A woman has been sentenced to 28 months in prison for having an abortion – we must demand decriminalisation now

A mother in the UK has been sentenced to 28 months in prison after admitting she illegally induced an abortion during lockdown. Read that again.

Ahead of the sentencing, Stella Creasy, MP for Walthamstow, tweeted what many of us were thinking: “This is happening here, not America, El Salvador or Poland. Here in the UK.”

She’s got a point: On June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion by reversing Roe v. Wade; in El Salvador, abortion is fully criminalised in all circumstances; and in Poland, there is a near-total ban on abortions.

But why are we labouring under the illusion that UK laws on abortion are more progressive? Are we actually surprised that a woman has been dragged through the criminal courts for exercising basic bodily autonomy? If so, we’ve been dangerously naive and, worse, complicit.

Per Hannah Al-Othman’s reporting for The Times, it’s understood that the woman in question received pills to induce the abortion via the “pills by post scheme” during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. This scheme allowed for drugs to be supplied after a remote consultation for pregnancies up to 10 weeks.

However, the woman is understood to have been past the legal time limit when she took the pills and has since pleaded guilty to “procuring drugs to induce an abortion” under Victorian legislation, which dates back to 1861 (the Offences Against the Person Act). At the time when this legislation was passed, most women couldn’t vote, own property, or refuse to have sex with their husbands.

The so-called “right” to abortion in England and Wales comes from the Abortion Act 1967 (as amended by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990).

However, rather than conferring a legal right for women and people with uteruses to choose if they want to continue a pregnancy, it merely provides a list of exemptions to the criminalisation of abortion.

Thus, abortion is only legal if it is performed by a registered medical practitioner (a doctor) and is authorised by two doctors, acting in good faith, on one (or more) of the following grounds:

(a) that the pregnancy has not exceeded its twenty-fourth week and that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman or any existing children of her family; or

(b) that the termination is necessary to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman; or

(c) that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk to the life of the pregnant woman, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated; or

(d) that there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped.