Crime and Policing Bill

Wednesday 18th March 2026 Lords Chamber

Report (6th Day) (Continued)

20:40

Amendment 422DA not moved.

Clause 208: Removal of women from the criminal law related to abortion

Amendment 422E

Moved by

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine]

422E: Clause 208, page 254, line 25, leave out from “1929” to end of line 26 and at end insert “—
(a) proceedings for an offence shall not be instituted against a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy except by or with the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions, who must exercise personally any function under this section of giving consent;(b) proceedings to which this section applies may not be commenced after twelve months from the date of the offence to which the proceedings relate.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to add the requirement of DPP consent for the institution of the criminal proceedings in Clause 208 against a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy and reduces the limitation period for the offence.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 422E and, additionally, do so on behalf of the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, KC, who has a prior appointment in The Hague this week. He was the author of the probing amendment on this topic in Committee. At that stage, the Minister signalled some reservations about it and subsequently wrote to him with additional data, which has proved to be most helpful, so we thank her. The noble Baroness, Lady Wolf of Dulwich, has appended her name to this amendment and will speak to it, along with her other amendment.

Noble Lords will be aware that Clause 208, which was inserted into this Bill in the other place at a late stage, has attracted numerous amendments. Our intention with Amendment 422E is that, where opinions are a matter of individual conscience, we should attempt to offer the House a compromise between the Commons position—Clause 208—and Amendment 424, which seeks to leave out the clause entirely. I point out that Amendments 423, 423ZA and 423A would be pre-empted if this amendment was agreed on Division.

The amendment would do two things. First, it would require the personal consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions before any proceedings may be instituted against women acting in relation to their pregnancy. Secondly, it would provide that such proceedings must be commenced within 12 months of the alleged offence. The version we debated in Committee provided for the consent of the Attorney-General rather than the Director of Public Prosecutions. The Minister observed that offences where Attorney-General consent is required tend to be in the national security or international spheres, while DPP consent is required to address a wider range of concerns, including, as the Minister explained, where there is a risk that the institution of proceedings might violate convention rights or cause a defendant “irreparable harm”. There are some offences in areas other than national security or international matters where AG consent is required, as the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, argues—for example, contempt of court under the strict liability rule, pursuant to Section 7 of the Contempt of Court Act. Nevertheless, on balance, it seems proportionate and in keeping with existing practice to replace Attorney-General consent with the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Our amendment would, however, require that the DPP exercises the function of giving consent “personally”. That language is taken from the Bribery Act, where some offences impose a similar condition on the DPP. Without this additional requirement, we understand that the consent of the DPP to institute proceedings could be given by a Crown prosecutor by virtue of Section 1(7) of the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985. So requiring the DPP to exercise that function personally provides, in our view, a better guarantee against the risk of abuse, error or overzealousness.

20:45

The second component of the amendment, proposed new paragraph (b), would impose a 12-month limit for commencing proceedings. We have added that in since Committee. It would be an additional check on prosecutions; the pregnant woman involved might, as things currently stand on the basis of Clause 208, have faced anxiety or uncertainty for years after the termination of the pregnancy. The limitation period of 12 months provides a measure of certainty. The possibility of being drawn into criminal processes long after the event compounds the stress and stigma that can accompany adverse pregnancy outcomes. A clear 12-month boundary strikes a proportionate balance; it allows for legitimate cases to be investigated but prevents open-ended exposure.

We understand the concern arising from some cases of appalling investigations, which have caused enormous and unnecessary distress to some women. We discussed these at length in Committee—and they are indeed harrowing. One thing that we were keen to understand after Committee was about the data on investigations. The Minister wrote to the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, in that regard, and we are grateful, as I said, for her detailed response. However, it is difficult to discern a clear trend from the data. Under Sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, there were five investigations in 2019-20; eight in 2020-21; and 13 in 2024-25—so there appears to be an increase. The problem is that this available data on investigations does not disaggregate by the sex of the person who is being investigated—so you have a trend of increase, but you cannot tell whether the increase can be attributed to a man or a woman. We also could not tell whether the women in the data were related to women acting in relation to their own pregnancy rather than other women assisting.

When you turn to prosecutions and convictions under Sections 58 and 59 Offences Against the Person Act 1861, the picture is clearer, as the data is disaggregated into male and female. In 2025, six people were proceeded against, with five convictions. When that was broken down into male and female, of the six proceeded against, four were men, of which all four were convicted, and two were women, of which one woman was convicted. It would therefore suggest that coercion may well be coming into play or, as in the Worby case that we discussed in Committee, deception was a ploy to procure an abortion for a woman who wished to continue with her pregnancy.

The number of prosecutions and convictions under the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929 is very small. There have been two prosecutions against women since 2019, although again we do not know if these were women acting in relation to their own pregnancy. None of them was convicted. There were seven prosecutions against men in the same period, and there were three convictions.

The question for us and for broader society is whether policy and law resolve both sides of a problem. Would we wish to pass a law that entirely removes any criminal sanction from rare but nevertheless potentially criminal acts, or not? As the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, said, when the police find a lifeless body which could be either a small infant or a late-stage foetus, they must investigate, because the police—

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I should like to ask the noble Baroness—

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

I do not think that we take interventions on Report, if I may refer to the Companion—but perhaps the Whip could assist us.

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Katz) (Lab)]

I can clarify for your Lordships’ House that the noble Baroness is able to take interventions, or not, as she wishes.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

I would like to proceed and conclude my argument. I will be happy to listen to the noble Baroness once I have finished.

Because the police do not know when they find a lifeless body which of the situations they are confronted with, even with decriminalisation of abortion offences for the women acting in relation to her pregnancy, she may still be investigated. If it was a case of stillbirth, for example, for that woman the investigation will inevitably be a cause of stress. She might be worried that the evidence will not support her or she will not be believed. However, what else are the police supposed to do in these cases, other than try to establish the facts?

Therefore, it is not possible to remove women acting in relation to their pregnancy from any criminal process, even if you decriminalise abortion offences for them. What is possible is to introduce further guarantees, as we are attempting to do with this amendment, that would add an additional layer of personal assurance from the DPP that the facts in context of terminations are taken into account, and that after 12 months, in any event, proceedings will not be brought against the pregnant woman. It ensures that the decision to prosecute in relation to the woman is taken at the highest level—the DPP—and applies the certainty of a limitation period.

No solution in this area will ever be flawless, but when the evidence before us is so limited and the broader picture so uncertain, wholesale decriminalisation would be a disproportionate response to a problem which, in any event, needs careful and thoughtful steps for resolution. This amendment offers a more balanced and workable path to the problem that we all want to resolve satisfactorily. It provides meaningful safeguards for women, ensuring that any decision to prosecute is taken at the highest level, as well as the certainty of a limitation period, while not upending the balancing of principles and values underlying the Abortion Act 1967. I hope that both those who oppose criminalisation and those who are rightly troubled by the distressing cases we have discussed will see that this approach represents a principled and proportionate compromise, and will feel able to support it.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Morris of Bolton) (Con)]

As the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, has already pointed out, if Amendment 422E is agreed to, I am unable to call Amendments 423, 423ZA or 423A by reason of pre-emption.

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 423 which is in my name. The purpose of my amendment is to see if it is possible to effect a compromise between strongly held opinions. If a compromise is not possible, then subject to pre-emption, I could certainly support Amendments 422E, and I could also support Amendments 424 and 425. At Second Reading of this Bill and in Committee, I expressed my views on what was Clause 191 at that stage. I do not wish to in any way reiterate the detail of what I said. Suffice it to say that I am much closer to the position of the opponents of Clause 208 than to its supporters.

However, there are two general points I would like to make at this stage. First, it is very difficult to distinguish in principle between a child that is just born and a child that is about to be born. Secondly and consequently, to extinguish the life of a child that is about to be born can be justified only in the most compelling of circumstances. This is not just a matter of personal morality. It is a reflection of the value that society as a whole, and Parliament in particular, has put on human life. I hope that these two propositions will be accepted as true by your Lordships and will inform the debate we are to have.

In urging a compromise, I would ask the House first to consider the provisions of the Abortion Act 1967, because that Act permits, in certain circumstances, late-term abortion. Without going into too much detail, Section 1(1)(b), (c) and (d) of the 1967 Act permit a late-term abortion in the following circumstances: when it is necessary to prevent grave, permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the mother; when the pregnancy threatens the life of the woman; and when there is a substantial risk that the child will suffer from such serious abnormalities as would result in serious handicap. The point that I make is that the existing provisions in law meet many of the concerns that have been expressed in support of Clause 208.

However, I recognise that the proponents of Clause 208 do not regard the existing law as sufficient. It is therefore with that in mind that I have tabled Amendment 423 in the hope of addressing those concerns. Proposed new paragraph (a) in my amendment reflects the language of the Infanticide Act 1938. That statute was reviewed in 2006 by the Law Commission and its terms were confirmed. My amendment proposes that it would be a defence to a late-term abortion that

“the balance of the woman’s mind was … disturbed by reason of her pregnancy”.

The amendment provides that the burden is on the prosecution to prove the defence beyond reasonable doubt. In proposing that part of the amendment, I recognise that, in logic, if such a defence should be available in respect of the death of a child immediately after birth, it is very difficult to say that such a defence should not be available in respect of a child immediately before birth.

I turn to proposed new paragraph (b) of my amendment, which seeks to meet the concerns that have been expressed in your Lordships’ House in respect of late-term abortions that result from domestic abuse. That is, I am sure, a concern to many of your Lordships. I have addressed that very precisely in paragraph (b), which I hope will reassure noble Lords who have that anxiety.

The remaining part of my amendment addresses the distress that can be caused to a woman by the police investigation. First, I will make just two preliminary points. If it is necessary to create a criminal offence, one has to accept the necessity of an investigation, but one that has to be conducted with great sensitivity, which is the case of course when one is investigating allegations of rape and the victim of the rape has to be examined and talked to. It has to be done with great sensitivity. The second general point I come to is the one with which I began my remarks: is the distress caused to a woman by the investigation a sufficiently compelling reason to justify extinguishing the life of a child about to be born? In my view, the answer to that is no.

However, I accept that concerns remain and my amendment seeks to address those remaining concerns. The amendment provides that no investigation can take place unless authorised by a very senior police officer of the rank of superintendent or above. The superintendent must have regard to the defences set out in my amendment and, to echo a point made by the noble Baroness in moving her amendment, the investigation must be completed within 28 days: the initial authority being for 14 days, with two subsequent extensions of seven days, but no more.

To conclude—

21:00

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

Can I just go back to the point the noble Viscount raised a minute or two ago? He said that such investigations must be undertaken with great sensitivity. He referred to the investigation of rape cases. I put it to him that all experience shows that the police and, indeed, prosecution authorities sometimes find it very difficult to investigate such cases with sensitivity. How is he going to guarantee that?

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

I am not sure that I accept that. It is certainly true that when I started practising at the Bar, which was a very long time ago, investigations were not conducted with great sensitivity, but the police service has advanced a long way from that. So I do not think—I hope the noble Lord will forgive me —that I accept the premise that the police are crude or insensitive in their investigation. There may be individual cases, but in general, no.

