UK approves bills to remove criminal penalties for women who commit their own abortions

Clause 208 removes all criminal liability from women for ending their own pregnancies under both the Offences Against the Persons Act (1861) and Infant Life Preservation Act (1929). This amendment also halts ongoing investigations and prosecutions for women who perpetrated “self-abortions.”

Amendment 426B, put forward by Baroness Thornton in the House of Lords, grants automatic pardons for any women who have been previously convicted for aborting their babies. The amendment also mandates the expungement or deletion of any related arrest, police, or court records.

“Legislation to pardon women who have been convicted of illegal abortions has passed its final parliamentary hurdle, paving the way for a landmark change in the law in England and Wales,” the Guardian reported:

The bill is expected to receive royal assent – meaning it will become law – in the coming weeks. The same legislation will also put an end to prosecutions of women who terminate their own pregnancies, with a clause in the bill introduced in the Commons last year by the Labour backbencher Tonia Antoniazzi.

“Automatic pardons for convictions or cautions, and expunging the records of arrests and investigations, will enable these women to participate fully in society again, seeking the jobs and careers they’ve always wanted without having to repeatedly disclose and rehash their ordeal, travelling to places they wish to,” Antoniazzi stated. “They can move through life without this hanging over them in the form of a record.”

Clause 208 essentially decriminalizes abortion up until birth, for any reason or for no reason, which UK Right to Life noted will likely lead “to a significant increase in the number of women performing dangerous late-term abortions at home.” Tory MP Sir Edward Leigh condemned the move as “a terrible indictment of our society that a human life can be taken when it is about to be born, at 39 weeks, and that there should be a free pardon in such a case.”

Several peers attempted to have Clause 208 removed from the bill in March, with Baroness Monckton emphasizing that it would “allow mothers to self-administer the abortion of their unborn child for any reason, at any stage of pregnancy, right up to full term” and that “the infant, who without the intervention of lethal drugs would be a fully living person at that stage, if born, is completely unmentioned. It is as if this is unmentionable.”

“Obviously, it is deeply distressing, as we have heard, for the mother to be questioned by the police in the aftermath of an illegal abortion,” Monckton said. “This should be done with compassion and sensitivity, but the police cannot act as if nothing has happened.”

“The consequence of these decisions is not a neutral expansion of autonomy, but a serious erosion of safety and humanity within the law,” the UK group Christian Concern stated. “By removing criminal accountability while leaving a regulatory framework formally in place, the law risks creating precisely the conditions it once sought to prevent: unregulated and unsafe abortions. As legal safeguards lose their force, we see the inevitable shift to dangerous self-managed abortions pushing vulnerable women toward practices carrying heightened risks of severe complication, trauma, and even death.”

Antoniazzi previously stated that she is “comfortable” with a woman ending the life of her child at 37 weeks, at which point the child has been viable outside the womb for more than two months. The abortion rate in England and Wales has soared in recent years to more than 30% of recorded conceptions.