The late-night vote on 18 March to back the decriminalisation of mothers who abort their babies at any stage of gestation has left many reeling.
Like many of those outraged by this decision, I am not against abortion in all circumstances. But I can see how abortion has become one of those issues where debates centre on emotion and tribalism, not scrutiny and evidence.
Backbench MPs had only 46 minutes to respond to it. In the Lords, we spent several hours. But a change of this magnitude—disapplying sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act and section 1 of the Infant Life (Preservation) Act—should not have been attached to a general crime Bill. Nor should it have been rushed through without the detailed examination such a sensitive issue demands.
Throughout the debate, one fact remained constant: the absence of reliable data. Ministers have repeatedly been unable—or unwilling—to provide basic information necessary to assess the risks of the current abortion model, let alone justify extending it further.
We still do not know how often abortion complications lead to hospital admissions because those figures are not incorporated into official estimates. We do not know how frequently gestational age is misreported, potentially leading to abortions taking place beyond recommended limits and therefore at increased risk to the health of the mother.
We do not know the gap between pills prescribed and pills actually taken for the reasons claimed—raising legitimate concerns about stockpiling or misuse. The 2024 conviction of Stuart Worby, who obtained abortion pills via telemedicine and slipped them into his girlfriend’s drink, illustrates how dangerously unregulated abortion is already.
The Government’s standard response—that such data is not collected via the HSA4 form—has become a repeated refrain each time we ask for more accurate information. But the absence of evidence is not evidence of safety. It is a policy blind spot. And a wilful one at that.
Against this backdrop, the expansion of “pills-by-post” abortion risks creating an even more dangerously unregulated system. Without in-person consultation, there is limited capacity to verify gestational age, detect coercion, or ensure that the medication is taken by the intended patient at the intended time. These are not theoretical concerns; they are predictable consequences of removing safeguards.
Abortion campaigners argued that reform was necessary to prevent large numbers of women being criminalised. Yet the Government’s own data – limited though it is – contradicts that claim.
In 2023, there were 277,970 abortions to residents of England and Wales. In the same year, there were just eight abortion-related charges under the relevant laws. Even if each charge related to a different woman acting in respect of her own pregnancy (which is not clear), that would amount to a prosecution rate of approximately 0.003%.
Public policy should be proportionate to the problem it seeks to address. Instead, for the sake of a vanishingly small number of cases, Parliament has now chosen to dismantle longstanding legal protections and expand a system already shrouded in uncertainty.
The Lords had an opportunity to take a more cautious path. An amendment that would have restored in-person consultation was put to the House but it was rejected.
The result is a reform passed without the data to justify it, without the safeguards to underpin it, and without the scrutiny it deserved.
This is not evidence-based law-making. It is a step into the darkness.
Lords wrong to permit mothers to self-administer abortion up to birth