I hope I will be forgiven now if I conclude. Clause 208 is a serious departure from existing law and practice. It was passed in the Commons on Report in a time-limited debate without the normal benefit of scrutiny in Committee or of pre-legislation consultation. I have tried to meet your Lordships’ anxieties with a compromise amendment. If there is no taste for that, so be it, and I will vote for the other amendments and clauses that I have identified, but I hope that your Lordships might reflect on the desirability of compromise.

[Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest (Con)]

My Lords, my Amendment 424 seeks to remove Clause 208. As my noble friend Lord Hailsham said, this clause passed the Commons without any evidence, scrutiny, public consultation or impact assessment, although it is momentous. It is a radical proposal with implications for the mental and physical health of the woman and lethal consequences for the viable unborn child. Clause 208 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. This is not just its consequential effect; it is its intended effect. The clause states:

“For the purposes of the law related to abortion … no offence is committed by a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy”.


The unborn child, in many cases more developed than those successfully looked after in premature baby units, would have no legal protection. As my honourable friend Julia Lopez said in the other place:

“This is not pro or anti life. It is not extremist to want protections for viable babies, and it is not anti-women to say that coercion or dangerous self-medication should not be outside the reach of the law”.—[Official Report, Commons, 17/06/25; col. 330.]


This in part was a reference to the fact that a woman may be coerced into having an illegal abortion at home. The law as it stands—

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

Is the noble Baroness aware that, if Clause 208 became law, abortion law would continue to apply to doctors and healthcare professionals and they would still be subject to time limits and all other aspects of the current abortion law?

[Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest (Con)]

Dr Alison Wright, president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, has written to Peers protesting that women may continue to face police investigations and criminal charges solely for ending their own pregnancy unless this clause is supported. She, speaking on behalf of the college, makes no distinction whatever between the abortion of a viable child at full term and a first-trimester termination. Indeed, the infant who without the intervention of lethal drugs would be fully a living person at that stage, if born, is completely unmentioned. It is as if this is unmentionable. Dr Wright describes the women concerned as being at the most vulnerable times in their lives. That may be true, but the most vulnerable and defenceless person here is the unborn viable child. 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. This should be done with compassion and sensitivity, but the police cannot act as if nothing has happened.

Clause 208 also endangers women by removing the current legal deterrent against administering an abortion away from a clinical setting right up to birth. Women may be incentivised to perform their own life-threatening abortion late in pregnancy. This is particularly the case given how easily women can obtain abortion pills through the pills by post scheme, beyond the legal limit and without a reliable gestational age check. These pills are not meant to be used after the 10th week of pregnancy for a very good reason. I encourage noble Lords to support Amendment 425 from the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, which would reinstate mandatory in-person medical consultations and abolish the pills by post scheme, which was started during Covid lockdowns and should have been rescinded after the pandemic, as was originally intended.

More than 1,000 medical professionals have written to us opposing Clause 208, and I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, former president of the British Medical Association, for her support for my amendment. One letter I received pointed out that—

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

The noble Baroness refers to 1,000 doctors writing, but is she aware that the British Medical Association has sent briefings to Members in support of the Bill as it now stands and that it alone represents more than 200,000 doctors?

[Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest (Con)]

The British Medical Association is a trade union, not a royal college.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest (Con)]

I am very sorry—I have to carry on or I am going to run out of time. This is Report and I am going to continue.

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is perfectly entitled not to take any interventions. We will make better progress if people just agree to take interventions or not, and then we will be able to hear from everyone.

[Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest (Con)]

One letter I received pointed out that 22 week-plus babies aborted in a medical setting are clinically euthanised prior to surgery with a lethal injection into the heart. What would happen, she asked in her letter, to babies aborted at home and born alive? Would the baby be left to die? How would the baby be disposed of? Would the mother be charged with infanticide?

Clause 208, as confirmed by a legal opinion obtained by the Father of the House, Sir Edward Leigh, in the other place, would also make it legal for a woman to perform her own abortion on sex-selective grounds at any time. Data from NHS England shows that there is already an imbalance in the sex of children among certain communities that cannot be explained by pure chance. Do the proposers of this clause want to further facilitate what has been called femicide?

Let me be clear about what Clause 208 does not do. It does not, despite the claims of its promoters, leave the current law intact. If the 24-week limit can no longer be defended when women induce their own abortions, and they can obtain pills through the post via a phone call, the limit set by Parliament in 1990 is rendered meaningless. The reason why it was then lowered from 28 weeks was precisely because of concerns about the termination of viable children.

The most basic justification for all abortions is that the unborn child in question is unwanted. The slogan is that every child should be a wanted child, but we all know that there are so many couples who for medical reasons cannot have families themselves yet desperately want a family. When you think of the fate of a viable baby being aborted as unwanted when there are so many families yearning to provide that love and support via adoption, this clause is morally questionable, even on the purely utilitarian grounds of the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

The preamble to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that

“the child … needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth”.

Removing the offence of a woman terminating her own pregnancy, even at full term, would remove the few remaining legal protections for unborn children.

I am sure that the proposers of Clause 208 genuinely believe that they will thereby create a kinder and more civilised society, but I fear that the consequences, if this is passed, will be precisely the opposite.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, it is normal to take questions and interventions as this is a debate so, before the noble Baroness sits down, can I ask her whether she believes that all 50 countries that have decriminalised abortion are wrong?

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 424 from the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, for the reasons that she has so clearly set out. I will not repeat them but instead seek to offer in my Amendment 425 a more judicious response than Clause 208 to the small number of prosecutions that have occurred in recent years.

When we pass laws as parliamentarians, we have a responsibility to ensure that those laws are as safe as possible, while legislating with the most difficult or even most nefarious scenarios in mind. It is with that in mind that I have tabled Amendment 425. The only reason why we are having this debate today and why there has been this push for Clause 208—not from the public but from abortion providers—is that the current law around how women can access abortion is not as safe as it should be and does not protect women in difficult or nefarious situations.

When the abortion pills by post scheme was introduced, I and many others warned of its risks. Sadly, those warnings have proven prescient, with one consequence being that a small number of women have faced prosecution for illegal abortions after the statutory time limit. Those prosecutions have led to the same groups who assured us back in 2020 and 2022 that pills by post was safe to lobby for the introduction of Clause 208, essentially trying to paper over the consequences of that scheme.

While women might no longer be prosecuted under Clause 208, the grave risks to women will not go away. Cases of women administering their own abortions late in pregnancy will likely increase without a legal deterrent. We will then hear calls for the full decriminalisation of abortion up to birth. It would be far safer to reintroduce in-person consultations with a medical professional before women can obtain abortion pills, as was mandatory before the pandemic. Amendment 425 would do this. It is not seeking to reverse the convenience of pills by post. It is only seeking to introduce safeguards for women. The amendment is deliberately moderate. It still permits at-home abortions but requires a prior confidential face-to-face appointment with a medical professional.

I draw colleagues’ attention to three reasons why this is important. First, in-person consultations allow women’s gestational age to be reliably verified. This would protect women because of the dangers associated with abortions away from the clinical context late in pregnancy. Those who argued for the Abortion Act in 1967 did so to prevent the back-street abortion. Under Clause 208, the DIY back-street abortion will be back for any woman who is more than 24 weeks pregnant.

In 2023, Carla Foster was convicted of an illegal abortion after she admitted lying to the abortion provider BPAS about her gestational age, claiming to be seven weeks pregnant when her gestation was actually between 32 and 34 weeks. Carla Foster was both a perpetrator—ending the life of a baby capable of living outside the womb—and a victim. She was a victim of a scheme that meant she could obtain abortion pills with no meaningful safeguards or medical care. After calling paramedics, she described being traumatised by the face of her dead baby. An in-person gestational age check would have both saved the life of her baby and spared the trauma caused by her actions.

21:15

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

I am not giving way; I am sorry.

Secondly, in-person consultations protect against coercion and abuse. Far from protecting victims of abuse, as is claimed, the lack of such consultations is a traffickers’ charter, allowing traffickers and abusers to cover up the effects of sexual exploitation by coercing their victims to phone up and ask for abortion pills. In-person appointments prior to an abortion in a confidential setting mean that such abuse is more likely to be detected. The disturbing case of Stuart Worby emphasises this need.

[Baroness Neate (CB)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

I am just carrying on; I am sorry.

Mr Worby was jailed in December 2024 after arranging for a friend’s girlfriend to pretend to be pregnant and acquire abortion pills for him via the pills by post scheme. He then spiked a woman’s drink with those pills to induce an abortion against her knowledge. Again, he could not have obtained the pills if in-person appointments were still mandatory.

Thirdly, in-person appointments allow for possible health risks to be checked to assess whether it is safe for a woman to undergo a medical, rather than a surgical, abortion.

The problems with the pills by post scheme are well documented, with FoI requests suggesting that one in 17 women requires hospital treatment afterwards. These risks were strikingly drawn to our attention by a letter, which has already been mentioned, from more than 1,000 medical professionals who support Amendments 424 and 425. I am glad too for the support of Dr Caroline Johnson MP, who still practises as a paediatrician and brought forward the same amendment in the other place.

The seriousness of this issue was brought home to me when I had the opportunity, in January, to meet with a woman whose sister tragically died after taking abortion pills via the pills by post scheme, leaving behind young children. The medical conditions the woman had, which meant she should have been deemed high risk, may well have been picked up in a clinical context. However, after a telephone consultation, she was sent pills in the post by BPAS and died suddenly minutes after taking the final set of pills.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

I am sorry; I am going to keep going.

This amendment would ensure that women are offered the best possible care at in-person appointments, where medical history can be discussed with a woman.

Amendment 425 is not about whether we are pro-life or pro-choice; it is about safeguarding women. Polling last summer found that two-thirds of women support the return of in-person appointments; a mere 4% support the status quo. Abortion providers provided abortion services before the pandemic, with no major problems for access. I urge colleagues to support Amendment 425, which is a far more proportionate response to the handful of court cases that have occurred in recent years than that offered by Clause 208, which makes matters worse and removes legal protections for unborn babies up to birth. Amendment 425 would not reduce access to abortion for women, but it would ensure that their health needs are properly catered for.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest: I am the chair of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. I hope that the noble Baroness who has just spoken will accept that sometimes the expertise of people who are directly involved on a daily basis with the treatment of women seeking an abortion is really rather important. I found it distressing when the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, refused to acknowledge that, in fact, many representatives of the medical profession strongly adhere to what lies behind Clause 208. I strongly support that clause because it seeks to ensure that women in England and Wales will no longer be subject to long investigations and criminal charges, which are very often exceedingly distressing.

I also support Amendment 423A to stop ongoing investigations and Amendment 426B to grant historical pardons to women. However, I will focus my comments today on the safety of the telemedicine service for early medical abortion and, in particular, my opposition to Amendment 425, which the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, just spoke to.

There have been extraordinary suggestions that the creation of the telemedicine service is the reason for the increase in criminal investigations. This is not true. There were cases of women being sent to prison before the telemedicine pathway was even created. Since the vote in the House of Commons last year, several women have been investigated, including a woman who experienced a miscarriage when she was 17 weeks pregnant. Surely that is something we should seek to avoid.

I turn to a landmark study of more than 50,000 abortions in England and Wales, which concluded that telemedical abortion is effective, safe and improves access to care. Waiting times fell, the mean gestational age of treatment declined and effectiveness increased, with 98.8% of abortions successfully completed after medication. The scare stories we have just heard are exceedingly rare and we should not take them as a reason for rejecting the telemedical service that exists.

