Women will really have the right to choose if politicians vote to revoke this Victorian-era legislation
Y
ou might have seen their faces. Every few months nowadays, another woman appears in a British newspaper charged with a suspected illegal abortion. Often the woman looks pale and gaunt. Sometimes she hides behind sunglasses as she bows her head. The photographs of these women walking into court feel akin to a public shaming, where the stocks are replaced by a breaking news banner, but the judgment remains the same.
If this sounds like a punishment from a different time, it’s because it is. The law that’s largely used to prosecute women for a suspected illegal abortion was written in 1861 – that’s before women had the right to vote or own property independently. While the Abortion Act in 1967 gave widespread access to abortion, it was never made fully legal on the statute books.
Now that may change. After more than a century and a half, this week could see abortion decriminalised in England and Wales – and for the first time, give tens of millions of women a genuine right to choose. When the crime and policing bill returns to the Commons, a Labour backbencher, Tonia Antoniazzi, will table an amendment to remove women from the criminal law. It would finally get rid of the anachronistic stain on otherwise modern abortion rights: women will no longer face prosecution if they end a pregnancy after 24 weeks or without approval from two doctors.
