ON FRIDAY, the House of Lords voted to approve the Crime and Policing Bill, including a strange and under-reported amendment, Clause 208. Clause 208 decriminalises self-administered abortions after 24 weeks of gestation (a limit that has stood since the Abortion Act of 1967). In practice, the new statute allows a woman to end her pregnancy at any time, at home, without official oversight.
Consider the strange juxtaposition: aborting an infant just before birth will be legal (or at birth, if the mother wants to lie about the timing), while killing a baby after birth remains illegal.
How could such a drastic change fly under the radar?
Clause 208 was proposed last June by Tonia Antoniazzi, a Labour MP who has often rebelled against her party. And yet, as a Labour MP, her amendment enjoys the tacit approval of the Labour government. Baroness Monckton (Conservative) tabled an amendment to remove Clause 208, but it was voted down.
Also passed: amendment 426B. It was moved by Baroness Thornton (Labour) during the House of Lords Report stage on Wednesday. The amendment inserts a new clause after Clause 208, providing for pardons and the expungement of criminal records for women (living or deceased) who were convicted, cautioned, arrested, or investigated for offences related to their own pregnancies under historical abortion laws (primarily: Offences Against the Person Act 1861; Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929). Amendment 426B directs the Secretary of State to order deletion of such records from official systems, so that they would no longer be picked up by the Disclosure and Barring Service.
Meanwhile, sensible attempts to restore oversight were defeated by the Lords. For instance, Baroness Stroud (Conservative) wanted to restore the requirement for an in-person appointment before gaining a prescription for abortion pills by post. This requirement was dropped during the Covid pandemic, temporarily, yet became normalised in practice, and now is normalised in law.
Baroness Stroud argued that in-person appointments reduce the chance of a woman being coerced at home into an abortion, aborting a foetus that she thinks is much younger or is of a less desirable sex (usually female, where such choices are made), or selling pills to a woman who has avoided health-carers entirely.
All of these things have happened already.
Stuart Worby was jailed in 2024 for arranging for a friend’s girlfriend to feign pregnancy in order to acquire abortion pills by post, which he then placed in a woman’s drink and her vagina to induce an abortion against her knowledge.
This case is one of the reasons why Baroness Spielman (Conservative) said that although she ‘broadly supports current abortion law, I am none the less appalled by this clause’. She warned the Lords of the ‘progressive urge always to find new frontiers at which one can prove one’s superior compassion’. ‘We will be told by the same people,’ she continued, ‘that it is cruel for a woman in late pregnancy to have to abort on her own, without access to the full range of drugs and clinical procedures and without support, and that all of these things must, therefore, be decriminalised – at which point we will have no abortion law at all.’
The Lords paid no attention.
The House of Lords is not the conservative oligarchy of yore. There are enough Labourites and Liberal Democrats to push legislation through, even though the largest party is Conservative.
In the Commons, the largest party is Labour, which did not need the LibDems to advance the Bill, but gained their support anyway. Clause 208 passed the Commons by 379 votes to 137, after just 46 minutes of backbench debate, in June.
Neither clause 208 nor amendment 426B was ever put to public consultation, academic research, or any sort of government review.
On the same side as the majority of Parliamentarians are the woke organs of government and the medical-social industrial complex.
Dr Alison Wright, President of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, had urged peers to support both clause 208, ‘ensuring that women are no longer at risk of investigation or prosecution for decisions about their own healthcare’, and amendment 426B, ‘which would pardon women previously prosecuted under outdated and unjust abortion laws’.
Heidi Stewart, the chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, said: ‘Pardoning these women and expunging the records of investigations would recognise the profound injustice of criminalising abortion in the first place’, and bring the law ‘into line with modern values’.
Humanists UK celebrated the ‘vote to treat abortion as a healthcare issue rather than a criminal one.’
Amnesty International UK issued a parliamentary briefing urging support for Clause 208 in order to stop criminalising women for making choices about their own healthcare.
The British Association for Sexual Health and HIV (BASHH) and Contraception and Sexual Health (CoSRH) said the vote is a ‘decisive step to protect women accessing abortion care from the threat of criminal investigation.
On the other side, Right to Life UK warns of abusers or traffickers coercing women into late-term abortions at home, with no legal deterrent or official oversight. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales is concerned that removing criminal sanctions for self-abortions leaves women more susceptible to manipulation, forced abortions, and abuse. CARE (Christian Action Research and Education) concurs.
You don’t need to be an anti-abortionist, a bishop, or a Catholic to have concerns about this institutional rush to decriminalise self-abortions throughout a viable pregnancy.
Most Britons are pro-choice. (In 2023, YouGov found that 87 per cent of Britons say abortion should be allowed, and only 6 per cent say it should not. In 2025, Ipsos found that 71 per cent of Britons think abortion should be legal in all or most cases.)
Yet almost nobody (1 per cent) supports abortion up to birth, which is what Parliamentarians have just effectively legalised.
Any way you cut it, Parliamentarians have moved in the opposite direction to the public.
The same poll found that 60 per cent of respondents, including 70 per cent of women, prefer to reduce the legal abortion limit to below 24 weeks.
Remember that 24 weeks is already an extremely late abortion by any measure; most jurisdictions prohibit abortions at a much earlier foetal age; 24 weeks is about two-thirds into a median pregnancy. Premature babies have survived at younger development.
In essentially legalising abortion up to birth, the government, and most Parliamentarians, are disregarding popular sentiment and public consultation, legislating major changes not by a discrete, easily scrutinised Bill but by amendments to huge, largely unrelated Bills, and are hiding negative risks (such as murders of babies misrepresented as abortions, coercion of women at home misrepresented as a woman’s private choice, and sex selection) behind positive framings (‘decriminalisation’, ‘healthcare’, ‘a woman’s choice’, ‘modern values’).