Safety is not only about clinical outcomes; it is also about safeguarding. Women accessing early medical abortion through a licensed provider will speak to a doctor, a nurse or a midwife who follows established safeguarding protocols, asking an agreed list of questions to verify what the woman seeking an abortion has said. In fact, abortion providers operate within one of the most tightly regulated areas of medicine. Where concerns arise, patients are always brought face to face to receive care by that method. Indeed, about 50% have a face-to-face appointment when they seek a telemedical abortion and the drugs that are concerned.

It is important to note that telemedicine has not removed face-to-face care. If a woman chooses to attend a clinic or hospital, she is able to do so. Telemedicine has simply broadened choice for women, and that is something we should also take very seriously as a huge benefit. We must consider what would happen if the option for telemedicine—

[Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB)]

Could I further clarify and ask a question? Is it not true that if any doctor or nurse is doubtful when telemedicine is happening, they will ask that person to come in to be seen?

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

That is absolutely the case. I was trying to make that point earlier, but I did not do it as clearly as the noble Baroness has just done. Of course that should happen, and it does happen.

If we remove the option, we will find that women, regardless of circumstance, are forced to attend the clinic. I do not think that is sensible. We should allow women the choice to decide what the best route for them is. Some women—for example, those in abusive relationships, those living in rural areas, those with great caring responsibilities and those who cannot travel safely for some reason—may no longer be able to access safe, essential abortion care.

There is widespread support from the medical establishment for the telemedicine service remaining an option for women, including from all the relevant royal colleges, not just the RCOG. It goes across the Royal College of Nursing, the Royal College of Midwives, the Royal College of General Practitioners and the Royal College of Psychiatrists—indeed, all those royal colleges that have a clear and obvious responsibility for providing good services for those women seeking an abortion.

I hope that, in further discussion today, that will be recognised and we will not hear comments—as were made by the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton—that many doctors are opposed to this. That is simply not the case; they are in favour of Clause 208 and of the telemedicine service.

The evidence is clear—

[Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB)]

Could I further clarify and ask a question—

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

Let me just finish, I am just about to complete what I was going to say. I am happy to take the question.

The evidence is clear that telemedicine has reduced waiting times; enabled earlier treatment, which is a huge advantage; maintained high safety and effectiveness rates; improved privacy, which is something that most women in these circumstances really appreciate; and increased safeguarding disclosures. It expands choice and keeps women within a regulated clinical framework. That in itself is exceedingly important too.

To weaken or remove telemedical abortion would not improve safety; it would instead reduce access, delay care and create barriers for the most vulnerable women. The system works. It is safe, effective and must be maintained.

[Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms and Chief Whip (Lord Kennedy of Southwark) (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, views on both sides of the debate are sincerely held. We should all respect each other for that. We had a long debate in Committee. This is Report. Members should make their points. Repeated interventions do not help us at this stage. We need to take the temperature down. The House can make its decision known in the Division Lobbies later on.

[Baroness D’Souza (CB)]

My Lords, I strongly support abortion on demand but, as we have heard, the danger continues to exist that an almost full-term foetus could be aborted by means of a pill ordered by telephone and delivered by post. I am struck by the extraordinary efforts that this House has gone to in order to provide safeguards for those who are terminally ill and who demand assisted dying, yet we do not afford the unborn foetus or near-term foetus any kind of safeguard at all. The amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, would introduce some kind of safeguard, which perhaps we all owe to that unborn child.

The experience of other countries suggests that late-term abortions are uncommon, and an in-person consultation to determine the stage of pregnancy would ensure that they remain so. We know, too, that women who abort at later stages of pregnancy are more likely to have birthing complications. This, surely, is a further reason for some medical oversight.

As I said, I strongly support abortion on demand. I think that introducing a safeguard such as this to avoid the actual death of a near-term foetus is acceptable, and I hope very much that the noble Baroness will put this to the House.

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, my Amendment 423ZA would limit the application of Clause 208 to those deemed not to have capacity. I have also added my name to Amendment 426C in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf.

Under the present law, it is an offence for a woman to procure an abortion to end her pregnancy after 24 weeks —the stage when the baby is deemed to be a viable child. Causing the death of the child is a crime, other than in exceptional circumstances. It is also an offence to procure drugs or devices with the intent of an abortion.

Clause 208 is a bad clause. It is constitutionally wrong. It has no manifesto pledge behind it, and no prior consultation has been done on it with the people of this country. No evidence exists that people want abortion up to birth. The clause undermines the constitutional arrangement by which the Government legislate: on the basis of consent by the governed for an announced programme, given freely at the ballot box.

21:30

The clause will bring suffering and misery to many mothers and babies. Tiny lives will be ended in the most cruel and painful way for sentient babies, although they would be protected if they were born naturally, and their mothers’ health will be in grave danger. In having an abortion, perhaps at home or without support, they may, like Carla Foster, suffer remorse and be haunted for ever by seeing their tiny, dead baby; Carla called hers Lily.

Even if the physical danger passes, the mental scar of losing your child never heals. Causing death brings a lifetime of trauma and mental anguish; even worse, it leaves the woman in a moral limbo. Our society will become desensitised in permitting the killing of tiny, viable infants—babies who are currently protected by the law, which recognises that it is wrong to kill another human being, including a baby once it is viable after 24 weeks, with intent.

This clause will bring the law into disrepute. First, it will overshadow the good aim of the Government’s Bill, which commands widespread support: tackling the epidemic of crime and lawlessness that has gripped the country. Secondly, it will turn a blind eye to a criminal offence by decriminalising an illegal act for just one group of people: pregnant women. This is a regressive step for women, who deserve to be under the same legal obligations as others and are owed the same punishment should they transgress.

My amendment would, therefore, restrict the application of Clause 208 to those who are deemed not to have capacity, defined under the Mental Capacity Act 2005 as those who are unable to make a decision for themselves

“because of an impairment of, or a disturbance in the functioning of, the mind or brain”.

Such people should not be treated as criminals. I hope that the Minister will accept my amendment in the interests of the constitutional arrangements of the country and the equality of the sexes. It is not a benefit for someone who breaks the law to remain unpunished, whether the person is a man or a woman.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I wish to speak to Amendment 426B in my name. Before I do that, I want to ask the question that I was trying to ask the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner; it was a perfectly ordinary question. Is the noble Baroness aware that, since 2022, there has been in place national oversight within the Crown Prosecution Service for the prosecution of abortion offences and that, under this framework, multiple women have been prosecuted, despite judges in the cases calling for the CPS to reconsider? That is all I wanted to ask the noble Baroness.

The amendment in my name has been signed by my noble friend Lord Hunt and the noble Baronesses, Lady Watkins and Lady Miller. It would insert a new clause that follows Clause 208 and is consequential on it. It seeks to pardon women who have had a conviction or a caution for the offence that Clause 208 applies to. It would remove their details from police systems, regardless of the outcome of their case. There are women who were convicted, and an even larger group of women who were not convicted but who were investigated. This means that they have permanently to disclose in a DBS check, because abortion offences are classed as violent crimes. When Clause 208 remains in this Bill, this is an issue that the Government will need to address, as they will need to do for the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, because both are technical matters when this clause passes into law. Can my noble friend the Minister confirm that this is indeed the case if this clause reaches the statute book?

I think we all wish to resolve this matter. We have had a significant amount of discussion about this clause, and I think it is safe to say that there is some disagreement between us. I would like to summarise what I think we need to do from the point of view of those of us supporting Clause 208. To protect this clause, we will need to reject Amendment 422E, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner. We will need to oppose Amendment 423, in the name of the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham. We will need to reject Amendment 423ZA, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor. We will need to reject Amendment 426C, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf. All those amendments seek to continue the criminalisation of women in one form or another: a cruel idea, that women should be punished.

The amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, seeks to strike Amendment 208 from the Bill. The House has heard arguments, however, about the 50 countries where this works perfectly well, and where it does not increase abortion or offences. As my noble friend has said, all the royal colleges support this. We can safely say that what we are doing here is seeking to bring British law up to the same standard as other countries across the world. Amendment 424 seeks to place limits on a well-functioning, safe and early abortion through telemedicine. As my noble friend has said, it works. The amendment from the noble Baroness would place young people at risk. Women who need to go to a surgery for their medicine, but who live a long way away from it may start their miscarriage on the bus going home. Surely we want to avoid that.

Amendments 426C and 426D seek to restrict access and safeguarding in a way that will harm women, and young girls particularly. We must oppose those as well. I urge the House to reject all those amendments, to support Clause 208 and to support Amendments 423A and 426B.

[The Archbishop of Canterbury]

My Lords, many noble Lords will know that the Church of England’s view on abortion is one of principled opposition, recognising that there can be limited conditions under which abortion may be preferable to any available alternatives. This is based on the belief of the infinite worth and value of every human life, however old or young, and including life not yet born. The infinite value of human life is a fundamental Christian principle that underpins much of our legal system and has shaped existing laws on abortion. All life is precious. We therefore need to recognise that women confronted with the very complex and difficult decision to terminate a pregnancy deserve our utmost understanding, care and practical support as they face what is often a heart-wrenching decision.

However, I cannot support Clause 208. Though its intention may not be to change the 24-week abortion limit, it undoubtedly risks eroding the safeguards and enforcement of those legal limits and, inadvertently, undermining the value of human life.

I support Amendment 425 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, since it is not clear how the law can function in an enforceable way without in-person consultation before accessing early medical abortion. The risks of medical complications are, as we have heard, much greater if the pills for early abortion are taken beyond the 11-week limit. Although there are benefits to telemedicine—I do not dispute that—there are also flaws, and they are key to the debate on whether Clause 208 should pass.

As I have already said, this is not a debate on whether the legal abortion limit should change, but without the levers necessary to monitor and enforce the law, we are at risk of it becoming exactly that.

In the same vein, I support the amendment in the name of my right reverend friend the Bishop of Leicester, as we have a particular duty of care to those under 18 to ensure that they are properly cared for and supported while making such difficult decisions.

I am reminded of the call of the prophet Micah both to do justice and to love mercy. Balancing justice and mercy is the challenge that we are debating today. I do not think that women who act in relation to their own pregnancies should be prosecuted, but I also do not wish to see any increase in late-term abortions.

Although Clause 208 is well intentioned, it risks making an already imperfect situation worse. Therefore, I support Amendment 424 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton.

Decriminalisation of abortion is a question of such legal, moral and practical complexity that it cannot be properly addressed in an amendment hastily added to another Bill. Consideration of any alteration to the abortion laws needs public consultation and robust parliamentary processes to ensure that every aspect of this debate is carefully considered and scrutinised.

There are many outstanding questions, which deserve greater attention, about the tone of policing in this area, about how we can best ensure that women suffering miscarriages can access the right care when they need it, and about how those who provide abortions outside the law will continue to be held accountable for doing so.

As I have said before in this place, we need a framework that supports women, not one that puts them and their unborn children in the way of greater harm. On that basis, I will support the amendments in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Monckton and Lady Stroud, and my right reverend friend the Bishop of Leicester should they push them to a vote.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

It was suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor, that Clause 208 would undermine respect for the law. On the contrary, it will enhance respect for the law, because it will express in statutory form compassion for women who have the misfortune to suffer the loss of their baby at late term for whatever reason it occurs, and it will prevent intrusive, distressing police investigations at a most sensitive time in any woman’s life.

