stella Creasy, Tonia Antoniazzi and other aggressive pro-choicers have ensured that, from now on, women will not be prosecuted for carrying out their own late-term abortions “even for non-medical reasons”. And despite the pain and suffering of the baby, who seems to have no rights at all in the matter, he or she will certainly be alive if the mother decides to do them in at the last minute. Doctors or anyone else providing assistance for late-term abortions for non-medical reasons will still be prosecuted, which does suggest that our lawmakers retain a residual awareness that the heinous thing they have just made legal is what the Left likes to call “problematic” – and the rest of us call “evil”.
The UK already had some of the laxest restrictions on abortion in the world. With a 24-week cut-off point (you can have a termination later, but only if a woman’s life is at risk or the foetus has a serious anomaly), we are on a chilling par with Communist China where abortion is generally legal at any stage of pregnancy, although there have been attempts in some provinces to root out sex-selection (aka killing baby girls – London hospitals are denying scans to try and prevent that repellent practice among certain ethnic groups here, too).
No one ever mentions it, but Britain is worryingly out of step with the majority of European countries where the median time limit for abortion is just 12 weeks. Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Latvia, Germany, Italy, Greece, all have a 12-week upper limit. France and Spain are slightly higher at 14 weeks. Liberal Sweden is 18 weeks and Norway’s parliament recently adopted legislation extending the legal limit for abortion from 12 to 18 weeks. Only the Netherlands has the same 24-week limit as the UK (the date when the foetus is considered viable outside the mother’s body) although, in practice, Dutch doctors apply a two-week margin of error and stick to 22 weeks.
I fully support abortion up to 14 weeks, because insisting women should have babies they don’t want, or can’t provide for, is not humane. Bringing up a baby that you actually want is quite hard enough. But advances in medical science mean foetuses can survive earlier and earlier outside the womb and the UK’s 24-week limit has looked increasingly indefensible. There are many thriving adults among us who will testify to that. On X, the clergyman and author Fergus Butler-Gallie wrote: “I was not expected to survive birth, my parents bought the teddy I was due to be buried with. Very hard, knowing this as well as many other cases I’ve encountered pastorally, not to view the vote in the House of Commons as an act of acute moral evil.” Amen to that.
Twenty years ago, I spent a few days observing a hospital neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) which specialised in the care of extremely premature babies. It was a humbling, unforgettable experience. Those tiny creatures, with their marsupial pelt of fine hair, were smaller than a shoe. Even though they were untimely ripped from the womb, they had a tenacious grip on this mortal coil, fists the size of a cotton reel hung onto it for dear life. Because life is dear, infinitely precious, and every being yearns to live. They taught me that.
When I left the unit to visit the loo, I walked down a corridor past a section where abortions took place. I struggled to reconcile the idea that all the expertise of the NHS was dedicated to keeping a 24-week-old baby alive in one part of the hospital, while a baby of the same gestation was being terminated in another – even though they could both open their mouth and gasp for air.
Those much-loved infants in the neonatal unit were between 23 and 36 weeks – ages at which Creasy and Antoniazzi think it’s perfectly fine for a mother to put her baby to death. Socialists like them carry a banner for militant secularism, whose soulless creed is infiltrating every aspect of our society. Friday will see the Assisted Dying Bill come before the Commons and, if it passes, old people can as easily be bumped off as viable babies. What a double that would be, eh? The week when our formerly civilised land abandoned its most vulnerable citizens to their fate because they were disposable.
Should abortion have been decriminalised?
Total votes: 14,791
The impetus towards decriminalisation of abortion came from the story of Carla Foster, who got a two-year jail sentence (14 months in custody) after she “procured drugs to induce an abortion after the legal limit”. Aged 44, Mrs Foster already had three sons when she fell pregnant in 2019. At the start of lockdown, she moved back in with her estranged partner while carrying another man’s child.
She claimed that, because of lockdown, she had trouble accessing an abortion clinic, although such clinics remained open until the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) obtained a change in the law. Under the new rules, women up to 10 weeks pregnant could have a phone consultation and receive abortion pills in the post to take at home. Carla Foster lied to BPAS, not consulting them until May 2020, when she gave the impression she was only seven weeks pregnant. Prosecutors argued successfully that Foster knew she was over the legal 24-week time limit for abortion and had made online searches which indicated “careful planning”.
Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court heard that Foster was between 32 and 34 weeks pregnant when she took the pills – a horrific and harrowing act, barely comprehensible to any of us who has ever carried a baby of that advanced gestation in our body. Initially, Foster was charged with child destruction, which she denied. She later pleaded guilty to an alternative charge of section 58 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, administering drugs or using instruments to procure abortion. Foster later admitted she was “haunted” by the face of her dead baby daughter. Good, so she should be.
Instead of responding with the revulsion that crime deserved, several prominent women expressed sympathy for Foster, calling the 1861 legislation “antiquated”. As if deciding to stop the heart of an eight-month-old unborn child was acceptable in any century. Dame Diana Johnson, who previously tried to repeal the 1861 act with a backbench bill, said ministers should change laws that were having a “chilling effect on doctors, midwives and others”. No mention of the chilling effect on babies just a few weeks away from entering the world.
Stella Creasy, who made a huge song and dance about being able to breastfeed her own baby in the House of Commons, said: “Abortion is not a criminal matter, it’s a healthcare matter. It serves no one to have had this case prosecuted.”
Caroline Nokes, the irredeemably woke Conservative chairman of the Commons’ Women and Equalities committee, said abortion legislation was “very out of date” and should be “overhauled”. It certainly should have been. Overhauled so the time limit went down and came into line with neighbouring countries which respect the rights of the unborn child (Creasy and Antoniazzi seem to think the unborn child has no rights because they don’t think about the baby at all).
Sorry, no. Late abortion is not a healthcare matter, whatever any of the pro-choice-at-any-stage brigade may claim. It is a barbarous and harrowing thing, it is a ripping and rending of flesh, bone and blood. It stops the heart. A human heat. It can only ever be justified in cases where mother, baby or both are at risk.
A quarter of a century ago, I was faced with the option of terminating a pregnancy at 21 weeks, because they thought there might be a problem with the baby. I asked a young female gynaecologist what giving birth anyway would be like. “Horrible for all concerned,” she said grimly, “Horrible for mum, horrible for baby, horrible for nurses and doctor.” I thanked her for her honesty. My son and I, we would take our chances.
Because of this repellent change in the law, a significant and meaningful deterrent is removed. More women will choose to abort their babies late because they can get away with it, and more men will give their partners abortion pills because they know they will no longer be jailed for that slaughter. Our humanity is diminished, our nation on a dark road never travelled, without maps or lights. Destination: nowhere good.
A final thought: in NICUs today, there is a 47 per cent survival rate for babies of 24 weeks. It’s a miracle. A miracle of science, compassion and human ingenuity. All those preemies who would once have died are saved, and we are the richer for them. Thirty-six years ago, in Wythenshawe, a baby boy was born three months premature – he weighed just one pound. There are women MPs who would have babies put to death at that age and weight. Fortunately, his parents had other ideas. Tyson Fury grew up to do pretty well, all things considered.
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