THE decriminalisation of abortion in England and Wales has been sold as a humane, pragmatic fix to an anachronistic criminal framework which penalises women.
But the parliamentary amendment in the Crime and Policing Bill which removes criminal penalties for women who terminate their own pregnancies until birth – leaving intact time limits, clinical oversight and sanctions for clinicians – deserves careful, critical scrutiny.
The debate has too often been framed as a simple choice between compassion and cruelty, yet it raises unresolved questions about gestational limits, legal coherence, the meaning of acknowledging loss, the interpretation of foetal science, and whether decriminalisation actually helps women in the way supporters say it will.
The first obvious tension is how the debate on decriminalisation detracts from the debate we should be having on gestational limits for abortion.
Much of continental Europe has substantially lower gestational cut-offs for on-request abortion than the 24-week default in the UK. Many EU states permit abortion on request only in the first trimester (typically around 10-14 weeks), reserving later termination for narrow medical or exceptional grounds.
Framing 24 weeks as the normal outer limit places the UK at the more permissive end of Europe, and it invites the question: why is 24 weeks the policy chosen, and does decriminalisation simply harden that threshold into a de facto moral and medical norm, rather than encourage a re-examination?
With changes in medical science having radically altered viability, a baby born at 24 weeks has now a 60-70 per cent chance of surviving; vastly different from when the UK legislation was last amended in 1990, when it was closer to 40 per cent. Surely the debate around decriminalisation shouldn’t be a reason to exclude scrutiny of the gestational limits for abortion to examine why the UK’s limit deviates from many neighbours.
Another awkward inconsistency is symbolic and bureaucratic.
When I was the Minister for Women we launched the issuing of voluntary ‘baby-loss’ certificates for pregnancies ending before 24 weeks. As a result the Government now explicitly offers a certificate in memory of a baby when a pregnancy ends before 24 weeks, a gesture that recognises loss and personhood while the law simultaneously permits, and now more fully protects, terminations up to that same point.
That juxtaposition is not merely bureaucratic quirk: it exposes a moral muddle. If the state will issue a certificate acknowledging a baby lost at, say, 20 weeks, what exactly does it mean legally and ethically to sanction termination at the same stage?
The policy sends mixed messages to grieving parents and to clinicians asked to implement care pathways. When the certificate was launched, the demand from bereaved parents was so high that in the first eight weeks more than 100,000 certificates were issued, showing how many people recognise the value of life before the 24-week gestational period.
One aspect in the parliamentary debate around decriminalisation that is constantly frowned upon is the debate around foetal sentience.
In a parliamentary inquiry by the All-Party Parliamentary Pro-Life Group chaired by Fiona Bruce MP in 2020, we heard stark evidence from physicians from around the world suggesting that a foetus may experience pain at earlier gestations than is commonly assumed.
Multiple examples were given of elective foetal surgery for conditions such as heart disease where analgesia is routinely given to the foetus on the assumption that it can feel pain. Yet during an abortion no such analgesia is ever given, and while foetal pain is still a contested scientific field surely shutting down debate on the possibility is premature.
There is continuing debate about neurodevelopmental thresholds, the interpretation of neural activity, and what observers mean by ‘experience’ or ‘suffering’. Serious ethical questions remain around how late-term abortions are carried out and a clear, peer-reviewed scientific consensus, not predominantly partisan parliamentary debate, is urgently needed to ensure that this aspect of the abortion procedure is not ignored.
Proponents of decriminalisation have argued that some high-profile prosecutions exposed the need for change, the case of Carla Foster being the headline example. Foster’s prosecution and initial custodial sentence in 2023 felt to many like an indictment of Victorian statutes applied in modern circumstances, and fuelled momentum for reform.
But the data complicates the narrative: prosecutions of women for abortion-related offences have been rare, and in many recorded instances the police or prosecutors declined to pursue charges or cases were dropped.
Media attention has magnified a small number of dramatic cases into evidence of systemic criminalisation. That’s not to diminish the trauma of any individual prosecution, but the empirical pattern shows that prosecutorial discretion has been the norm. Any legal reform should be honest about how common prosecutorial action was and consider whether changing enforcement practices and clearer prosecutorial guidance might have addressed the harms without wholesale legal restructuring.
Finally, decriminalisation as a policy goal should be judged by its ends, not only its rhetoric. If the aim is to reduce harm, protect patient safety and destigmatise reproductive healthcare, lawmakers must show how removing criminal sanctions for women will improve clinical outcomes, reporting and safeguarding. Will it encourage earlier presentation to services? Will it change medical training, oversight or the circumstances that produce late-term terminations? Decriminalisation divorced from investment in public health infrastructure risks being a symbolic reform that leaves the deeper drivers of late presentation and maternal distress untouched.
Decriminalisation of abortion in England and Wales is consequential and deserves rigorous, fact-based public argument. The parliamentary vote represents a seismic shift in law, but seismic change merits answers to uncomfortable questions about gestational thresholds compared with Europe; the moral signal sent by state recognition of early baby loss; the contested science of foetal sentience; and the actual scale and nature of prosecutions under the old regime. Policy that seeks to balance compassion, autonomy and protection must engage honestly with these tensions rather than subsume them under a slogan.
If public trust in reproductive policy matters, legislators should use the opportunity of reform to produce a clear, consistent framework: one that explains why the 24-week threshold exists, reconciles how we commemorate loss with how we regulate termination, commissions independent scientific review where disciplines disagree, and pairs legal change with tangible measures to improve timely access to care. Only then will the law’s moral and clinical coherence match the compassion its supporters rightly demand.