It has been suggested that there should be a balance in the law. Clause 208 already includes the necessary balance because it protects the woman but maintains the criminal liability of anyone who assists her to have a late-term abortion, whether it be the abusive partner, the rogue doctor or whoever it may be. That is right and proper, and that is the balance that should be accorded.

As a lawyer, I look for precedents. The precedent that occurs to me is the Suicide Act 1961, in which Parliament recognised that a person who had the misfortune to seek to take their own life should not be prosecuted. You cannot be prosecuted for attempting to end your own life. But the law says—I appreciate that we are currently debating the assisted dying Bill, but my speech has nothing to do with that—that if you assist a person to seek to take their own life, you can be prosecuted. That is the distinction there, and it is the distinction in Clause 208.

21:45

[Baroness O'Loan (CB)]

There is another distinction that the House may wish to consider: under the Suicide Act, it is not a crime to take your own life, but we are talking about taking the life of an unborn baby.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

Of course, the unborn baby, until it is born, has no legal identity. That is the law of the land. The unborn baby has no legal identity, and the mother is in the prime position in relation to that baby. We have to balance the interests of all concerned. My view is that Clause 208 does contain the balance that I have suggested to the House.

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, if we have to balance the needs and rights of all concerned, does that mean that an unborn child that is viable beyond 24 weeks has no rights and should not be considered here? Does it mean that it is only the rights of the mother that matter?

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

I am not commending late-term abortions. Nobody on either side of this debate is commending late-term abortions. The question addressed by Clause 208 is whether there should be a criminal liability: whether people should be investigated by the police and potentially sent to prison in those circumstances. That seems to me, with all due respect, to be the wrong balance. I say to the House that this is a very difficult issue, but I am afraid that those who oppose Clause 208 simply fail to recognise the arguments on the other side, which need to be balanced.

[Baroness Neate (CB)]

My Lords, as a former chief executive of Women’s Aid, I will specifically address the comments made about domestic abuse, particularly in relation to telemedicine. It is common for domestic abuse to begin in pregnancy, and it is common for all aspects of pregnancy, including conception, to be tools used by perpetrators of domestic abuse. That is why groups wishing to end violence against women and girls—domestic abuse groups, those who deal with so-called honour-based violence, those who deal with forced marriage, Rape Crisis and many others—have written to parliamentarians saying that creating clinically unnecessary barriers to abortion helps abusers, not survivors. I would really like noble Lords to take note of the fact that, in denying women discrete space for action, they are actually enabling abuse much more than they are preventing it.

[Baroness Hazarika (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendment 423A in my name would ask the police to cease investigations into women since the other House passed this vote back in June. Since June, in a number of cases women and mothers have been investigated. At Christmas, a woman in her 40s thought she was in her early pregnancy. She delivered a foetus in its gestation sac. She was very distressed. It turned out that that was actually at 24 weeks; she had not realised. She called the ambulance, and it was made clear that she had safeguarding issues. She was a victim of domestic violence. She had children. Then the police came. Her house was searched, including the Christmas presents for the children. It was incredibly distressing. The children had to leave the house. Many noble Baronesses here have talked, rightly, about the effects on the unborn child, but what about the children of the mothers who are taken away for investigation? So this is a very important addition to the other amendments. I very much support the amendment that the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, has tabled.

As the noble Lord, Lord Pannick said, I am sure that nobody, whatever side of this debate they sit on, thinks that anyone has a late-pregnancy abortion for the fun of it. No one is doing it to get some promotion at work or to get a late holiday—some of the excuses that we have heard suggested. This is an incredibly traumatic thing. Actually, I would say that an abortion at any time was an incredibly traumatic thing for a woman. I urge noble Lords to go, if they have not seen the Tracey Emin exhibition at the Tate; she speaks incredibly movingly but in a very harrowing way about her own lived experience of abortion. This is not something that is taken lightly.

For that small number of women who end up doing this at a late stage in their pregnancy, they are not doing it for the fun of it. They are often abused and often in situations of domestic violence; they are often from very marginalised communities, such as my own community—from the Muslim community, or from other more isolated communities. Many of them are from deprived backgrounds; they are not from nice families such as ours, where you can talk about these things. Many of them are told, by the way, that they do not know what is going on with their bodies, by their abusive partners or abusive parents, because coercive control does not just come from the husband or partner —it can come from within the family structure. They are not even told about their bodies; they are not given agency about their body—and they are told that if they dare to go to anyone for help, they will end up in prison, and here is the evidence. While I understand the concerns about coercion and care and making sure that we protect vulnerable women—it is very well intended—this could further push those very isolated women into situations that are ever more dangerous.

The final point that I want to make is that, whatever side of the divide we are on, we know that the police are really struggling with resources right now. We have had many conversations about how we do not think that police are investigating serious sexual assault against women and severe anti-social behaviour. Do we really want our police to be rifling through the bins of women who have just had a stillbirth? Do any of us think that that is a good use of time? Do we honestly want to see vulnerable women put in prison, when there are very few places in prison right now?

Finally, you cannot solve this problem by just prosecuting vulnerable women. I have had many conversations with people on the other side, and I understand that, as the Chief Whip said on our side, these views are profoundly and genuinely held by all of us. But I have heard the argument from people who say that, when the terrible thing happens and there is a late abortion, someone has to pay the price—someone has to go to prison. I would push that back. Throwing women, vulnerable women who have often been beaten and treated violently, into prison, is not the answer. Believe you me: these women need compassion, and their kids also need a mother, so that they do not fall into the patterns that lead to bad outcomes. If anyone thinks that these women need to be punished, trust me—what they will have gone through is punishment enough, which will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, I shall speak to the amendment in my name, Amendment 426D. I start by thanking the Minister for meeting me a couple of weeks ago to discuss this matter—and I want to be direct at the outset about what the amendment would do and would not do.

The amendment is distinct from Amendment 425, which stands on its own merits, and which your Lordships will consider on its own terms. This amendment says nothing about adult women’s access to abortion, nothing about where medication is taken and nothing about the broader questions that have been part of our debate up till now. It rests entirely on one safeguarding principle—that when a child is the patient, a professional should meet her before prescribing. I believe that that is something that your Lordships can support, regardless of the views that you hold on everything else before the House today.

The amendment is brought on behalf of the National Network of Designated Healthcare Professionals for Children—NHS doctors and nurses who carry statutory safeguarding responsibilities for children across every local safeguarding partnership in England. Its concern is that the needs of children, particularly looked-after children who become pregnant, are not sufficiently accounted for in this clause. Since 2022, a girl of 14 can telephone an abortion service, receive medication by post, take it at home, and no clinician will ever meet her. How does that give confidence that safeguarding risks are being properly assessed? How does the provider of medication know whether there is someone else in the room when they speak to the child on the phone? How do they know whether someone else has suggested that the child should make the phone call? Surely the only safe way to assess risk is to meet in person.

The noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, says that telemedicine is safe. I fully respect her experience in this field and, in many situations, I would agree, but in the case of children, of which I note she made no mention in her speech, I believe she is wrong. Telemedicine is not safe for children.

[Baroness Gerada (CB)]

Is the right reverend Prelate aware that coercion can also occur in the consultation room, as I have seen many times? It may actually be safer for the girl—or the child, as he is calling her—to be able to choose the place and the time where she has that consultation.

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

I am very aware that there are risks to all forms of consultation. My argument is simply that the risks are minimised by in-person consultation.

The considered view of safeguarding professionals in the NNDHP is that the current guidance put in place by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health in 2022 is simply not robust enough. That guidance, I note, requires an in-person meeting for children under 13. Children under 16 are,

“normally … required to complete their consultation in-person, unless there is a compelling indication to do otherwise”.

Evidence, however, suggests that most providers of abortion care are arguing that the option of telemedicine itself is a compelling indication that an in-person consultation is not required. For those aged 16 or 17, the guidance says only that children—and, of course, 16 and 17-year-olds are still children under the Children Act—should “be encouraged” to attend in person. More fundamentally, guidance can currently be changed unilaterally, without parliamentary scrutiny or public consultation, at the discretion of the body that issued it. I believe, therefore, that legislation is required. What Parliament enacts, only Parliament can remove.

The case for this amendment, however, does not rest on my view or the NNDHP’s alone. The Government’s own consultation found that safeguarding organisations specifically identified under-18s as the group for whom in-person assessment was most critical to reduce the risk from those who sexually exploit children, manipulate the system or force their victims to obtain abortion. Indeed, MSI Reproductive Choices has documented that face-to-face appointments are associated with a significant increase in domestic abuse disclosures compared with telemedicine. This is especially significant given that girls and young women face a higher risk of coercive or abusive relationships than those aged over 24, and are often less equipped to ask for help.

The clinical risks compound this. Beyond 11 weeks’ gestation, home management is not appropriate and the risks to the patient increase significantly. As has been mentioned, accurate gestational age assessment is the foundation on which safe prescribing depends, and it cannot be done reliably by telephone. These are not theoretical risks. We have heard stories already. I would simply add that of a 16 year-old who was estimated by the clinic to be under eight weeks pregnant, but the baby she delivered was in fact 20 weeks. She later said, “If they had scanned me and I knew that I was that far gone, I would have had him”. An in-person appointment would have changed everything for that young woman. This amendment would require such an appointment.

I echo the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, in her amendment. Without an in-person consultation, it is unclear how we will ensure that early medical abortions take place within the law. Indeed, challenges around vulnerability and correct gestational assessment apply to adulthood as well, which is why I fully support Amendment 425.

22:00

Although I have been assured that abortion providers will remain subject to the criminal law if Clause 208 is passed, it is hard to see how this will make a meaningful difference in the case of early medical abortion, since providers who carry out telephone assessments will have met the standard of due diligence required of them. My amendment offers a reminder that the needs of children and young people should be paramount in our thinking and in that of all who work with them, including abortion providers. My amendment asks for one proportionate safeguard: that when a child is the patient, a medical professional meets her before prescribing. I invite noble Lords to consider whether that is really too much to ask.

[Baroness Hollins (CB)]

My Lords, I had prepared a longer speech but I will speak very briefly as most of the points that I wanted to make have been made. Of course, I do not want to see women unduly prosecuted, but I was reassured by the wise remarks in Committee of my noble friend Lord Hogan-Howe, suggesting that the adaptation of police protocols was more suitable than the change in the law proposed by Clause 208. I support Amendments 424 and 425, as indeed do many doctors, including some among the numbers mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, of obstetricians.

One point, perhaps, has not been raised, which concerns the mental health of women who may be isolated. I am concerned about the possibility that home use, in relative isolation, of a self-induced later abortion may increase the emotional intensity and mental health consequences for some women, particularly if she has limited support or medical complications, which are of course much more common in later abortion. Safeguard support and informed consent become much more critical as gestation advances and care shifts away from in-person supervision. I am not convinced by this clause; it just has not had the depth of thought and preparation required to really understand the complexity of what is being proposed. I ask Members to err on the side of caution and to support the amendments that I have spoken about.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 426C and thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Falkner, Lady Spielman and Lady Lawlor, for their support. I will also speak in support of Amendment 422E, to which I have added my name.

