The Justice Secretary has “significant concerns” over moves to decriminalise abortion, The Times has reported.
Shabana Mahmood is said to fear that decriminalising abortion will endanger expectant mothers who use the ‘pills-by-post’ scheme to have DIY abortions at home late in their pregnancy.
A source close to Mahmood said: “She believes that, from a women’s health and safety perspective, there’s such little oversight. If you do take those pills later on, it can have a really terrible impact on you.”
‘Unthinkable’
Labour MPs Tonia Antoniazzi and Stella Creasy have tabled amendments to the Government’s Crime and Policing Bill which would allow a woman to kill her unborn baby at any stage of pregnancy without sanction. MPs are expected to vote tomorrow on the proposed changes.
Commenting on the amendments, GB News presenter Miriam Cates warned that Britain “may soon have one of the most extreme abortion regimes in the world”.
Making the pills-by-post scheme permanent after coronavirus restrictions were lifted, she said, had led to “an increase in illegal abortions, dangerous late-stage terminations, coercion and undetected abuse”. Yet, rather than “arguing for a return to face-to-face appointments”, she added, activists are pushing for full decriminalisation.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Mrs Cates countered: “it is unthinkable that there should be no consequences for ending the life of an unborn, fully-formed human child. Just moments after birth, such an action would incur life in prison.”
‘Amoral’
Columnist Janice Turner describes herself as an advocate of ‘reproductive rights’, but expressed shock at the “glib, careless and amoral plan” that would “allow a woman to self-terminate a pregnancy up until the moment of birth without facing prosecution”.
a glib, careless and amoral plan
The pills-by-post scheme was “open to abuse and error”, she conceded, but while she did not support the prosecution of all illegal abortions, nor did she accept that a “woman should be free to self-administer abortifacients up until birth, in any circumstance, with no legal sanction”.
She also said: “It cannot be that killing a full-term baby in the birth canal is legal, but smothering it outside the womb is infanticide.” She added: “a foetus at 37 weeks gestation is still a human life”.
Safety
In a further amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill, 30 MPs have called for an end to the dangerous pills-by-post scheme and a return to pre-pandemic in-person consultations.
It cannot be that killing a full-term baby in the birth canal is legal, but smothering it outside the womb is infanticide.
Conservative MP Dr Caroline Johnson, who proposed the amendment, said it would “protect women and prevent further cases of coerced or dangerous abortions arising as a result of the pills-by-post scheme”.
MPs across six political parties have backed the amendment, including former Conservative party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Liberal Democrat MP Tim Farron and Labour’s Mary Glindon. According to a poll of 2,103 adults by Whitestone Insight, two-thirds of women support the move with only four per cent against.
Christian thinking and contemporary opposition
John R Ling
When does human life begin? It is a fundamental and decisive question because your answer reveals your understanding of the nature and status of the human embryo. It also shapes your stance on the big bioethical issues of the day such as abortion, cloning and embryonic stem cell research. There are many voices sowing confusion, but the Bible is unmistakably clear that human life begins at conception. In this booklet, John Ling provides a wide-ranging explanation of biblical truth, the historical Christian perspective and evidence from modern science to support this position.
