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Why vote to decriminalise abortion in England and Wales is so important [1]
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Date: 2025-06
Parliament has voted to decriminalise abortion in England and Wales in a historic moment in the fight for women’s rights.
MPs overwhelmingly voted in favour of an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill tabled by Welsh Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi, which will stop women from being prosecuted for ending their pregnancy after 24 weeks or without the consent of two doctors.
Celebrating the vote’s outcome, Louise McCudden, UK head of external affairs at MSI Reproductive Choices, said: “Once this reform is signed into law, no one will face invasive criminal investigations into their medical history and personal life following an unexplained pregnancy loss. No one will face prison for ending their own pregnancy.”
Some people may be confused as to why the vote was necessary, with abortion having been legalised in England and Wales with the 1967 Abortion Act. But the reality is that this law change is urgently needed – for two important reasons.
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The first is that the number of criminal prosecutions following unexplained pregnancy loss has increased dramatically in recent years.
As it stands, a woman who accesses an abortion outside of the 1967 Act’s restrictions could face up to a life sentence in prison under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act and the 1929 Infant Life Preservation Act.
Campaigners estimate that more than 100 women have been prosecuted in England and Wales following an unexplained pregnancy loss in the past decade. Between 1967 and 2022, there were three court cases where women faced abortion charges; since 2022, there have been six.
A 15-year-old girl who was arrested in 2021 following a miscarriage, having previously looked at abortion information online, was among those investigated in the past ten years. The stress of the police investigation led to her self-harming, and the case against her was eventually dropped after a coroner concluded natural causes ended the pregnancy.
Another teenager, Bethany Cox, was interviewed by police while still in the “throes of grief”. It would take three years before she was found not guilty of abortion offences at the age of 22.
Two high-profile cases from the past three years have involved the use of abortion pills.
Nicola Packer took abortion pills prescribed to her by a registered provider during the November 2020 Covid lockdown, as she believed she was still in the early stages of pregnancy. She was cleared of any wrongdoing earlier this year.
Carla Foster, a mother of three children, was sentenced to 28 months in prison in 2023 after taking pills outside the 24-week limit. She was released on appeal the following month.
During yesterday’s parliamentary debate, many of the MPs opposed to the change raised the alarm that women would face no criminal sanctions for late-term abortions. But rarely does the anti-abortion movement explain what the appropriate punishment for these women would be.
They fall silent when asked if a domestic abuse victim who is coerced by their abuser into taking pills and later arrested for an “illegal abortion” – as was the case for Laura* – should go to prison, and when asked whether they believe prison is appropriate for a mentally distressed woman with pre-natal depression who takes abortion pills in desperation.
The reason they have no answer is because they don’t want to admit to supporting laws that harm women’s safety. Instead they raise a straw-woman argument that a woman might abort at 38 weeks because she has decided having a child will be “an inconvenience”, a bizarre point made by Liberal Democrat MP Angus McDonald.
The second reason why last night’s vote is so important is that it sends a clear message that the UK supports a woman’s right to abortion, in a world where reproductive rights are increasingly attacked.
Since the US Supreme Court ended the nationwide right to safe and legal abortion in the country in 2022, the global anti-abortion movement has been emboldened. US organisations are spending millions of dollars every year to try and influence the abortion debate worldwide.
This includes here in the UK, where the US religious freedom charity Alliance Defending Freedom gave its London office a £1.2m grant last year, including to support anti-abortion activists who illegally protest in the ‘buffer zones’ outside clinics. US vice-president JD Vance has been vocal in his support of such campaigns.
US influence is only part of the picture, although it is a significant one. In recent years, there has been an increase in far-right activism both in the UK and globally that focuses on abortion via the great replacement conspiracy theory, which claims abortion is a form of “white genocide”.
Even in the UK, abortion is at risk of becoming a new front in the far-right culture war, with Reform leader Nigel Farage now pushing for a decrease to the upper time limit alongside pro-natalist policy.
So, for Parliament to decriminalise abortion in this moment of global and local backlash is a bold and important move in support of women’s rights. It is a clear and positive statement that women have rights over our own bodies, and that US and Russian dark money, political threats, far-right conspiracy and anti-abortion disinformation will not change that.
What was the law?
Since 1967, women in Britain have had the legal right to abortion up to 24 weeks and with the consent of two doctors who confirm that continuing the pregnancy will harm their mental and physical health. In Northern Ireland, which was never included in the 1967 Act, abortion was decriminalised following a 2019 Westminster vote.
Abortion in England and Wales is also permitted after 24 weeks in cases of severe foetal anomaly or threat to the mother’s life. Only 0.1% of abortions take place this late in pregnancy, with nearly 90% of abortions occurring in the first 10 weeks.
The very few women who have an “illegal” abortion – that which falls outside the 1967 Act’s restrictions – are often struggling with complex issues. They may have been forced to seek abortion pills online after being denied access to abortion care by an abusive partner, or been unable to access care in time due to severe mental health issues.
Antoniazzi started the debate to decriminalise self-managed abortions that happen after 24 weeks, saying these were “desperate women” who need “compassion, not criminalisation”. Her amendment means they will no longer face prosecution, which is particularly important when the women’s prison estate is struggling with a mental health crisis.
“This is a landmark moment for women’s rights in this country and the most significant change to our abortion law since the 1967 Abortion Act was passed,” said Heidi Stewart, chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, BPAS.
“There will be no more women investigated after enduring a miscarriage, no more women dragged from their hospital beds to the back of a police van, no more women separated from their children because of our archaic abortion law.”
As Antoniazzi said when she introduced her amendment, “this is a once in a lifetime, once in a generation opportunity [...] the right change at the right time.”
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