Before explaining why we have tabled Amendment 426C, I give a little context. Like, I am sure, all other noble Lords, I have received a great deal of correspondence on Clause 208. One thing repeatedly said by proponents is that, apart from decriminalising all instances of maternal abortion, nothing would change. The Fawcett Society, for example, says that apart from this one change, the Abortion Act 1967 would continue to operate as it always has. However, I think this is quite mistaken. We are not tidying up a small drafting error here; we are making a fundamental change to the law. When you make a fundamental change to the law, you change perceptions and behaviour, and it has knock-on effects.

We have heard, for example, that there has been a marked change in the number of investigations related to abortion. We have also learned—the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, alluded to this—that the changes are a bit more complicated than we might have thought. There has been an increase in the number of investigations related to procuring illegal abortion offences, but at the same time there has been a decrease in the number of investigations for intentional destruction of a viable unborn child. For example, there were seven investigations of intentional destruction of a viable unborn child in 2025, compared with 18 in 2023. Only one person, a male, was proceeded against in the most recent year. Clearly, something is going on but, equally clearly, it seems to be a little more complicated than we might think and the Government do not really know. To repeat the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, made, it is not possible to determine how many investigations there have been that relate to women, including women acting in relation to their pregnancy.

Alongside that we have had another major change, about which we have already heard a great deal this evening, in Committee and at Second Reading, and that is the arrival on the scene of abortifacient pills. They have completely changed the profile of abortion, including whether the foetus is dead before it is delivered. It is not just about telemedicine but about pills by post, which have become much more easily available, not simply within this country but increasingly across country boundaries.

The noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, and others have discussed consultations by pregnant women, and we have had some discussion of whether these should or should not all be in person. Our Amendment 426C has a rather different focus. It would create a new crime of obtaining abortifacients, which for the moment are pills, by false representation. To explain why this is desirable, I will say a bit more about the case of Stuart Worby, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, referred.

In 2025, Stuart Worby was found guilty of poisoning his pregnant wife by administering abortion medication without her knowledge or consent. She very much wanted the baby she was carrying and he did not. A female associate of Worby’s procured the drugs through an online consultation in which she claimed early pregnancy and was duly prescribed and sent the pills. Worby gave his wife the drugs without her knowledge. She suffered a devastating miscarriage and the government website summarising the case notes that she is left unable to bear children. The victim of Worby’s act was not investigated when she miscarried. The crime came to light only when she found messages on her husband’s phone and went to the police.

In another recent case in Scotland the abortion was procured by a paramedic who injected his partner without her knowledge. Again, she was not investigated; the crime only came to light indirectly. There may be many other cases like this, but it is possible and becoming easier to obtain these pills—

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

No, I am going to continue. I agree with the Chief Whip on this; we should just keep going.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

I took a number of interventions.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

That was your choice. I am going to follow instructions.

It is becoming easier to obtain these pills not least because of the balkanisation of American states on abortion issues, which has also turbocharged the use of pills in the United States. If, as seems likely, obtaining and administering an abortifacient without consent is going to increase, then we think there is a good reason to make this a clearly defined offence. Our amendment is drafted in consultation with some experienced KCs based on existing fraud law.

I realise that there will be an obvious objection, which is that there is existing legislation, but as the Government Ministers themselves have made clear when introducing specific legislation to cover retail workers, the fact that there may be legislation is not necessarily a compelling argument against creating a new, clear offence. Sometimes the legislature may want to go further to inform, to highlight particular risks, and to clarify the law in new situations, which is what we are in in this case.

We have drafted this amendment on the assumption that Clause 208 stands, because you have to have to make an assumption, but the fact that it was so difficult to do this, that it is so unsatisfactory and that, if we went forward, we or the Government would have to redraft in the light of what does or does not happen to Clause 208 makes it clear that we are in an unsatisfactory situation. We are making law on the hoof when what is needed is a really good look at the situation we are in and the way that the changes that we might introduce would impact on other behaviour, so that we could take a coherent, holistic view of whether abortion law needs to be rethought.

In that context, I return to Amendment 422E. The first rule of good policy-making is to be clear about the problem. I do not think we are. Amendment 422E therefore proposes an alternative to the unscheduled and unexpected introduction of the sweeping changes in Clause 208. It would require the personal consent of the DPP for an investigation, with a tight time limit. It would address the distressing situations that we have heard about and it would leave us time to discuss properly what changes could usefully be made to current law. It would also ensure that any change that occurred fulfilled the objectives of those who proposed and support Clause 208. I am really concerned at this pulling something out.

I have two final, quick points. Many people will say that lots of other countries have decriminalised, but that does not mean they have a situation that would be exactly like ours if we passed Clause 208. Whether you have full decriminalisation exists in a whole set of different situations, and it certainly does not mean that those countries allow abortion at full term by mothers. The second point is that it is perfectly possible to have a review. The Scots have just done so. They have had a thorough review. One may or may not like what they have done, but that is what we should be doing. Given where we are, I commend my amendment to the House and strongly commend a compromise that would give us time. I hope that the Government are listening to the degree of concern over this and considering whether they might, in the near future, do something serious on this issue.

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I wonder whether noble Lords are aware, in spite of what we have heard from some noble Lords, that more than 50 countries around the world, including 29 in Europe, do not criminalise women under abortion law. Going back to the noble Baroness’s comments about Northern Ireland, telemedicine was voted on as lawful by our very House.

[Baroness O’Loan (CB)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

I am sorry, so many Cross-Benchers have just been speaking. I sincerely hope that I can finish my point. I have been waiting ever so patiently.

I agree with my noble friend Lady Hazarika, and I wish to make my comments in the spirit, as she said, of understanding that there are people with very different views across the House. I respect those views, so I hope to be heard similarly.

National and international women’s rights and health groups are proactively calling for decriminalisation in the UK and beyond. That is in addition to the other place—our elected representatives—overwhelmingly voting in support of decriminalisation. I wonder whether we believe that every one of those respected organisations is wrong, that only a section of this House is right and that the other place is wrong. I would find it difficult to ally myself with those who oppose the decriminalisation of abortion.

On Amendment 423A, to which I put my name, along with the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and my noble friend Lady Hazarika, I do not know whether noble Lords have read the excellent article in the Guardian today by Hannah Al-Othman. She has done some extensive research about a number of harrowing cases, one of which was referred to by my noble friend Lady Hazarika, of women being arrested in their hospital bed. Is it seriously the case that we as a House want that situation to continue? The Centre for Women’s Justice has detailed a number of cases that are truly dreadful.

I also support the telemedicine provisions; they seem humane and are also lawful in Northern Ireland. I am not going to say any more. I strongly support decriminalisation and strongly oppose the amendments that other noble Lords have spoken to.

22:15

[Baroness O’Loan (CB)]

Before the noble Baroness sits down, is she aware that there are no telemedicine abortifacients available in Northern Ireland? It is not lawful.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I wanted to sound really definitive in saying that I oppose Amendment 424 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, which would remove Clause 208, and that I oppose Amendments 425 and 426D. However, the good thing about this place is that I listened to the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf of Dulwich—about whom I am going to say something wonderful. She made me pause and think, and that is what is really useful about this debate. I am absolutely certain on some things, but I am not quite sure about the tangle of amendments that have been proposed. I am therefore going to carry on and voice some of my concerns.

To give a bit of context, abortion in the UK is a safe, normal and common procedure. It is appreciated by women because, when facing an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy, it allows them a legal choice on whether to be a mother—a decision that will alter the whole course of their life. The fact that a third of women in the UK will have a legal and safe abortion at some point in their life—the vast majority of which will happen early on—shows how careful we have to be not to allow this rather fraught, heated and emotional debate impose any unintended barriers to that success story for women’s freedom and rights. I am afraid that some of the well-meaning compromises we have heard about tonight would likely do that. I am particularly worried about undermining telemedicine and pills by post.

I want to reflect on time limits. Many of us will have received a tsunami of emails and letters urging us to oppose Clause 208, stressing emotively—and factually inaccurately—that this clause will legalise abortion until birth, and that that amounts to the state-sanctioned killing of babies, as someone explained to me. We have to restate for the public that this clause does not change the limits for abortion. There is still a 24-week abortion time limit. In fact, abortion itself remains a crime, just as it has been since 1968, unless very stringent conditions are met. I stress again that any medical professional, or anyone else, who assists a woman to get an abortion beyond the legal limit of 24 weeks will be committing a serious crime and will be liable for prosecution.

We have to understand the public backlash, because there is unease about the whole issue of abortion until birth, and time limits per se. As a society, or indeed as a Parliament, we may want to revisit the issue at some stage. For many, the 24-week legal time limit based on viability can feel too arbitrary, especially as surely we all want medical science to make great strides in keeping prematurely born babies alive ever earlier for those women who want their children, but that should not limit the rights of those women who do not want to proceed with their pregnancy.

There are moral issues here about human life—that old chestnut of whether human life starts at conception or birth. There are those who stress that we should focus on the unborn child—we have heard a fair amount of that tonight. They say that, when we talk about more developed foetuses, we are talking about an unborn child, and that the heart that can be seen beating on an ultrasound scan at six weeks is just as much that of an unborn child as one that beats five months later. Is gestational growth a useful guide to the law? Is viability the best guide to what makes us human?

Such difficult discussions should not be shied away from. When you go out and talk to the public about this subject, they talk about time limits and these kinds of issues. Certainly, at the Academy of Ideas, where we work with young people, we consider it is our duty to organise such debates regularly to ensure that new generations rightly ask questions and hear all sides of the argument.

However, Clause 208 is not trying to relitigate the legal time limit debate, even though I welcome the fuller debate we have had tonight. It is important that we acknowledge why it has caused a furore. It removes the threat of criminalisation for a tiny number of women who, for whatever reason, have taken abortion pills to terminate their own pregnancy, but we have to be honest and acknowledge that it brings a risk of abuse—I know that, even though I am supporting it. The notion that decriminalisation will mean that women will gleefully go on a crime spree because it is decriminalised—suggesting that it is only the threat of prosecution that stops women from letting their pregnancies progress carelessly so they can inflict on themselves the horror of self-induced full-term termination —seems far-fetched and lacking in generosity. Legal late abortions are not harmful per se; certainly, they are not more harmful than coercing an unwilling woman to endure a full-time pregnancy and labour against her will.

However, it is also true that late abortions are undoubtedly gruelling for both patient and clinician, which is why the idea that any woman would choose that as an easy or casual option is far-fetched, ludicrous and insulting. The earlier an abortion can be performed, the better it is for women, and that is the reality of the perspective we need for this debate. In 2022, the last year for which figures are available, almost a quarter of a million women in England and Wales had abortions. Almost 90% of those were under 10 weeks and only 1% were at 20 weeks or over. We are not talking about everybody having late abortions or queuing up to have them.

The emergence of telemedicine has allowed access to even earlier abortion. Surely one of the few positives that emerged out of Covid, 2020 and the lockdown was that it changed the abortion regulations to allow medication in early pregnancy to be taken at home. While it is easier, early medical abortion is certainly not a free-for-all or unregulated—it is not like getting a pharmacist to okay your access to Wegovy or Ozempic. It remains regulated under the 1967 Act, which is a hyper-regulated piece of legislation that includes speaking to a doctor and so on. The limit remains at 10 weeks and nothing in Clause 208 changes that. What is positive about pills by post is that it cuts down on the dreaded waiting list times, which means that treatment can be earlier. An insistence on face-to-face appointments, as some of the amendments suggest, would tangle up early abortions in delay, which would undermine the success of 40% of abortions by telemedical methods now being performed at six weeks, versus 25% using traditional access methods.

