Dangerous Amendments Will Trigger Further Surge in UK Abortions

I wrote to you a few days ago about the upcoming General Election.

I said that SPUC’s election campaign needs to be ready to go live the moment that the prime minister calls the 2024 election.

Why is the General Election so important?

Firstly, because Parliamentary candidates are more receptive to voters in an election year than at any other time.

It’s vital that pro-life matters feature prominently in interactions with their constituents.

But there is another pressing reason why MPs need to be hearing from pro-life constituents this year.

MPs Stella CREASY & Dame Diana JOHNSON – both leading figures in the UK abortion lobby in Parliament – intend to hijack the Criminal Justice Bill.

The Johnson Amendment would make it legal for a woman to carry out her own abortion at ANY time, for ANY reason.
The Creasy Amendment would decriminalise concealing the body of a dead baby who dies before, during or after birth.

Simply put, should Parliament vote for the amendments, abortion would CEASE to be a criminal act in relation to the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929.

And we have every reason to take the threat these amendments pose to the unborn (and women) very seriously.

In 2019, we saw how a Government Bill intended to resolve a power-sharing stalemate in the Northern Ireland Assembly was used by Stella Creasy to introduce a totally unrelated amendment to the Bill, massively expanding abortion provision in the Province.
In 2022, the House of Commons voted to approve Baroness Sugg’s—again unrelated—amendment to the Healthcare Bill. This made “temporary” DIY abortions during the COVID pandemic “permanent” in England.

Completely decriminalising abortion in the UK would:

1. Lead to MORE abortions – more unborn babies will be killed.

Written evidence presented to Parliament late last year by Britain’s second biggest abortion provider, MSI Reproductive Choices (formerly Marie Stopes), suggests that recorded abortions for England and Wales may well have topped 325,000 in 2023.

By comparison, the figure for 2019 was 207,384—representing an ADDITIONAL 117,000 babies killed by abortion.

2. Leave vulnerable women and girls at greater risk from abortion coercion from family members, partners and employers… and worse.

Increased access to DIY chemical abortion pills has resulted in a huge rise in abortions in the UK since 2020 and COVID.

Currently, a time limit of 10 weeks is in place.

Should abortion be decriminalised, however, there would be no legal barrier preventing women from taking these deadly and dangerous pills well beyond the 10-week limit.

(You may recall that this occurred in the tragic case of Carla Foster, who last year was prosecuted for illegally procuring her own pill abortion when she was between 32 and 34 weeks pregnant.)

3. Open up commercial opportunities for online and over-the-counter abortion pill sales, creating a 'back street' abortion culture.

SPUC and others have made it clear to the Government what physical dangers its pills-by-post policy is posing to women.

Ambulance callouts and hospitalisations directly related to medical complications arising from DIY abortions have increased FOURFOLD since the pills by post-scheme became operational.

Old-style face-to-face meetings with medical professionals who are trained to spot signs of coercion and (illegal) underage sexual activity and ensure that the 10-week safety limit is observed can all now be easily circumvented.

The advent of “telemedicine” is providing fertile ground for abortion pill prescriptions to be fraudulently obtained and sold to abusers who can coerce women and girls into aborting their babies.

Should the Creasy/Jonson amendments become law, they would enable abusers to cut out the black-market middlemen altogether and buy abortion pills straight from commercial outlets online or over-the-counter, making abortion easier to access than ever.

4. Leave virtually no protection for the conscientious objection of staff and healthcare professionals working in the NHS and at pharmacies.

When enacted, the 1967 Abortion Act provided protection to doctors and nurses holding a conscientious objection to abortion.

However, those protections have been seriously eroded over the years.

NHS Guidelines published in 2014 barred doctors and nurses with religious or moral objections to prescribing abortion-inducing drugs—such as the morning-after pill—from receiving professional qualifications needed to work in specialised areas of medicine such as gynaecology and General Practice.
Catholic doctors, for instance, have found themselves pressured to “refer” patients requesting abortions to colleagues who are prepared to sign off on abortions.

Should the Creasy/Johnson amendments become law, the Abortion Act would effectively become redundant, stripping away, at a stroke, even the limited conscientious protections pro-life healthcare professionals enjoy today.

Online Webinars

I would like to run a series of interactive webinars, each one specifically tailored to constituents in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, providing the public with the tools they need to lobby their MPs effectively.

These will be based on the successful webinar series that we ran in November as part of SPUC’s campaign to end the UK’s deadly abortion pills-by-post scheme.