Finally, one of the arguments used against telemedicine is that it could lead to non-consensual coerced abortions, with abusive men, or even abusive parents, forcing young, vulnerable women to abort. I was glad to hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Neate, about the issue in relation to domestic abuse. Clause 208 does not change the law on this non-consensual coerced abortion. Non-consensual coerced abortion at any gestation remains illegal and is a crime.

However, it is key to note that since telemedicine became legal there has been a major increase in safeguarding disclosures, especially by young women who have felt able to talk about being victims of domestic abuse or sexual violence precisely because they are doing it remotely. It has allowed abortion providers to offer invaluable pastoral intervention beyond abortion services. Telemedicine also enables those vulnerable to coercion to avoid their abusers being involved in the deliberations about their desperate plight of being pregnant.

I will just finish by addressing the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester. There are many young girls—I appreciate that they are children—from traditional religious communities. Think of the young Catholic girl, the young Muslim girl and so on, as well as those at risk of honour-based violence. Those kinds of young people actually do not need to be asking their dad to drop them round at the clinic so they can get advice. They are sometimes dependent on other people. With telemedicine, they can go with privacy and talk at their own chosen time and place, without having to answer back to a parent or an abusive partner. In other words, telemedicine offers privacy and can help women stay safe.

[Noble Lords]

Time!

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

I have finished. That was it.

[Baroness Gerada (CB)]

My Lords—

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord McCrea of Magherafelt and Cookstown (DUP)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords—

[Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms and Chief Whip (Lord Kennedy of Southwark) (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, can we please take the temperature down and respect the Clock? There are 10 minutes for Back-Bench contributions. Of course, many people want to get in, but please take the temperature down—there is no need to constantly interrupt others. Everyone can speak. We will come to the Cross Benches first and then go to the noble Baroness opposite.

[Baroness Gerada (CB)]

My Lords, I would like to pick up some of the safeguarding issues around telemedicine that have been mentioned in the House. To put things in context briefly, I have been a GP now for nearly 40 years, and over the past five years I have been conducting many remote consultations.

First, you can assess safeguarding issues remotely. A paper was published in 2025—very recently—on young girls under 16. More than 600 young girls were involved in the study. It found that 100% of the safeguarding issues—some of these girls then had to be seen face to face—were identified remotely. The conclusion, which is very short, states:

“Requiring in-person adolescent consultation is associated with reduced access to medication abortion without enhancing safeguarding”.


We do want to work with evidence. You might think it is safer to consult face to face, but the evidence shows that it is not safer: it can actually make it more harmful.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Baroness Gerada (CB)]

Well, the evidence is there. You either believe in evidence or anecdotes.

The second issue is about ultrasounds. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence does not recommend ultrasounds for judging gestational age, unless there are problems: for example, if a woman’s menstrual cycle is long or if there are other issues. Again, we have to go by the evidence: not what we think or feel, what we read in the papers or what we discuss with our friends.

I will also comment on assessing competence in younger children under 16. The noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor, has an amendment about mental capacity. I am sure that she is aware that the Mental Capacity Act cannot be used in relation to under-16s. Therefore, the noble Baroness’s amendment, if passed, would automatically mean that a 16 year-old would be prosecuted if she had no mental capacity, yet a 17 year-old could use that Act. So it is a nonsense amendment in that respect.

I fully support Clause 208 and I urge the House—on humane reasons, on competence and capacity, and, moreover, on evidence—to support it.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendment 424, tabled my noble friend Lady Monckton, and Amendment 426C, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf. I have put my name to both amendments. I will be brief.

Despite the careful unpacking in Committee of the human and legal problems that Clause 208 will create, no amendments have been put down that address them. As we know, there have been no impact assessments and no public consultation, though third-party polling shows a very large majority opposed to abortion up to the point of birth. No effort has been made to gain insight into the extent to which the existing telemedicine scheme is abused, as its laxness means it must inevitably be to some extent. The lack of real answers to the questions asked in Committee make it all too clear that the Government intend to keep their eyes closed and ears stoppered to shut out evidence of abuses. Sadly, some, though not all, of the medical profession also find it easier not to think about the lives of unborn children, no matter how close to birth.

The status quo is, therefore, profoundly unsatisfactory. If this clause is passed, it will signal to all women that there is zero risk to them personally in abusing the telemedicine scheme or procuring an illegal abortion in another way. So, of course, abuses will increase—that is how humans respond to bad incentives—and each abuse is likely to mean that a viable child is killed with impunity. I recognise that, despite the obvious risks that the clause introduces, it is tempting to support it in order to feel good about yourself and show that you are someone who really cares about women—but this requires suppressing all thoughts of children’s lives.

22:30

The language of reproductive rights and healthcare is used, but the word “healthcare” has lost all meaning if it extends to a woman who cynically kills a baby shortly before birth to suit her own convenience or, perhaps, her family’s preferences. If abortion were merely healthcare, we would not have abortion law. The framing of healthcare, I am afraid, conveniently spares people from facing both the agonising moral conflicts involved in late abortion, and also the consequences of bad policies. Those who use this language would prefer that the cost in human lives goes unmentioned. They are not interested in, and do not want to plan for, the kind of serious monitoring that is needed to understand the brutal arithmetic that would reveal itself in future if and when the price of being kind to women wanting late abortions is just too high; the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury recognised this deficiency in her remarks.

We also know that the progressive urge always to find new frontiers at which one can prove one’s superior compassion is never satisfied. This is evident in many policy areas, not just abortion, and in many countries, not just England. If this clause is enacted, it is obvious where the next push will come. We will be told by the same people that it is cruel for a woman in late pregnancy to have to abort on her own, without access to the full range of drugs and clinical procedures and without support, and that all of these things must, therefore, be decriminalised—at which point we will have no abortion law at all.

That is why, as someone who broadly supports current abortion law, I am none the less appalled by this clause. If it stands, I believe that the mitigations offered by Amendments 422E, 425, 426, 426C and 426D would represent the bare minimum of a framework of sensible control. I would add that decriminalisation and telemedicine simply should not coexist. As the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, explained so clearly, the case for Clause 208 simply has not been made, and by far the best solution today will be to leave it out entirely.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, I say to my noble friends who will try to come in shortly that we have had a reasonably long debate on this group and we had a very long debate in Committee. I have begun to hear calls for the Front Benches. I offer the House a reminder that this is Report: the stage when we vote to make decisions. I hope that we can quickly begin to move on to hear from the Front Benches.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful that the Chief Whip will offer me the chance to speak for a couple of minutes. We have always agreed that this is an expert House, and it helps to make sure that legislation is best addressed by expertise where it can be. One of the things we might want to consider in this debate is that there are at least two Members of this House who have given at least 100 years in total to the management of people having terminations of pregnancy —so we do know quite a lot about it. There is also a large number of people who have not spoken who are fellows of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, who I think have been rather insulted by some of the things they have heard today because they do not represent the views of most members.

Having said that, I just want to say two things very simply. I firmly believe in decriminalisation. There is a great deal of misapprehension, as was just shown by the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman. The fact of the matter is that you cannot induce a pregnancy close to term. In fact, I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Patel, will agree with me that it is virtually impossible to induce labour in a woman who does not have ruptured membranes at term with drugs. It just does not work. In fact, both he and I—numerous times, if I am not wrong—have been faced with caesarean sections that we did not want to do as the only way we could get a baby out of the womb when it was in danger. We could not use drugs to induce labour, because they do not work. That certainly applies to pills but even to drugs given intravenously. It is therefore important to understand that a termination of a pregnancy conducted by a woman herself will be an extremely rare event. It would be very difficult, and the idea that pills will work is nonsensical.

Moreover, we have heard a lot about pills, but nobody has told us yet what pills they are talking about. That is very important. The hormones that are usually used in early pregnancy would not work in late pregnancy. The other thing I have already mentioned is that pretty well all late terminations of pregnancy are done for very serious medical conditions. One of the commonest ones is where there is an extremely deformed baby in the womb. I described this during the earlier stages of the Bill, and I will not go through it again. The indications of these late pregnancies are always very carefully and scrupulously observed. They are not done lightly.

I should also add that, sadly, babies born much after 24 weeks still are very likely to be highly abnormal. Even though people often miscarry them when they do not want to, sometimes it can be the very best thing that can happen because these babies will eventually die early with very severe abnormalities.

Recently, the noble Lord, Lord Patel, chaired a committee on this very issue to see how we could reduce the number of premature births. It is a big problem in medicine because of the risks to the babies when they are born after 28 weeks. I shall say no more except that I firmly believe we should really try to understand this from the woman’s point of view. No woman tries to interrupt her pregnancy except with the deepest grief and the deepest unhappiness.

[Lord McCrea of Magherafelt and Cookstown (DUP)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords—

[Noble Lords]

Front Bench!

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

We will have a short intervention, but we need to move on shortly to the Front Benches. That is what the House wants, I believe.

[Lord McCrea of Magherafelt and Cookstown (DUP)]

My Lords, throughout this debate Northern Ireland has been mentioned, yet not one Member from Northern Ireland has been allowed to speak until now. We have had to force the issue to be allowed to speak in this debate. When the new abortion laws, the most liberal and extreme laws in the United Kingdom, were forced on Northern Ireland, few across this House really cared. The lobby for abortion in Northern Ireland was on the basis that women there had fewer rights than in England and Wales. Now that same lobby is using the same arguments for a change in the law in England and Wales. In the previous debate, it was suggested that this would bring England and Wales into line with Northern Ireland, but that is misleading as, crucially, Northern Ireland does not have pills by post.

I genuinely believe that even many of those who support abortion know in their hearts that this is not the way to go about things. This hurried parliamentary process, the rewriting of one of the most sensitive and serious areas of criminal law, is surely unworthy of our democracy. A clause passed in the other House last summer was passed after 46 minutes of Back-Bench debate. Is that what our democracy has come to? If noble Lords think that this is a good idea, why are they not prepared to allow public consultation and pre-legislative scrutiny, instead of rushing it through?

Clause 208 means no justice for the death of a full-term unborn child, even in the most grotesque circumstances. I ask supporters of Clause 208: what would you do if a woman told you that she was taking abortion pills, perhaps obtained from an NHS provider via telemedicine, in the 39th week of pregnancy because she had changed her mind about having a child? What would your conscience say to you, knowing that you made that possible through the support of this legislation?

We heard a great deal about unwelcome investigations, but what do supporters of Clause 208 think the police should do if they discover the dead body of a 39 week-old baby in a rubbish bin? The noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, explained in Committee that investigations would often still be required even if Clause 208 passes, as police would need to investigate the circumstances if a deceased full-term baby body is found away from a clinical setting. Is that the option that supporters of Clause 208 really believe in?

To conclude, I could give many reasons why I support Amendments 425 and 426 but, because of time, I am not able to do so. Let us remember that when we are talking about the life of an unborn child, we are talking about not an it but a real, living person with the expectation of being born, being protected by a caring and loving society, and being held in loving arms. I do not think that is too much for a child to ask or expect.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

We need to move on to the Front Benches.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I am the first speaker from these Benches. For us, this is a matter of conscience. My noble friend Lady Smith of Newnham has not had the opportunity to speak. She disagrees with me. She is supportive of the other side. She wished for me to mention that she has been contacted by a young student called Lily, who has contacted a number of other Peers to say that they share her point of view. I hope that Lily and my noble friend will hear that we have acknowledged their sincerely held views, which are very different from mine.

[Baroness O’Loan (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, and I have been trying to speak. The noble Baroness has an amendment down. It is not good enough that we are being silenced at a time when the House is being asked to vote to approve something that has not been properly discussed or explored, and the consequences have not been fully considered. It is not good.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I do have an amendment, Amendment 423A, which other noble Lords have signed. It is to ask that prosecutions cease and desist. The reason for it is that we have uncovered over these past few months that different police forces are taking entirely different approaches under the current law, and that women and health professionals do not know where they stand. I refer to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, and to the speech of our noble colleague who is the chair of the College of Policing, about the fact that there needs to be a clear policy direction from Parliament in order that we can have a consistent approach throughout the medical profession and throughout policing.

22:45

I also question some of the statistics that people have put forward. I listened to the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, who said that there are very few actual prosecutions, but what did not come across from her statistics is that for every prosecution, we know that 10 women are arrested and subjected to very lengthy investigations. That is in part why this clause has come about.

I thank all the noble Lords who came along to the many briefings put on by the royal colleges, and particularly those Peers who came along with searching questions and who listened to what the professionals had to say. Those really searching questions helped me, apart from anything else, to sort out what I think are the two major issues and the two major reasons why we should have Clause 208.

This goes back to 1961 and that decision to decriminalise suicide. Then, as now, there had been years of debate on a very contentious subject. There had been big debates within the churches, and people wrestled with profound thoughts. At the end of the day, they came to a decision that decriminalising suicide was the right thing to do.

When we were discussing this matter in Committee, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, as ever, raised the key question: what will happen if we do not continue to criminalise women who do this? We have two lots of evidence that we can point to. One line of evidence goes back to what happened after 1961: there was no significant increase in suicide in this country. The noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor, said that when you change the law, you change the behaviour, but the evidence for that is not there.

We also have the evidence from those different jurisdictions, everywhere from New Zealand to the state of Texas, where they have decriminalised abortion. There has been no significant increase. There are still a very few desperate people who will do something that none of us can actually contemplate, and the reason that we and a range of professionals have come forward with this measure is to make sure that those desperate people get into contact with the medical professions and do not wind up in the criminal justice system, where no good comes to them or to anybody else.

That takes me to a point that the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, made—his speech in Committee has been referenced quite a lot. He talked extensively about a situation where a police officer comes across a woman and there is a dead child; they have to secure it as a crime scene and have to make sure that they build the correct prosecution. That would be plausible if it were what a police officer always did in every case where they believed that a crime had taken place, but they do not. Taking class A drugs is a crime. If a police officer shows up and somebody has overdosed, they do not do that—they work with the medical profession to try to make sure that that person gets the right care and attention in the hope that they can stop it happening again. That is what every professional whom we have spoken to has said, and we have spoken to many over the last few months.

I say to the right reverend Prelate that I do not for one moment doubt his intentions, but the professionals say, “They won’t come. They just won’t come. They won’t come and talk to us, and if we can’t do it on the phone, we’ll never get to them and will never be able to help them”. When other professionals tell us, “Yes, we can tell when somebody’s been trafficked; we can tell when somebody’s been coerced; we’ve found them through telemedicine”, I am afraid I cannot support his amendment, no matter the great intention behind it.

The noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, said that her amendment was necessary for compromise, and she cited a number of cases in which men had been prosecuted. Those men who had coerced women would still be prosecuted under Clause 208, so I am afraid that her argument falls.

For 10 years, people like me have worked hard to raise these issues. Please do not insult the House of Commons; it has debated Bills from other MPs in overtime, and it has given this quite considerable consideration. They get postbags too; they are not immune to them. They took that decision because they listened to the advice of the professionals, and they listened to the evidence that we have been able to gather over a long time and from a number of places. They did it to protect women; they stood up for women, and it is time for us to do the same.

[Lord Cameron of Lochiel (Con)]

My Lords, once again we have had a full and passionate debate on a matter of the utmost significance. It is apparent, from both deliberations in Committee and from today, that views on this matter are deeply and sincerely held across your Lordships’ House.

A wide range of points have been raised by noble Lords. Let us consider a variety of them. We have heard about issues around how the police investigate cases, about the interaction of telemedicine and criminal investigation, about the potential for women to face coercion, about issues of safeguarding of younger women and about issues of domestic abuse—to name but a few mentioned tonight. A lot of ground has not yet been covered. Other noble Lords have not yet spoken or have wanted to speak but have not been able to. What this tells us is that the matter is very far from settled. Some noble Lords’ concerns have plainly not been allayed.

This brings me back to the point I made in Committee. This clause has not received anything like adequate scrutiny. It is true that we have now had several hours of debate on this matter in your Lordships’ House. The point I made before, however, still stands: it is a matter of procedure, not substance. In the other place, however, this clause was considered for only 46 minutes of Back-Bench debate. No parliamentary committee has been able to seek views and take evidence, and if ever there was the need for a parliamentary committee to take evidence on a policy, this is it. We need to hear from and test the views of the police, of the CPS, of doctors, of obstetricians, of safeguarders and, if possible and most importantly, of women or their representatives and advocates. This policy was not in the Government’s election manifesto. It has not been subject to pre-legislative scrutiny, public consultation, or an impact assessment. The noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, put it very well in Committee. She said that the clause was passed

“in the other place following a very brief and truncated debate, entirely incommensurate with the gravity of its impact”.—[Official Report, 2/2/26; col. 1336.]

Changes to the law of abortion are and remain issues of conscience. The Opposition do not and will not take an official position on the substance of the clause. There is a multitude of views in my own party, and the issue is in the hands of your Lordships’ House as a matter of conscience. But that does not mean that we are released from our duty to undertake due diligence and rigorous interrogation of the consequences of changing the social law of this country. Whatever one thinks of the substance of the issue itself, the truth is that this clause has been tacked on to the side of a Crime and Policing Bill when it should not have been. That is no way to make law.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Baroness Levitt) (Lab)]

My Lords, I will be as brief as I can. I shall start, as I did in Committee, by reiterating that the Government maintain a neutral stance on abortion in England and Wales. Many of the amendments in this group are similar or identical to those tabled in Committee. So, save in a very few cases, I shall not repeat the Government’s assessment of their workability. This means that if I do not explicitly mention an amendment, it is either because there are no workability issues or because I set them out fully in Committee. As a shorthand, I will refer to conduct that comes under Sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, and under the Infant Life (Preservation) Act, collectively as “abortion offences”.

I begin with Amendment 423ZA tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor. It is unclear how this amendment is intended to work in practice—in particular, which party would bear the burden of establishing a lack of mental capacity and what the standard of proof would be. Thus, it is possible that it would create confusion for practitioners. Your Lordships may wish to note that the law already takes account of defendants’ understanding of their actions in various ways. It is unclear how this amendment is intended to interact with well-established criminal law principles.

Amendment 422E, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, is similar to that tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, in Committee, but it contains an additional requirement that a prosecution could not be brought any later than 12 months from the date of the alleged offence. Your Lordships will be aware that, other than for summary-only offences, there is, almost without exception, no statutory time limit for prosecuting criminal offences in England and Wales. The reason for that is that evidence may emerge over several years, so a limitation period would remove the ability to prosecute in cases where evidence of guilt came to light much later on. The introduction of a limitation period could lead to differences in outcomes depending on when evidence becomes available, the complexity of the case and the resources of investigating and prosecuting authorities.

Amendment 423, in the name of the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, is similar to the one he tabled in Committee, but it differs in three respects: it would broaden the scope of the specified defences; it would make provision for who must bear burden of proof in relation to those defences; and it would introduce additional provisions relating to police investigations. In relation to the workability concerns I raised in Committee, for the second and third of these differences there are some further issues. In relation to the burden of proof, the drafting is ambiguous. If the intention is that the defendant should bear the evidential burden, clarification would be needed. In relation to the proposed new provisions for police investigations, your Lordships may wish to note that decisions on whether to initiate, and the scope of such an investigation, are currently operational matters for the police.

Amendment 423A, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, is also similar to one tabled in Committee. While the Government remain neutral on changing the criminal law, it is important that investigations into other offences, such as murder, manslaughter or infanticide under the Infanticide Act, are still carried out. Those offences would continue to be investigated and prosecuted by the Crown Prosecution Service if the test for prosecution is met. Your Lordships may wish to note that this amendment would be likely to trigger a review of any live investigations and prosecutions. However, we would not expect this to carry any significant resourcing implications.

Amendment 426C, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf of Dulwich, is again similar to an amendment tabled in Committee. It might be helpful to remind your Lordships of the point that I made then, namely that the proposed new offence is not limited to obtaining abortifacient drugs for use in the termination of a pregnancy. Abortifacient drugs are not defined in legislation and are also used for non-abortion-related purposes. In addition, further amendments would be needed to clarify whether the offence was one that is to be triable either way, whether the maximum penalty on conviction on indictment should be the same as that on summary conviction and whether the maximum penalty in the magistrates’ court should align with its general powers, which update automatically should the limits on its sentencing powers change in the future.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

I would be grateful for clarification as to whether the Government have considered their own current inquiries into the grooming gangs. There was evidence there that:

“Victims and survivors were also critical about how easy it can be to obtain emergency contraception or abortion services without appropriate questions being asked”.


This evidence has been relied on consistently in Committee and on Report, yet there are concerns. Have the Government looked at that?

Secondly, in relation to the case that I mentioned in Committee, which contradicts much of what has been said, the comments of His Honour Mr Justice Cooke in Leeds Crown Court, in the case of Sarah Catt, very clearly state that this was a “cold calculated” decision that she took for her own convenience and self-interest. She took pills at 39 weeks and gave birth, and it seems she never revealed where the body was. She had a history of deceit and concealment—that is in the judgment of Leeds Crown Court. So have the Government considered, also in relation to other amendments about pardons, that this was conduct not of a victim but of a woman who perpetrated a crime?

Finally—

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

It was a crime, and she was given eight years in prison for that.

On the question about the offences that the judge also considered—murder, manslaughter and infanticide —I emailed the Minister about the clarification I asked for in Committee on guidance being given to emergency services that may come across a situation such as that outlined in Sarah Catt. What is their obligation to the woman and the child?

23:00

[Baroness Levitt (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her points, which I am sure your Lordships’ House will want to take into account when deciding whether, as a matter of policy, to vote for or against the various amendments. I remind the noble Baroness that these are not government amendments—the Government are neutral—but I am sure that everyone in your Lordships’ House has heard them and will take them into account in various ways.

Amendment 425 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, is identical to one tabled in Committee. I raised at that stage the Government’s concerns about workability and operational difficulties, and they remain. In short, the effect of Amendment 425 might be to reduce access to early medical abortion due to resource constraints on the ability of abortion providers to hold in-person consultations.

Amendment 426D, tabled by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester, is new, but it carries similar possible operational effects to those I set out in Committee in relation to Amendment 425, about which I spoke a moment ago. The proposed new clause in Amendment 426D may have a detrimental impact on abortion provision and access for under-18s, including those who live in remote areas or who have difficulties in attending a clinic. It should also be noted that it is unclear whether this amendment would require under-18s to have all consultations face to face, including any initial contact with the service. If so, this would further increase the workability concerns, including resourcing constraints on providers and access to abortion provision for young people.

Amendment 426B, in the name of my noble friend Lady Thornton, is once again very similar to an amendment tabled in Committee. The duty on the Secretary of State, as drafted, poses substantial operational and resourcing implications. There is no centrally held record of women who have been convicted of, cautioned for, arrested for or investigated on suspicion of abortion offences. Therefore, the Secretary of State would be unable to comply with the duty to direct the specified bodies to delete such details from records. If this is the will of Parliament, consideration will need to be given to how to deliver the objectives of this amendment in a way that is operationally workable.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

My Lords, I appreciate that the hour is late and very charged emotions have been expressed, so I do not intend to delay the House with a long response. I simply point out to those Members who are not familiar with the Companion and were surprised that so many of us did not take interventions that this was not due to any lack of respect for their positions. The Companion says at 4.29 that a Member

“may justifiably refuse to give way, for instance … in time-limited proceedings”.

I wanted to make that clear.

I have heard what the Minister has said about Amendment 422E. I will go away and consider that. This was meant to be a compromise. I know that Members want to get to other substantive amendments. I therefore do not wish to test the opinion of the House and beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 422E withdrawn.

Amendments 423 to 423A not moved.

Amendment 424

Moved by

[Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest]

424: Leave out Clause 208

[Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest (Con)]

I thank all noble Lords who have participated in this debate. I have listened to opinions from across the House but am not satisfied that the mother or the unborn baby is protected. I would therefore like to test the opinion of the House.

23:05

Division 5

Amendment 424 disagreed.

Ayes: 148

Noes: 185

23:16

Amendment 425

Moved by

[Baroness Stroud]

425: After Clause 208, insert the following new Clause—
“Abortion: requirement for in-person consultationIn section 1(3D) of the Abortion Act 1967 (medical termination of pregnancy), omit “, by telephone or by electronic means”.”Member’s explanatory statement
This new clause would mean that a pregnant woman would need to have an in-person consultation before lawfully being prescribed medicine for the termination of a pregnancy.

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

I beg to move.

23:17

Division 6

Amendment 425 disagreed.

Ayes: 119

Noes: 191

23:28

Amendment 426 not moved.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, let me assist the House by saying that we should now be moving on to Amendment 426A on assisted dying, in the name of my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer of Thoroton. I understand my noble and learned friend tabled the amendment only to get a particular response from the Government and he has no intention of dividing the House tonight. I suggest that we allow his contribution but do not have a prolonged debate on assisted dying tonight—we have had a number of days on that. Then, when we have had the Minister’s response, we can get back to the other amendments because potentially there are three more votes in this group. I think the House will want to vote on those and this is a way forward for everybody.

Amendment 426A

Moved by

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

426A: After Clause 208, insert the following new Clause—
“Providing assistance under assisted dying legislation in Crown Dependencies: criminal liabilityIn the Suicide Act 1961, after section 2A (acts capable of encouraging or assisting suicide) insert—“2AA Assistance provided in Crown Dependencies(1) In sections 2(1) and 2A(1), a reference to an act that is capable of encouraging or assisting suicide or attempted suicide does not include—(a) participating in acts that facilitate the provision of a medically assisted death in Scotland or the Crown Dependencies (the “jurisdictions”) under or in connection with legislation in those jurisdictions (“relevant legislation”),(b) performing any other function under that relevant legislation in accordance with that relevant legislation, or(c) assisting a person seeking to end their own life in accordance with that relevant legislation to access that relevant legislation.(2) It is a defence for a person charged with an offence under section 2 to prove that they—(a) reasonably believed they were acting in accordance with relevant legislation in those jurisdictions, and(b) took all reasonable precautions and exercised all due diligence to avoid the commission of the offence.””

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)]

I am obliged. Assisted dying feels quite pacific in comparison with the debate we have just had. This is my amendment, which I do not intend to press. It is the product of discussions with the BMA. It was tabled in Committee in my name and in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff. It was withdrawn in Committee because the Isle of Man Government, who have passed a Bill to deal with assisted dying, said they did not want it to be tabled before there had been discussions with them. There have now been discussions between the BMA and the Isle of Man Government and they are content for it to be tabled.

This amendment seeks to provide protections for doctors with patients who live in the Isle of Man or Jersey, where assisted dying Bills have been passed but have not yet received Royal Assent. It is common, for example, for some people resident in the Isle of Man to have doctors in the north-west of England. Those doctors may well give a diagnosis or a prognosis in writing, which might then be used in an assisted dying process in accordance with the laws in those two other jurisdictions. Amendment 426A says that if a doctor does such a thing and they are participating in a process which is strictly in accordance with the law

“in Scotland or the Crown Dependencies”,

And, obviously, Scotland voted against assisted dying yesterday, but the principle is that they will not be breaking the law in this country—

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)]

Can I finish my explanation, then hear from the Minister and then take it from there? I have had a very useful discussion with the Minister, who said that the Government took the view that the amendment was premature before Royal Assent in relation to the two jurisdictions, and I accept that. She said that once Royal Assent was given, the Government would consult with Jersey and the Isle of Man Governments and other relevant parties about what the Government would then do. She gave no commitment as to what the Government would do, but I am content with that approach. There will obviously be some degree of urgency, depending on how long it will take for the other jurisdictions to introduce assisted dying, but if the Minister were to confirm that that was the position, and that is what she explained to me, I would be content with that explanation.

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

I did not quite hear at the start. Can I just confirm that this amendment was not tabled at the request of the Isle of Man Government?

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)]

That is correct. It was tabled after discussions between the BMA, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, and me, and it was withdrawn because the Isle of Man Government wanted more consultation.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Levitt (Lab)]

With the House’s permission, it might be helpful if I set out the Government’s position, and then perhaps we can take it from there, if the noble Baroness is prepared to give way to me at this stage. The Government have some workability and drafting concerns about the noble and learned Lord’s amendment, but I will focus on the central issue so that the House knows what the Government’s position is.

Although the Government remain neutral on the overall issue, we recognise that assisted dying regimes being implemented in different parts of the UK and the Crown dependencies could create practical issues for those in one jurisdiction who are involved, in some way, in the lawful assisted death of a person in another jurisdiction. However, I support what my noble and learned friend said: the Government consider it premature to legislate on this issue. We do not yet know whether assisted dying will become lawful in the various jurisdictions, what the final form of any such regimes may be, or how and when they would be implemented. Legislating now in this unique way to amend the criminal law in England and Wales without clarity about these frameworks risks unintended consequences. The Government do not rule out that, in due course, processes may be agreed between the jurisdictions—or, if necessary, future legislation placed before this House and, potentially, other Parliaments—to achieve these aims.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)]

I am grateful to the Minister for that indication. On the basis of that, I am happy to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 426A withdrawn.

Amendment 426B

Moved by

[Baroness Thornton]

426B: After Clause 208, insert the following new Clause—
“Provisions for pardons and criminal records of women prosecuted under abortion law(1) The Policing and Crime Act 2017 is amended as followed.(2) After section 165 (Other pardons for convictions etc of certain abolished offences: England and Wales), insert—“165A Pardon and expungement of records for women under the law related to abortion(1) Subsections (2) and (3) apply in respect of a woman (whether living or deceased) who, when acting in relation to her own pregnancy, was convicted of, cautioned for, arrested for, or investigated on suspicion of, an offence under the law related to abortion, including sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, and the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929.(2) Where the woman has been convicted of, or cautioned for, an offence detailed in subsection (1), she is pardoned for the offence.(3) The Secretary of State must by notice direct the relevant data controller to delete details, contained in relevant official records, of a conviction, caution, arrest, or investigation detailed in subsection (1).(4) Expressions used in this section or section 167(1) (so far as relating to this section) and in Chapter 4 of Part 5 of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 have the same meaning in this section or (as the case may be) section 167(1) as in that Chapter (see section 101 of that Act).”(3) In section 167 (Sections 164 to 166: supplementary)—(a) in subsection (1) after “165” insert “ or 165A”;(b) in subsection (2) after “165” insert “ or 165A”.” Member’s explanatory statement
Abortion offences are classed as violent crimes meaning they will permanently be disclosed as part of a DBS check. This amendment seeks to pardon women who have a conviction or caution for an offence which Clause 208 applies to. It would also ensure the removal of women’s details from police systems, regardless of the outcome of their case.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I know that the amendment is defective, because my noble friend has said that. However, this is the only opportunity we have to address the issue. Now that we have agreed, as a House, to keep the clause in the Bill, if I press my amendment it will need to be dealt with by the Government between now and Third Reading. Therefore, I wish to test the opinion of the House.

23:35

Division 7

Amendment 426B agreed.

Ayes: 180

Noes: 58

23:46

Amendment 426C

Moved by

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich]

426C: After Clause 208, insert the following new Clause—
“Offence of obtaining abortifacients by false representation(1) A person commits an offence if they dishonestly makes a false representation and intend by making the representation to obtain any abortifacient drugs for use either by themself or another, whether such drugs have been lawfully prescribed in good faith based on the false representation or not.(2) A person guilty of the offence is liable on conviction on indictment to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or a fine or both, or on summary conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or both.”

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

I am grateful to the Minister for her comments, and indeed to everybody who was engaged in the debate. I completely accept that an abortifacient is a drug that can be used for other things. I am not sure what that has to do with my amendment, which is to do with false representation. For all the reasons I spoke about—the fact that we are throwing a bit of a bomb into a changing world rather than a tiny little change—I think this would be helpful. I would therefore like to test the opinion of the House.

23:47

Division 8

Amendment 426C disagreed.

Ayes: 70

Noes: 166

23:56

Amendment 426D

Moved by

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

426D: After Clause 208, insert the following new Clause—
“Abortion: requirement for in-person consultation if the pregnant woman or girl is under the age of 18After section 1(3D) of the Abortion Act 1967 (medical termination of pregnancy) insert—“(3E) If the pregnant woman or girl is under the age of 18, any consultation must take place in person.””Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to ensure that a pregnant woman or girl under 18 years old would need to have an in-person consultation before they could be prescribed drugs to end a pregnancy, so that potential safeguarding needs are identified.

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

I realise that I am going to make myself very unpopular at this hour, but I will make a very brief comment on the couple of comments that were made regarding the amendment in the course of the debate. I remind noble Lords that this is about children who become pregnant and it is about safeguarding risks. Therefore, I was not entirely happy that it should be contrasted between evidence and anecdote. There is plenty of evidence to support the need for this from professionals in the field. Similarly, to those saying that professionals say that children will not come, I am afraid that the professionals that have advised me on this are very clear that children will come when it is necessary. I therefore invite the House to support the amendment and ask for a Division.

23:58

Division 9

Amendment 426D disagreed.

Ayes: 68

Noes: 163

The remainder of today’s proceedings will be published tomorrow.

[Continued in column 1005]